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Wednesday, December 20, 2017

I've given myself a concussion again

To speed recovery from concussions, you avoid screens, so I'm just going to copy and paste from a comment at Ana Mardoll's Ramblings:

Last night I hit a low hanging pipe* because I'm the only one in the house tall enough for the pipe to be a hazard so there's no need for anyone else to acknowledge it exists, much less warn people about it.

Point of impact was my forehead. It was, hands down, the hardest I have ever been hit** in the front of my head. Not only did my head get banged but my fucking shoulders felt it when inertia was suddenly carrying them in a different direction than the rest of my body. At least, I think that's why my shoulders felt it.

Given the shoulders thing, it should come as no surprise that my spine also raised objection. I felt the individual vertebrae (which are normally indistinguishable for me) go, "What the fucking FUCK!?"

And, for all of that, I seemed to come away unscathed.

I didn't mention it to anyone at the time because, after consideration, I didn't see the point given how stressed out everyone else had been and the fact that, it being over, there didn't seem to be anything that could be done.

Lonespark is right that I should have known better.

So here is where things stand: It's the next morning and it feels worse than it did at the time. Moreover, it's a different kind of bad. Signs point to possible concussion. Also, who knows what's up with my neck and upper back portion of my spine.

[Massive edit]

Concussion confirmed, sort of, in spite of the difficulty of getting a diagnosis where my insurance doesn't exist.  Long version of the part of the previous  sentence that comes after the comma:

MaineCare basically doesn't exist outside of Maine.  Exceptions are technically possible, but I haven't met one yet.  As a result the urgent care people, who were largely unhelpful and merely confirmed that what's going on with my head isn't worse than a concussion, had to be paid out of pocket.  Not my pocket because that things empty.  Lonespark provided the money which was, if I remember correctly, $169.

I wish I could pay that back, but I can't.  In fact, things were worse than I realized because in my struggle to pay off the non-usual expenses I neglected about $130 dollars of usual ones.  That's taken care of now, but it means that when previous calculations would have me well on my way to paying the property insurance (which I've lost track of: I think it was ten dollars less than usual so that would be $278, but I'm not sure) I actually have only about ten dollars to put towards it right now.

[/massive edit]

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On the broken fucking record front, for anyone who wants to help probably all you can do is send me money. It'll take a major part of the stress off and also mean that I won't be looking at a screen (screen time slows recovery) as much since one of the main drivers of screen time at the moment is the panicked frenzy of trying to figure out how to make it through December.

In theory, if I make it through December the months long train wreck will be over. In practice . . . no clue.

Paypal can be used to send me money via my email address cpw [at] maine [dot] rr [dot] com. This method is preferred. There's also a donate button in the upper right corner of Stealing Commas. Patreon won't help me in the least right now*** since it won't pay out until month end, but unlike paypal it doesn't utterly fail when it comes to monthly payments. It's here.

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* A big sturdy metal one that would make for an overpowered melee weapon if you cut it into a length short enough to wield, definitely could stop the strongest sword, the sharpest sword, and whatever sword had the perfect placement between "strongest" and "sharpest".

** Well, technically the front of my head was doing the hitting while the pipe did what TV Tropes calls a "No Sell".

*** But in the long run makes this bullshit less likely.

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