Monday, February 20, 2017

If you find yourself suddenly unable to walk, don't fuck up like I did

Cue story that I'm not sure if it's embarrassing, degrading, humiliating, disgusting, or something else.

(icky content note: urine)

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Light makes it really hard for me to sleep.  When I sleep in daylight I'm usually sick or exhausted beyond all reasonable limits.  My anti-depressant, which I cannot stress enough is the only one that works,* makes this so god damned much worse.  In fact I won't sleep at all without a separate sleep med which is no good because sleep deprivation is dangerous and has very similar symptoms to depression anyway.  Even with sleep med I tend to need dark, with exceptions (other than sickness and prior sleep deprivation) following no pattern and thus being entirely unpredictable.

In search of dark I moved down stairs.  The downstairs windows are small since the downstairs is mostly below ground level.  Think the height of a bog standard porch, subtract the distance between a floor and the ceiling below, and you've discovered how far above ground the downstairs ceiling is.  Result: they can be blacked out by a well placed towel.

Downstairs is also largely lacking in electronics so none of those lights from microwaves, stoves, VCRs/DVD players/Blu-Ray players/other shit that insist on telling the time.  (And who in fuck came up with the idea of adding "off" lights to things.  We know it's off because it isn't working.)  No router lights.  So on, so forth.

Plus, for reasons unknown to me, there was a matress there.  Combine this with the fact that boxspring the matress in my room is on happens to be fucked up beyond all recognition, and it was a smart move.

Going down stairs with crutches is Hell.  Upstairs is decent but you have to get them down first and it never really occurred to me to to just toss them from the top of the stairs.  Going downstairs is a butt-sliding expedition.  As much as I dislike butt-sliding myself, I'll have you know that that my mother once (or was it twice? we did it twice, but I'm only convinced once involved butt-sliding) traversed the knife edge at Katahdin via butt-sliding, or I suppose you could call it butt-scooting.  Doing the knife edge is a mark of great . . . um, something.  It's epic is the point.  So clearly butt-sliding/scooting is nothing to be scoffed at.

Around now we come to the point.  At this stage I have five jobs.  I was originally going to say three so . . . No one expects the Spanish Inquisition! I need to eat, hydrate, sleep, not get injured again, and try to keep my broken ankle elevated in spite of not having enough pillows to put in a solid effort.

From the injury to the end of the first day, through into more than an hour of the second day, everything was about getting to the ER, waiting in the ER, having stuff done in the ER, and waiting in the ER.

On the second day I shoved things that might have been easily cleaned into heaps that will be very difficult to clean in order to create crutch safe paths through the points I need to reach in my house.

On the third day, my dad got me some microwavable food, so eat is covered for the moment.

Sleep hasn't really been a problem.

Not injuring myself is a moment to moment thing.  The lack of pillows to stack under my ankle makes elevation more of something I do my meaningless best at.

Hydration is the problem.  I've talked about it before.  My body is badly calibrated.  The amount of water my body will hold is lower than the amount of water it takes for me to be well hydrated.  If I want to be hydrated (and as a rule, I do) I have to put up with going to the bathroom a lot.

Crutches are a mode of transportation with decent speed, it's been annoying more than a real problem.  Until I woke up a bit after midnight this morning with a very powerful need to pee.  I think you can see where this is going.  It isn't exactly sanitary.

By the time I normally would have been done and heading back downstairs, I was still crawling up the stairs.  Good news: totally not a failure and it all comes out at once situation.  Bad news, crawling around (without knee pads) while your ankle yelps in pain and your bladder keeps on causing spurts is the exact opposite of fun.

When I got to the crutches there was no way in hell I could use them.  Do you know how you move on crutches?  Call it a hop, call it a bound, call it a vault, call it what you will, but for our purposes the important thing is you move by fucking bouncing up and down.

So the crawl, which is slower than crutching, continued until I reached the bathroom and my ordeal wasn't over.

See, I don't have one of those shower seats, even if I did I don't have "Use this plastic bag and duct tape to keep your splint and wrappings from getting wet, and a bath was right out.  Try giving yourself a sponge bath when you don't have a sponge and you can't get your left lower leg wet but you do have to clean right up to the edge of it because motherfucking urine.

* * *

So if you should find yourself suddenly unable to walk, make god damned sure you're sleeping on a floor with a bathroom.  Moral of the story.

I somewhat wonder if I just drove away half of my readers.

For those that are sticking with me through the Ankle Chronicles and the disgusting anecdote, I swear I'll try to get something story-like at some point.

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* Since it's so expensive my insurance forced me to try out one that uses almost exactly the same principles on the grounds that given the extreme similarity to the one that works it should have worked too.  It was Hell.  My depression was back in full force rather fast, they made me stay on might-as-well-be-a-placebo (less the placebo effect) for a full month, it was difficult to get out of the depression again both in terms of time and dose.  We had to double my dose which now has me at maximum allowable dose, your doctor will periodically have to write to the state (or maybe insurance company, but for me that is the state) saying, "No my patient is not a drug dealer, yes she really needs that much, fuck off."

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