Bah and also humbuggery

I got older.

I got a bunch more information from my GP, including all the referral and discharge notes from the specialists and the fairly shitty follow-up I was getting was in fact slightly more than what I was 'supposed' to be getting according to the letters.  So the dropped ball seems to be a choice of the health system as a whole rather than any slackness on the part of my doctor's office.

So sucks to be me.

And my diabetes is worse than usual because I have been eating more sensibly and doing a bit more exercise, which of course means my body responds as if the opposite.  Because my body.  And this is just how it rolls.

Otherwise, I have not been doing a lot.  I am run down and feel busy, but don't seem to have been doing anything to justify any of that.

And now I have Christmas to deal with.  I hate Christmas.

Though at least now that I have much therapy under my belt I understand my hatred of Christmas is really more about my family's behaviour around Christmas and not really about some greater thing to do with the season.

On the topic of therapy, my therapist was a little worried I may have had a brief dissociative episode during session - so moved from framing silences as awkwardly as possible to bait me into talking about things to now handling me fairly kid-gloves-ish.  Which made the last session much easier going than usual, but has left me a bit more concerned about my general level of crazy.

Was a bother

After a bit of missed sleep from working myself into an anxiety spiral, I decided I had to harass my doctor's office.

Have now heard back with a vague, yes we should check your thyroglobulin again but it is still very low in the scheme of things.  Which doesn't exactly agree with what the various thyroidectomy information sites online run by the big name American for-profit-health-industrial-complex.

But it is an official response from my doctor so I should take it as a win and pretend I am not convincing myself that I have cancer.

Also, this stops me from having to deal with the fact that the concern is only annoyance at the bad diagnosis and that treatment will be annoying.  The fact there is a slight chance it could 'end poorly' hasn't been bothering me at all and it didn't even occur to me it was a thing I should be worrying about until people were worried that I would be stressing about it.

So maybe my doctor has been missing something that explains why I I have been feeling progressively more crap for the last year

Buggerit!

Was nosing through some old blood test results of mine and found something my doctor missed, that my thyroglobulin is over thirteen times the allowed maximum for someone who has had a thyroidectomy.  This from a test that was done in June and only because I asked why it hadn’t been done in a year and a half - I was told after the surgery it would be tracked regularly.  I am pretty sure it is only the third that has been done.  Even if the one before had been normal it should have been within a year, and the one before was slightly elevated enough that the information sites about thyroidectomies act like that is a sure sign of disease recurrence.

I am going to have to chase up with my GP about what looks likely to mean my carcinoma had spread a bit before the surgery after all.

I have a strong feeling my GP ignores all results not flagged by the system, and the system doesn’t flag things in the range for normal people - thus completely misses what I was getting the test for.  It is showing I have an organ that I really don’t.

It seems now that I am going through results on tests that were listed as clear, that the actual numbers suggest I had blood tests saying otherwise from about two years ago that were overlooked. Which is not ideal.

I have not been doing anything much of not.  I am just very bad for myself.

House sitting the awful dogs at my mother's house of grossness messed up my sleep patterns which have not recovered and I have been a fail human ever since.

My brain is unhelpful

I don't know if I would have known a few days ago when I had met Shitlord exactly, but my brain felt the need to wake me up at about two this morning with a very definite "today is the ten year anniversary of when you met him".  So I spent much of the night lying awake being angry at my brain.

Otherwise the weirdness of the week involved dinner with my mother and her household, who had me over for dinner so she could show me where things were for housesitting her horrid little dogs.  It is the first time I have had dinner with my mother that wasn't part of some larger gathering in over a decade.

In fact, I am fairly certain it is the only time since I moved out of home that my mother has invited me for a meal that she hasn't also invited other people to.

The weirdness that comes of being volunteered to live in her house and keep her hellbeasts fed and entertained.

I am bad at dating and at life in general

So last weekend the rather over-built-up first meeting date thingee happened.

It was much awkwardness on both parts.

He stayed on the couch for the weekend.  We watched the released so far episodes of Agatha All Along, enjoying Disney+ while I have it.  And a few movies.  We ate too much snack food and talked a lot.

He shouted me a back and shoulder massage at The Rub in the Wall St mall - so all the touch I got all weekend was from a tiny Asian woman whose name I never got, elbowing me in the back.  I wasn't that convinced by it while it was happening, but it felt pretty good afterwards.  Who would have thought that I carry around a lot of tension?

On the Sunday morning he took me to Joe's Garage for cooked breakfast, which was nice.

Wednesday this week I had a flat inspection.  It went smoothly, the inspector was mostly distracted by my Lego and otherwise only checked the things his form demanded he check off.

Today on my way to see my new psychotherapist I saw my clinical psychologist from last year in the street and the expression on his face did not seem neutral, to the point that I suspect me may have read this blog at some point since I stopped seeing him and disagreed with my interpretation.  So that was a touch awkward, but gave me something to talk about.

Writing yesterday's entry reminded me that I was angry and led to a night of mostly not sleeping.

So helpful....

I would be less angry if I was less suspicious his whole excuse hadn't just been a lie to cover for his own lack of organisational skills.  As that was really what the evidence presented was strong suggesting.

Unpleasant phonecalls

Last week I had the unpleasant phone calls of my dental school postgrad student making impossible demands based on what I have to assume was intentional ignorance about diabetes to get out of the procedure he had already agreed to and said was fine when my HbA1c was significantly higher, but after it dropped it is now dangerously too high.  In fact for the procedure to go ahead I would have to drop it to significantly below the diagnostic threshold within four weeks....  Two things that made it very clear he had no idea what he was talking about, quoting a demanded figure that was ridiculously low and below what many non-diabetics have (and that if HbA1c was there with medical intervention was indeed confirm they did not have type II diabetes) and in a time span that shows he does understand how the HbA1c is measured.

Every appointment I had had with him I had liked him a little less as a person, but I had managed to maintain professional respect until the last couple where he was clearly stuffing me around by making appointments from a specific thing and then either doing some pointless follow-up and rebooking the thing or just straight up cancelling the appointment only minutes before (and once I was already at the dental school).  And then this.

Worst of all, I think this also ends me six or seven year waiting list wait, with the care I was waiting for not actually being done.

I expect better of the Otago School of Dentistry.  I don't know why, I have had decades of experience of them and they have often been fairly careless with their patients - the poor are so easy to replace.

This week's unpleasant phone call was my mother contacting me (as she has done only a handful of times all year) to bulldoze me into pet sitting for her awful little dogs. So much of her usual approach of misrepresenting the situation with fact that any amount of investigation would prove false, talking over me and talking like I had already agreed when I was trying to say no and then just bulldozing until the fact that I am a soft touch gave her a victory she didn't deserve.  And so I will be responsible for keeping alive dogs who hate me.  Fun.

Chugging along and being too lazy to write in this thing

Last week I saw my dentist for a quick check.  He got the last stitches, which had been hidden by the swelling when he took out the rest, and instantly the last of the discomfort went with them.  Nice to know the weird 'is this healing' sensation was actually just 'there is still something foreign stitched in here'.

Otherwise I have received and built the whole of the Lego City Jungle Explorers run, from which I shall keep the animals and plants bits and give all the vehicles and minifigures to kids, probably Oli's kids.

And I had a doctor's appointment last week too, with a long conversation about how the meds that would be best suited for me - best practice wise - are only funded by the public system once I become more sick than where they are most efficient for preventing people from developing more significant illness.  The underfunding of the New Zealand health system leads to it costing more in the long run - because of stupidity - and lowers the quality of people's lives in the process.  It is all so stupid, and with our current government it is only going to get worse.

I have been replying with "Thank you for your time" emails to the rejection emails.

I hope it comes across as polite as I am now worried it might have come across as passive-aggressive.

New kinds of rejection

Today is a day of getting rejection emails from psychotherapists.

I got approved by ACC finally, and then got warned that if I didn't find a provider myself in a timely manner they would allocate me one, and after how badly the last went I put a bit of effort into trying to get someone decent.  So now I am getting a string of very polite rejection letters from people explaining they are not offering new appointments.

At least I made the effort, I guess.

Otherwise since I got home it has just been the slow recovery of the mouth.  Rearranging book shelves and building some Lego that filled up the entirety of the freed up shelf, which was not what I had planned.  I had really hoped to get multiple sets on there.

Oh, and got bloodtests and my HbA1c is down by 13 points, which is a nice change that makes no sense as the last three months was a run of me doing things that probably ought have made it higher.

Home

I got back to my flat today.

Have washed, dried and put away the laundry I brought back.

Had a nap.

Picked bit of suture off my tongue as the dissolving ones are now coming off as I was warned that they would over the week.  as they are coming off the gap between gum flap is opening up a bit revealing an uncomfortable amount of the membrane, making it unsettlingly clear how little is holding in the bone graft material.  The information I was given just says that the membrane is extracted from cows - which is vague is a way that is more creepy that the human corpse way of the bone graft material.

A bit of reading up on it and I think it is mostly bovine collagen.   So I am part human zombie and part cow.

The permission form I signed on the day (which I have since got a copy of) included plans to also use porcine derived material  to aid the graft, but they were out of stock.  So I miss out on also being part Miss Piggy.

Having a staring role in a body horror

Last Wednesday morning I went in to the dentist expecting a fairly straight forward extraction.

This was a wrong assumption.

I was presented with an informed consent form explaining about the grafting material of bone extracted from donor corpses - I was supposed to have left with a copy of the information, but didn't, thus I was expecting to have it written down.

The first root of the tooth popped out easily, the second took a very long time.  It kept fracturing, and was hooked into the bone more than expected.  It was slow and brutal.  Having to slice my gums away with a scalpel to get access.

And when it was done I stupid thought the worse was over.  I hadn't realised how much they would be going into my jaw.  I had a bunch of fully encapsulated cysts under the tooth inside my jaw.  Once I was shown the huge back shadow they had cast on my x-ray I was left wondering how my jaw hadn't broken considering how little jaw was left.

So I had a dent postgrad levering inside with various tools before pulling out freaky squishy things like alien or insect eggs from my jaw with, what I learned were called, pathology forceps (fat handled tweezers with very fine tips).

Then cleaning, and the slow packing in of the grafting material.  The membrane placement, and my sliced gums being stitched as flaps over the membrane to hold it in place.  As the undergrad dent student who had been observing was sent to get more suture thread multiple times, and the dentist started to lose patience that exhaustion was making it hard for me to keep my mouth fully open at the end of what turn out to be very nearly a three and a half hour process.

Sure I had been numbed up a lot, but my jaw hurt and I was getting pretty exhausted and was starting to feel pretty unwell.

It was not a fun time.

And I failed to get a bunch of the information I was supposed to get before I left.

I forgot to get the tooth they had extracted, so I guess it got binned.

I got back to catsitting and the cat was very happy as I mostly just dozed in the lazyboy, which is his favourite chair for sitting on people.  For days.

And the bleeding and then salty oozing in my mouth reduced my appetite enough I have lost another kilo.  Down to 116kg - which I realise seems like a giant number to normal sized people but it a lot less than it used to be.  I don't even know when I last weighed this 'little'.

Also, why does losing weight depress me even more than gaining?  The mental health minefield of internalised fatphobia...

Anyway, now I just need to not burn down Si's house for four more days.  More like three and half really.

The ginger menace is a slave driver

On the last day of July I came out to Simon and Joe's to start serving Catsie, the one-eyed ginger overlord, while his usual servant are off gallivanting.

So I have been on the Taieri enjoying the luxury of not being in my awful apartment building having to deal with my awful neighbours.  The luxury of having a whole house to wander about instead of living in a shoe box.  The luxury of a pellet burner so that I can look at the beauty of fire.  And the luxury of a bath tub so that I have now treated myself to a soak to relieve my knee of much of its annoyingness.

Of course it was once out here, and unable to get to town without bothering other people for transport, that I finally got contacted by the dental school about a waiting list I have been on since... I think 2017 (possibly even 2016) for something that was supposed to be done within 18 months but they have only just got to.

So I had an assessment last week and discovered that fortunately I do still appear to have enough bone remain even after all this time.  In less good news, the gold crown that broke last year but not leave enough healthy root to be repairable, so the amount of actual tooth in my mouth shall decline even further.

Also, I didn't pack my reflux meds because the side effects were annoying me.  The side effects have indeed cleared up, but after 14 days of not taking it the reflux is really starting to kick in again and is very bothersome.  Will have to work out the balance of how occasionally to take it to take the edge off the reflux without making myself sick in other ways.

I should be better at writing in this, but my mental health has not been great and it would just be a lot of moping onto the page - and no one needs that.

I haven’t been sleeping great out here, especially since the dentistry of it all started up.

My giant hulking bear of a dentist has been ringing me almost daily wrangling details as he complicates things by treating my diabetes like it means I am made of glass and will shatter under the drill.  And his worry is making my general discomfort with situations where I don’t have control into a swirling spiral of anxiety.

It has led to a lot of getting in my head a lot about my general diabetes management.  In the… I think two years now… since I did that last diabetes trial my HbA1c has not recovered, in spite of the fact that I have slowly lost almost 20kg and followed the dietician advice fairly well.  It is almost like my metabolism is fucked in general, what with lacking a major regulatory organ and having been a bit of a trainwreck even before that.

And Catsie is kind of a jerk, which doesn’t help.

He takes any sign that I am getting ready for bed as a sign to suddenly because very demanding of attention - after having shunned any interaction I had offered at time that were actually convenient for me.  And he gets very loud if I try to ignore him and just go to bed.  Tiny orange troll.

I should be forgiving, he is old.  Based on his declining appetite is quite possibly the last time I will be cat-sitting him.

I got cocky, again

I spent Saturday at Oli's birthday party at his house, walking around being vaguely a normal person and not wearing my knee brace because things were mostly moving normal.

Yesterday revealed this had been a mistake.

Stupid f-ing knee.

Otherwise I continue to do a lot of nothing and that is the only time I have left the house since I last reinjured my knee.

Still all about the fucking knee

On the first on the month I had my second, and as it turned out final, of the reassessment appointments that were what I got for winning my hearing against ACC.  Which a little bit feels like not winning at all - but that is what it is.

On the walk in my knee was buckling something atrocious and making walking fairly awkward, so I caved and stopped in at a pharmacy and paid probably a little too much to the Antidote empire to get a 3M knee support bandage.

The bandage made an impressive improvement, apart from rubbing the skin on my knee cap until it was hyper sensitive it seems to just be an amazing solution, until the Sunday when I noticed that my foot was a bit achy in my slipper and, on taking off said slipper, discovered such edema in that foot that I barely had visible toes at all and the foot was an unmoving lump.  Not ideal.

So since then I have been rationing the use of the knee support, as it helps the knee so much but also seems to anger my leg beneath after a few hours, and sometimes even faster.

And mostly I seemed to be slowly recovering.  Things were getting better, knee wasn’t complaining so much.

Until yesterday.

I ran some errands in town, maybe overdid walking around.  Things seemed to be doing okay.  Then when I was at Exalted and taking my knee bandage off as I was going to be sitting on the couch for several hours I bend my knee too far and felt (and in the moment was sure I could even hear) the tearing of tissue beneath my kneecap.  And just like that, a bunch of recovery undid itself…

Balls.

Otherwise.  Have not been up to a lot.  Having a quiet time mostly just at home and feeling not great because life is hobbling.

Why do I let my family in my house

 My dad brought Chinese takeaways around for dinner since I am being a bit of a cripple.

Unfortunately, my sister tagged along which hadn't been mentioned but I should probably have expected.  She arrived and immediately started lecturing me on how I had to turn off the podcast I had playing quietly in the background as it was making her even angrier at me.  I turned it off and she still storms off in a rage into my hallway.

Fuming at me.

And at no point ever explains why.

Just acts like somehow I am in the wrong for her invading my home uninvited.

I should just stop letting my family into my space.

Knees are dumb

I have now completed Warhammer 40k: Rogue Trader.  I didn't particularly like it, and it was a long game.  And it has three sub-stories, suggesting it should be replayed to see them, but I am not sure I liked it enough.

Maybe once the expansions are out.

Otherwise, my knee keeps getting worse.  It is clearly not bursitis.  It makes noise and gives unpleasant wet sensations.  Both of which seem signs something is probably actually injured.  You should not be able to hear soft tissue noises from your own knees, they are not close to your ears and noises made in your body should not travel that well.

Also it has buckled and I have fallen off it a couple of times, which seems like a way to make the damage worse by physically adding more damage.

So…

Visiting my doctor went mostly fine.

The weirdness in how my knee is moving seems to be bursitis.  The ‘odd sensation’ I complained of, is pain.  Something a human should be able to identify.

I am so broken.

Anxiety spiralling over the nothing

I have not been managing sleep much.

Such nightmares and general insomnia.

Also, my chronic pain has been getting to me.  Have been considering asking my doctor about increasing my pain meds for months (I choose to stay on a lower dose than she originally suggested), but the last couple of weeks have reminded me why that isn't a feasible option.  The main negative side effective is temperature dependent and it has been firmly reminding me not to make it any worse.

And after my worst ever HbA1c result I have other health things to worry about.  And how much my fatigue has been kicking my arse when I try to do things.  And that I have started to have a knee that complains and stops doing its job at random.  And a bunch of other falling apart because I am getting old things.

I have not been achieving anything much.

The only times I have left my flat at all have been for roleplaying.

I need a life.

Especially as I am weirdly close to having an internet boyfriend like a socially awkward teenager - after a lot of chatting with someone in Queenstown since, only, October-ish last year.

“Subtle sex organs, the name of my autobiography” something I just overheard

I had been using the same Brita filter in my water jug for such a long time the water had stopped going through it at all.  Which probably means it hasn’t been filtering that great in a while.  It has been well over a year, possibly over two.

Fortunately I still had a fresh filter unopened in the cupboard.

Otherwise I am a bit achy from having fetched all my Palladium Books products from the basement (three storeys below).  It was a reminder of how unfit I am.  But I have been meaning to do it for ages, I just had to sort all the lego boxes from my spare room first (they are now all boxed inside each other in my bedroom wardrobe).

And I got back my worst ever HbA1c test, which is not ideal.   I guess I am headed toward awful new meds with awful new side effects.

Big screens hurt my stupid eyes

I went to Furiosa today.

It has issues, and like most prequels is unnecessary, but is a fun watch.

Otherwise not much happening in my life.  Just doing bad things to myself in the form of Stellaris.

I got this year's flu jab and a COVID booster just after lunch today.
My arm has just started to really complain about it.

Also, this thing is getting hundreds of hits. Which is weird and wrong.  It is not for reading.  And almost entirely from countries I don't think I know anyone in.
I am not interesting, why would anyone read this if not to be checking just to see if I am bad mouthing them on the interwebs?

I am wearing trousers and socks, like a motherfucker

Monday last week I put my winter duvet on my bed, after a week or so of airing it in my spare room as it still smells of fake shearing shed smell after all these years, just in time to have it on for mornings of actual ice on the ground rather than just a touch of frost.

It is autumn, stupid weather what is trying too hard.

Also, after close to a year of washing and drying the same set on sheets fast enough to get them back onto the bed same day, I had to swap to one of my other seats of sheets that hadn’t been used in at least a year.  Not only did they have unfortunate custom wood cupboard smell, but the fitted sheet made a deeply unsettling sound of persisting elastic giving out.  Which is not ideal.

On Thursday, after an early morning walk in the frosty start, wearing shoes and trousers for the first time in a long while, I impulsively went into a furniture store and lucked into finding an actual wood bookcase with polish a fairly close match for my bedroom furniture that was the floor model of a discontinued line so marked down to near half price.

Otherwise, the last more than a week mostly went to very disturbed sleep patterns thanks to the new Stellaris expansion - a single playthrough made extremely slow by new origin and civic options that combined to generate a ridiculous quantity of species and slowed the game so very, very much.

Resolutions of a sort

I got the decision about my ACC review hearing today.  It went in my favour, I think mostly because I had asked for basically nothing except for ACC to be officially called wrong.

Somehow the tiny bit of emotional effort reading through the response took out of me has left me fairly useless for the rest of the day and feeling the cold so much I have my heat pump turned on for what I think must be the first time this year.  Now that I say that I realise it is the second time, I had it on very briefly on evening for some particular reason that now escapes me - but tonight it the first time running it for the reason of actually trying to heat my flat over a period of hours.

Ruining a several years long run without vomiting

My delivery dinner last night did not go well.

Katsu curry that tasted fine as I slowly ate it while playing some Baldur's Gate 3.  It was only as I was putting the empty container in the kitchen sink to wash before recycling and the smell was suddenly nauseous and awful that I realised something was wrong.  Then, immediately after taking my evening meds, my body decided to purge all of my dinner.  Leaving me quivering and exhausted.  Also purple.  Because it takes very little for my body to decide to change colour (or just go blotchy).  I am like a chameleon except instead of going sexy colours to attract a mate I go gross colours to advertise that I am sickly and should not to bred with...

After the purge my body went from feeling the everything was awful to just being very tired and I went off and slept for about twelve hours.

Today I looked awful, but mostly felt only my regular amount of fucking terrible.  So I guess I threw up most to all of whatever the problem was.

I hadn't thrown up in a few years, I think since the treatment for my little cancer thing back in 2021.

Apart from finally getting back to BG3 after sevenish months, I haven't done too much.  Though did leave the house twice.  Went to Simon and Joe's for the night on Thursday to be social and pose as a human, and had roleplaying on Friday (Exalted).

Playing BG3  now that my computer has fans instead of water cooling makes me realise how quiet water cooling was.  The fans make noise.

And I am playing as Astarion this time, instead of my own character.  For a different approach to the game.

Also, I have a weirdly large number of hits on this blog lately.  Based on not giving the link to anyone in a long time and the platforms the hits are from I am suspecting someone I have no reason to assume would have any reason to think about me at all, much less check up on this thing.

Historically none of my friends have ever been particularly interested and I don't see why that would have changed.

I just realised I haven't so much as opened Baldur's Gate 3 since early September last year.  I was just taking a quick break between play-throughs so I didn't confuse what I had done, and then I forgot to go back.

I should really get back to it.  I was loving that game.

Well, once my eyes are behaving a bit better and I feel more confident about screen time.

Oh, and I went and got a haircut last week finally.  It isn't great.  And the child barber somehow made the process weirdly uncomfortable - his crotch ended up in contact with my shoulders multiple times, I don't think I am that awkwardly wide to work around.

A week ago I had my hearing

I haven't been getting out much.

Or looking at screens much.

There has been a lot of audiobooks - including the six currently available Dungeon Crawler Carl books by Matt Dinniman.  Which are fun, but I al unconvinced by the LitRPG genre.  I may have mentioned this already, I don't remember it I have written in this since starting them and am too lazy to check.

I am enjoying how deeply anti-billionaire their underlying themes are.

Anyway, the ACC review hearing was deeply unpleasant.  The representative from ACC was very much there implying I was faking things to try and scam the system - but stuck to her script so implied that my request to be reassessed was grasping for money for personal gain, in spite of that making no logical sense.  And was generally abrasive and unpleasant.  The arbitrator was professionally neutral so while she was very polite I can't tell how she will lean.  The whole system is deeply unpleasant.

The Ascendice replacement base is much easier is mount, proving that I was not too stupid to use it but that the first one I had received had in fact been broken.  Now that I have a working one, I am very impressed with the product and glad I kickstarted it.

I have had my family visit too many times as dad was in town between jobs.  And my sister's inability to not touch everything in my house, including pawing though the contents of a package I had just opened and hadn't had a chance to look in myself yet, continues to grate on my nerves.  For someone very fixated on judging people for how well they follow an arbitrary set of made up rules she derived from tumblr posts, and getting very angry at violations of these rules that exist only in her head, she has absolutely no respect for requests that have been made of her to leave things that are not hers alone.

I have not gone for a haircut

 I have not achieved a lot this month.

My health has been a bit balls, so I have read some books while my eyes continue to hate screens, so I read the last of Jasper Fforde's The Last Dragonslayer series The Great Troll War, which is an examination of genocide for children....  I read Ravensong, some more TJ Klune werewolf romance.  I read Uprooted, Naomi Novik doing some Polish fairytale fantasy.

I have walked to the library a couple of times, because two of those three books were library books, only the Klune was a book I actually bought.

I  discovered how many time limited Pokemon I have missed in Pokemon Violet while I haven't been feeling well enough to play and it has severely soured me against the franchise.  I bought the game on pre-order, and pre-ordered all the DLC, giving the company all the money they asked for and am still being penalised on content I am able to access in the game ever for not playing it at the specific times they determined.  What bullshit is that Nintendo?  You are tell customers that you don't respect them and teaching them not to give you money in the future.

I had a doctor's appointment.  My blood test results were all pretty much the same as three months ago.  Even after all the ridiculous eating of Christmas, and the eating my feelings of recently my weight was also the same, sitting at the lowest in over a decade (though still far higher than it 'should be').

I spent much of this week having made myself sick stressed out over doing the paperwork for the ACC review.  The result was shockingly terrible.  I did a piss poor job of it because the instructions are deeply unhelpful and I got too anxious about it.  Over-thinking about it also left me with an even less positive opinion of my clinical psychologist, my assumption the problem was me is becoming less certain and I am coming around to the notion that he really wasn't doing a good job, possibly even intentionally.

And so, having stressed myself unwell I have failed to go get a haircut this week, which I had planned to do so I would look a bit more presentable for my zoom meeting for the ACC review.  And also because I would like a haircut.  But it sort of had to happen by today and it hasn't so it won't.

Also haven't really been sleeping which doesn't help.  With the waking up a lot.  And the getting up may times to check the door is still locked and generally being too anxious so staring at the ceiling worrying about irrational things.

Am I a mental case?

No, I'm a matching mental set.  Made of cheap nasty pine, but stained to look like it is made of tolerably decent wood.  Kit set assembly.  Available cheap.  Probable from My Mate Jon's or similar....

Oh, and in good news my Ascendice kickstarter is sending me a replacement base after the original one I was sent arrived obviously chipped from the factory, and they are throwing in an extra levitating dice so I will have all the varieties.  I find complaining to companies about faulty products to be very difficult, but I am glad I managed it.

Also, had my cousin Breffni visit the weekend before last, and talk me into giving her my three piece suit (which I haven't fit since I got sick and as it was tailored for someone else the sleeves had always been too short for my arms).

The following Wednesday I had someone stay on my fold out couch for the first time since I moved (a touch over three years ago, I think) and discovered the fold out mechanism had got a bit busted in the move.  But my second cousin (ish, I failed to work out exactly where on the family tree he sat) Henry, who I had never met before, successful crashed for the night as he passed through on his tour of the South Island before returning to salmon farming in Canadiastan.  He seems nice enough.

Goodreads 26 books for 2024 achieved, in February

 By reading Jasper Fforde’s Red Side Story I have completed my Goodread’s goal already.  Yay for books.  And for my eyes forcing me to hide from screens.

Trying to think of things I have done this month that I should have mentioned.

I haven’t gone out that much.

Dinner at my mother’s for her 65th birthday.

Managed one dinner out at Black Sheep with Simon, Joe and David this month.  Was supposed to see them again today but illness is going around so things were cancelled.

Plans being canned for other people’s illness have been almost as common as me piking for my own recently - which is nice as it stops me having to feel like I am always the one screwing up plans with sickness.

I made myself Lego roses for Valentine’s.

Otherwise I really can’t think of much to say.

I have been unwell and done not a lot of not a lot, and the state of my country has made me sad.

Were it not that it is generally a bit fatal, I could rteally culturally appropriate some demigraning trepanation about now

 So migraine

Such crippling muscle fatigue

Have had a run of barely being able to walk

Sleep is so messed up

Was awake until almost 6am yesterday, lying in bed with painful pin and needles in my face style headache

Such fucking fun

Winning

The run of my health being shit has meant I have got through a lot of audio books, and some actual reading, as I have been needing to avoid screens a lot.  Have almost finished my whole Goodreads challenge for the year already, 25 books of my 26 book goal done and February isn't even over yet.

Predictable

 As expected, things continue.

I continue to be exhausted.

I have been doing fuck all of anything.

Mostly still too tired to do anything, have been listening to a bit of the Pern series as audiobooks and none are as good as I remember them being when I read them as a teenager.

Have been playing a bit of Tales of Maj'Eyal, which I bought about ten years ago, as it mostly plays itself.  And I am too tired to play games the require me to actually play them.

I did get taken out of the house a couple of times by Tavendale while he was still in town for the summer.  Even went to a movie at the cinema, and saw All of Us Strangers, which was good, if too much of a heavy-handed punch in the feels type movie.

Otherwise just continuing to be disappointed as my countries gets worse.  The new governments corruption is so open, it is very much going to drag New Zealand down in the least corrupt rankings.  We had done so well for so long, but now we are in the pocket in the tobacco lobby and everyone can see it.

So depressing.

Oh, and I had my preliminary ACC review meeting and messed it up - so I failed at any chance to get bumped to the conciliation pathway by mostly failing to talk during the meeting as the whole thing was kind of a bulldoze situation even when the lawyer running it was 'keeping things fair'.  It was me who has no information versus someone whose job is to stop people getting anything out of ACC.

I probably should have had a support person.  But that would have involved asking someone, which was a non-starter.

Still so run down, what did I do to myself

My body is rudely taking a long time to recover from the exertion of the Christmas period.

It is irksome.

I feel so drained.

So mostly I have just been reading books, or listening to audio books.  My eyes have been a bit hit and miss about screens, so haven't been doing TV or computer games so much.

On the 13th I went to a high tea at The Press Club for a friend's birthday.  It was very fancy, but as I was too me to mention my food sensitivities when asked beforehand I ended up sending the following night being pretty unwell with allergic reactions.

The following Saturday was a BBQ with boardgames where I finally tried out the Uk'otoa game I got last year.  It is pretty straight forward and quick, and not unfun.  Just not as fun as many other games.

The exhaustion and a bunch of headachiness means I have procrastinated all of the preparation I should have done for the ACC thing.  Also, every time I try to read through the file again I am just disappointed by it and now much worse my communication with my clinical psychologist was than I had thought it was.

Part of my worries I screwed the whole thing up by trying too hard to be likeable.  The need to seem like a human and be easy to talk to but then I realise that I managed a much better job talking to the psych registrar over the couple of years, in spite of having much less in common and more reason for it to be awkward, so there must have been something else up.

It is all annoying and stupid.

And now making things stressful and hard.

Probably a bit of a factor in the ongoing headachiness.

I did get a small amount of advice on what I should be doing to prepare but as that significantly featured having a support person for the meeting, and the idea of having a support person is even more stressful, it has not led to achieving much.

Forcing one of my friends to massively inconvenience themselves just to witness my ineptitude doesn't seem particularly a helpful expenditure of my social capital.  Why am I referring to social capital, have I become one of those people who thinks of friendship as a commodity?  And it would just be me making a burden of myself.

Otherwise... what is happening.  My country is falling in fascism as the NACT coalition puts Atlas Network funded white supremacy above all over concerns.

New arbitrary time counter, same shitty life

The Wednesday before Christmas, I had to do Christmas substitute with my mother and her partner.  By the end of it I was already sick of my sister - who I was going to be stuck with for most of my Christmas trip away.  It boded poorly.

On the Friday before Christmas I finally made the phone call to ACC for the password to open the information they had emailed me weeks before.  It led to a grumpy day.

While I had found the psych registrar's report to have a bit of a game of telephone feeling, the reports by the psychologist took that to another level.  I had had the feeling a few times, especially near the end, when coming out of session that we had been having two different conversations.  But I was not expecting how much his not proved that.

We had been communicating so much worse than I had realised.  I didn't realise I was that bad at talk to people.

I am not sure I ever got my point about anything across to him.

Either that or he was wilfully misinterpreting, but in fairness the problem was probably me.

But the whole thing really felt like he was describing someone else rather than just me from a distance.

Also, he described me as wearing slides.  Jandals and slides are not the same thing.  I would never.

Then, grumpy from that I went for dinner out with Simon, Joe and Firmin before we watched the new Chicken Run movie to celebrate Christmas.  It is inferior to the first Chicken Run.

The next day I stuffed around a bunch before finally packing, and in the evening returning to Simon's.  Joe having to put up with me for a second evening in a row.  They also had other guests staying, an ex of Simon's who was also someone I had been friend's with in health sci and his husband - so that was nice as a catch up.  

First thing Christmas eve morning I sorted myself and Simon drove me to the airport for my flight to Christchurch.  I like that Christchurch airport is close enough to other things that I could walk to shops that weren't airport shops to get breakfast between my flights.  Then back to the airport to meet my sister and be reminded that I should have been more careful to travel alone before I had even got on the second flight.

A second prop plane...

A smaller prop plane...

A fucking Q300.  Tiny seats.  Claustrophobic aisle.

And the woman in the woman seat beside me went to sleep immediately and sleep spasm elbowed me, repeatedly, all through the flight.

While we flew over cloud the whole way so there was nothing to see through the small amount of window I was able to see through.

Arriving in Nelson, I got picked up by my cousin Breffni for a few hours of hanging out with relatives on mum's side of the family before my dad came and drove us to the middle of nowhere.

The family hosting Christmas were more than 20km past Tapawera up the Tadmor.  So far from everything and with what I think was the Hope mountain range blocking all cell signal.  And so there were a lot of my dad's family isolated away for much of the week.  For Christmas itself it was twenty adults and another ten kids.  Too many people.  But from Boxing Day onward the numbers slowly shrunk.  

It was days of too much family.

Too much meat.

Too much watching children feed whole eggs to eels.

Not enough sleep.

But a very nice break from the internet, and thus news.  As both world news and the more local are very depressing.  New Zealand's new government is just white supremacy and right wing economic stupidity.  And the global situation is so dominated by western nations looking the other way while Israel does abhorrent things to the Palestinians.  So almost a week of no news was a good thing.

Also such things as learning I definitely am far too easy to gaslight, with one of my cousins having me doubting all of my fairly sparse childhood memories with her absolute certainty that basically every one that included her (and she lived with my family for a significant chunk of my childhood so featured heavily) wasn't how it had happened and I was making it all up.  It was only when other cousins brought up the exact same stories later and their versions matched entirely with what I remembered that I realised I should trust myself over one single person declaring my memories entirely false.  Family making me crazy.

On the morning of the 29th, the Friday after Christmas, my cousin Jocelyn drove me the hour-ish to St Arnaud for my ride back to Dunedin.  Then it was a very long drive with Lisa from my roleplaying games, and whose wedding I was groomsman at this year been.  Apart from the very long time sitting in a car, it was actually pretty nice.

And then I was home.

And my body fell out from under my for most of the time since.  Pushing through my chronic illness to try and act sort of like a person for the time I was up north was something my body had to punish me for.

Also, the lots of sunburn and bug bites.

I did manage to leave my house for dinner with visiting relatives from mum's side on New Year's Eve, though was home in time to do the night when people were partying out in bed reading.  Because books are better than people.

Thursday this week I had lunch with someone I have had a purely internet/txt friendship with since at least 2013.  He had even attempted to ask me out a bit before I met Shitlord but for reasons that had made sense at the time I thought it wasn't a great plan.  Because Shitlord proved a great plan.  (Turned out to be doing him a favour as he met someone much better instead who he is still happily with.)  Was nice to finally meet in person after so many year of some pretty serious conversation, and did leave me wondering how I had been too lazy/socially terrible to have ever met him in the almost seven years when we were chatting and both living in Dunedin and now only meeting when he has left and passing though town on holiday.

I am bad at people.

And almost recovered from Christmas, I think.  Basic moving about my flat is starting to hurt less anyway.  Almost back to just usual levels of ache.