Confessions of an Internet Junkie

It went pretty well. Yay! Very weird procedure but really not all that bad. I got a wild tour of the hospital while being wheeled around on my gurney from one floor to another, one department to another. The last nurse who steered looked just like that cute young woman who plays Ugly Betty, and I think she was on speed. We were zipping down those corridors and slamming around the corridors. I mean my hair was flapping in the breeze. It was wicked fun :)

I'm a bit stiff and a bit sore but not really in any pain. The trick now will be to lay low and just rest. I don't feel that bad, so I'm inclined to overdo things. However that will give Dar a nervous breakdown. I promised to be good (after she caught me emptying the dishwasher), so I'm going to log off and go lie down for a while.

Thank you guys for all the good thoughts and good wishes! I love you like the plague, babies :) (Muppet Show reference, just in case you didn't get it.)

1. cajoje is on her way back to Albert after a not-so-relaxing stay. She pitched right in to help with all of the blow-back from the new cria's scary entrance into the world, and she did it at the expense of getting some other things accomplished that were important to her. That? Is the definition of friend.

2. Cria boy is doing well today. I got to try my hand at feeding him this morning, and let's just say that it's not exactly in my skill set yet. I'll get better at it, but we're all really hoping that he'll get the hang of nursing on his own so I won't have to learn how to wield that bottle.

3. I, at least, am calling him Jack.

4. Poor Pixel kitty has been suffering from constipation, and I didn't really catch on until very late last night. I suck as a kitty mom. So today, we all got together to enjoy the experience of giving her 1) an enema (it didn't work) and b) a suppository (which did.) Dar did all of the hands-on, so to speak, while Mark and/or I held her. The yowling could be heard throughout the county. And that wasn't counting the noises Pixel was making.

5. Speaking of bodily functions, I got the latest blood work back from my PCP. I have protein in my urine which points to kidney problems but is most probably because I'm lacking in B12 this month. The upshot is that I have to take the dreaded (by me) 24-hour urine collection. I hate giving urine samples. Hate. I'd rather give blood. I have terrible aim and lousy motor control. I once ended up spraying the entire bathroom because the urine apparently bounced off the side of the cup and went all Bellagio Fountains over the room. Followed by much cursing and ripping of paper towels and more cursing. Jack Bauer should have such a 24 hours as I'm going to have.

6. We didn't make it to the big alpaca show today, but our alpacas did thanks to our friends. And . . .
( The Winners Are )

7. BSG continues to rock in glorious ways. I have to rewatch it because I was very distracted toward the end because of Pixel, and I was also dead tired. I hit the wall, as they say, about 5PM standing in Zehr's waiting for the pharmacy to fill a prescription. "Just another few minutes" turned out to be 35 minutes, and it just pushed me over the edge of the amount of fatigue I could deal with. I know it sounds wimpy, but trust me, fatigue isn't the same as being tired. Anyway, BSG. I have no frakking idea what's going to happen from episode to episode, and I love that about this show. So well-written and acted.

My neurologist turns out to be a huuuuge Trekker. Bwah! I'm not even sure how we stumbled into that conversation, but all it took was one mention and Dar and I were off quoting various episodes to his great glee. I had mentioned to Dar just last night that I thought he reminded me of Dr. Julian Bashir on DS9, and when I repeated that to him this morning while he was stabbing me with that big needle, Dar said he blushed and he told me that he took that as a great compliment. How adorable :) When the procedure was over and he was leaving, he stopped in the doorway and intoned "Live long" to which I replied "And prosper." Hee! Greatest lumbar puncture ever :)

The procedure itself wasn't all that bad. He had to make two tries to get the spinal fluid tapped. The first one was uncomfortable because he was tapping around with the needle. It wasn't a sharp nerve pain or anything, but it was like a deep ache - imagine getting bad case of cramps along your spinal cord. That's what it was like. The second try he got it right off, and I didn't feel a thing, happily.

I had to lay there like a lump for 90 minutes just to give everything time to start to heal and refuel. I'm on bed rest until tomorrow morning, no leaning over, no lifting things. I was sitting straight up in bed for a while, but I started to get a dreaded lp headache, so laid down again and it went away. Yes!

Q was a saint for getting up before dawn to drive us 40 miles through ice and slush and then hang around with a bunch of Trek freaks geeking out. She didn't mock us even once. And of course my Dar is a saint under all circumstances just as a matter of course.

And now I should get prone for a bit. Oops, one last update. Jane is doing much better. Still crazy in heat, but she's not the near-catatonic poor kitty that she was yesterday. Yay!

Seriously. If it weren't for the TV schedule, I'd really have no idea about what day of the week it is. And even with that it's a crap shoot. But if last night was ANTM, then tonight must be Lost, and that must mean it's Thursday. It must, mustn't it?

Winter is still banging away around here. It snowed Monday. Q and I shoveled out the (long and wide) driveway Tuesday. It snowed Tuesday night and drifted. I got my freakin' car stuck in the freakin' drifts in the freakin' driveway on Wednesday. Q heroically shoveled and salted and we both sanded and the damn thing finally came unstuck. Today it was light snow and ice pellets but with a wind that caused the snow already piled up to drift dangerously across some of the roads. I almost spun out at one point, and I passed a truck that had gone off the road and into a ditch.

I had more blood work done yesterday, and today was a bone density scan. I'm thinking of making a list of all of the types of tests I've had, because it's getting to be pretty impressive in an oogy sort of way. Add in the ones that Maddie and Dar have had, and I think we set some sort of group record. Win! I don't expect anything unusual to come back from the blood work, and the bone density test showed that my bones are just fine, thank you very much. I owe it all to that extra weight I carried around for all of those years. It had the decided benefit of producing dense bones on par with working out with weights. Win, again!

Unfortunately it has been all win. I've been in a lupus flare for a couple of days, and that's been a drag and a half. I don't know what kicked it off, but it can stop any day now. I manage to get up and out to run necessary errands or do the doctor stuff, do some household chores, but it's like I'm dragging a small mountain behind me when I do it. Plus the weakness, nausea, headaches, and other fun stuff. Same old, same old, eh. So if I've been remiss in commenting, it's not that I don't care - it's that I can't think :)

I've been trying to play Scramble just to keep the brain sparking, and let's just say that some days go more smoothly than others. Take today for instance. There are times when I have no control over what my fingers do once they hit the keyboard, which can be a real detriment when you're playing Scramble. (It's pretty much an online version of Boggle: make words out of randomly selected connected letters.) I'd see the word on the board, but I couldn't type it out. Gibberish would appear. I ended up bitching at the screen, "Not d, t. T. No! Not d. TTTTTTT!" Just substitute different letters for that little rant, and you have my game experience this afternoon. Not the highest scorer online, as you might imagine. Heh. And typing this is not much better, except that I get to backspace and correct. I can't tell you how long it took me to type Thursday up there toward the top. Fun with fingers! Except not in the perverted way that many of you are imagining.

And speaking of perverted imaginings - Chloe is in heat again. She does the cutest little butt dance. Really. She's all furry and pudgy and she sticks that little furbutt up and starts just shaking it hoping something is gonna happen to make her feel better. But all she gets are appreciative "Awwwwww"s because it's just so damn cute.

Jumping topics. I'm about halfway done with the first Dexter book. I started off thinking I wasn't going to finish it, because I saw the series before I read the book. It's a somewhat different voice, and that threw me off a bit, but now I've settled into it, and I have to say that I'm enjoying it.

My hair continues to annoy. Damn, this is one hellaciously bad haircut. The left side is both thinner and shorter than the right side - noticeably so. It has had one unlooked for effect, though. I'm going to dye my hair again. Between the cut, the texture, and the wildly uneven graying, the whole effect is just . . . ratty. A dye job will at least help with the texture and the color. Ain't nothin' but time gonna help the cut. Every once it a while it spikes nicely, but mostly it looks like someone took a blender to my head.

And now my choices are to sit here and watch Rocky lick the fur off his belly (it's all pink because he's a neurotic groomer), or go out to the kitchen and empty the dishwasher. Decisions. Decisions.