mrissa | State of the Household Post (Reply)

So. I go in on Wednesday to get the results from my sleep-dep EEG.

markgritter is only going to be out of town one week this month (and the peasants rejoiced!), and

timprov has his own neurologist check-up stuff coming up as well.

We are not particularly well here. We are coping as best we can and trying to figure things out in the medium-term (since we don't have enough information to do long-term). There are many of you who are worse off in one dimension or another or many dimensions -- more of you, in fact, than I'd like. One of the most frustrating things about having two of us feeling long-term crappy around here is not being able to offer as much help and support for other people as I'd like. But, well, we can't. We're doing as much as we can, and I wish it was more, but I only have what I have right now.

There are very few things I can't do that I usually could do. Mostly it's a matter of costs instead. Things that used to be a normal part of the day will knock me flat if I insist on doing them. (Going out running errands at Target and the grocery nearly always requires a nap, for example.) Also, if I misjudge when I need to go home by even five minutes or so, people end up alarmed by me standing there shaking like the proverbial leaf as I get my coat on. (This is even more of a problem if I'm the driver -- and when

markgritter is out of town, I'm the only driver here.) I just run out of Mris, and then there really, really is no more. It's not a matter of cutting into reserves. The reserves just aren't there. It highlights for me how much I used to rely on those reserves.

The above paragraph is not true for

timprov: there are many things he just plain cannot do. This is not always predictable. If you hear that he went out for a walk and then went to dinner and even dessert with some other people, and yet we said he couldn't grab a quick coffee just the day after, both can be true. Both have been true in recent memory. But there have been days when he could not go up and down the stairs safely: in addition to normal activities often having high costs, there are times when can't means can't, not costs-too-much-energy. (Well, I suppose you could categorize "likely to fall down stairs" as "costs too much.")

One of the things this means is that any travel involving me is somewhat suspect right now, and any travel involving

timprov is extremely dubious. Going to Omaha and Milwaukee wiped me out pretty thoroughly. It simply would not have been possible for

timprov. And if you are in the small group of people he has offered to buy plane tickets for a visit, please please remember that he would fly to see you if he could, but he can't, so this is the only way he can cover the cost of seeing you. So those of you who asked about visits from various combinations of my household monkeys, in the random question post: not soon.

markgritter is not keen to travel more when he's spending 50% of his time out of town, and

timprov and I are just not physically up for that much of it.

I know that some of you are getting frustrated with me not calling or e-mailing to do stuff as much as I used to or as much as you'd like me to. I'm really sorry about that. I'm trying to see those of you I haven't seen in ages, but by the time I manage to schedule something with one such, another two or three have joined the "haven't seen in ages" club. It's a very frustrating problem, and I suppose the long-term solution is that some of you will just stop wanting to spend any time with me at all. I can't bring myself to recommend this solution, but it certainly seems practical in some ways.

The new pill I'm on does not seem to be helping with what it was supposed to help with, but we'll give it another two months.

And onwards.