Azure Jane Lunatic (Azz) 🌺 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
azurelunatic) wrote2016-12-13 10:28 pm
azurelunatic) wrote2016-12-13 10:28 pm
A few days' update
Saturday: very quiet, stayed at home, a certain amount of chat with partner.
Sunday: went to my aunt's to gossip and watch GBBO and Frasier. This was put on pause when Infamous Cousin, his girlfriend, and two friends showed up to pick up Boat.
Boat is a dog. She's a German Shepherd (perhaps a mix?) with one constantly upward-pointed ear and one ear that mostly flops but sometimes flaps and points when she's doing radar-ears about something. She is 70 pounds of complete love, love that wants to hug you without your permission and share your peanut butter. She's also dog-reactive, got separation anxiety, and has recently learned how to climb 8 foot wooden fences. (Her rear legs were off the ground and front legs were over the top, according to my aunt.)
My aunt very much misses the poodle.
Monday: also quiet, wrestling with sleep schedule and preparing for Fishie's visit and chatter with partner (always). Plus some undignified laboratory homework.
TMI: the laboratory homework was 24 hour urine collection. They give you a "top hat" collection container to shove under your toilet seat, and a jug. They want exactly 24 hours of urine, no more and no less. To get that, they have you start the timer just after you pee first thing in the morning. After that, everything gets poured into the jug. They recommend a day when you can stay home without interruption.
There are two sets of instructions, one for the jugs with some sort of toxic preservative or other, and another for the non-preservative jugs, which have to be refrigerated. Or kept in a cooler. I was given the non-preservative sort. (I went for the option which *doesn't involve keeping a jug of pee in the same fridge where I keep my food*, and chucked an ice pack in the mini-fridge that used to be in my cube and set it up in the bathroom. THERE WILL BE LYSOL WIPES IN MY FUTURE. I HAVE FORESEEN IT.) In this case, the jug is a plastic cube with a little handle and a screw-top lid in a slightly indented area in the top of the cube. It's made of thin plastic, and they store them folded up, so you have to un-fold them before you pour anything into them. I recommend some sort of poky object. Don't worry about being perfect; the liquid will help it regain its shape.
The collection container only covers part of the toilet, but it's still ... an adventure ... to try and perform other bathroom operations. The less said the better, but I neither contaminated my sample nor lost anything that should have been collected.
Having not previously done anything like this, I was skeptical that the container they gave me would be big enough, but figured that they were the professionals, so I should not question it. I should, in fact, have questioned it. I wound up realizing that I was either going to have to flub the collection (woe!), find another container (er...), or go to the lab and ask for an additional one (as if!) -- or drink less water and risk mildly dehydrating myself. I drank less water.
You're supposed to set an alarm for the end time, and take one last collection at that point (whether you need to or not), to ensure exactly 24 hours. And this happened, without any disasters or sleeping through it. And (just barely) without the need for any additional containers.
Before the other things today, I shoved the jug into the appointed paper bag after labeling it, then put that and the ice pack into an additional canvas bag that would wash nicely. I dropped it off at the lab before going off elsewhere.
Today: whooooo boy. Aforementioned lab drop-off, then I picked upquartzpebble and we went all the way out to the back of beyond to talk with the sleep neurologist who wasn't Dr. Asshole.
Appointment went okay. This doctor wasn't at all sure what to do with a patient whose depression is rapidly and *extremely* worsened by sleep deprivation (she inquired with some urgent concern whether I was feeling like that now, as she'd have to report that; I was not; she recommended that I see my psych crew to get that taken care of, which MISSED THE POINT ENTIRELY, that if I follow her instructions I'd probably need to be taken inpatient, and if I don't try to fuck with my sleep schedule, I'm pretty much all right except pretty fucking disabled due to the level of difficulty I have maintaining a modern business type schedule), and whose AD(H)D interferes with any and all "sleep hygiene" things that amount to "just get fantastically bored and you'll go to sleep", and whose budget does not presently include a CPAP. (Also, the mouth appliance thing costs more than a CPAP, and stuff in my mouth when I sleep is a hard limit after the misadventures of 1996/1997.) And there's some advice (not all of which can be followed and keep me sane), and there's a CBT class (cognitive behaviour therapy, not the other one), the contents of which I will be running past my Top and perhaps also my morail, as they are among the safeguards against me putting stuff in my head which needs to not be in there.
I only cried a little.
Soooooooo... compared to the appointment with Dr. Asshole, this went astonishingly well.
F and I had a few misadventures in finding a place for food. We settled on a diner. Lumpy's was closed already, since it was a Tuesday. Digger's was astonishingly difficult to find. I refueled, then we finally located it. The sign is not night-friendly, and very stylized.
Food was good. One of the great things about a diner that plays oldies and classic rock -- very little chance of getting the Wham!
The drive back was pretty much uneventful. Except nowquartzpebble smells enough like Purple that I kept getting the "Oh, there's Purple!" pings in my brain. THIS IS WEIRD.
My partner called when I was on the way home, and we talked about stuff. Logistics for some things are difficult.
I talk to my (prescribing) psych tomorrow, and I'll probably poke Purple for dinner. Whee!
Sunday: went to my aunt's to gossip and watch GBBO and Frasier. This was put on pause when Infamous Cousin, his girlfriend, and two friends showed up to pick up Boat.
Boat is a dog. She's a German Shepherd (perhaps a mix?) with one constantly upward-pointed ear and one ear that mostly flops but sometimes flaps and points when she's doing radar-ears about something. She is 70 pounds of complete love, love that wants to hug you without your permission and share your peanut butter. She's also dog-reactive, got separation anxiety, and has recently learned how to climb 8 foot wooden fences. (Her rear legs were off the ground and front legs were over the top, according to my aunt.)
My aunt very much misses the poodle.
Monday: also quiet, wrestling with sleep schedule and preparing for Fishie's visit and chatter with partner (always). Plus some undignified laboratory homework.
TMI: the laboratory homework was 24 hour urine collection. They give you a "top hat" collection container to shove under your toilet seat, and a jug. They want exactly 24 hours of urine, no more and no less. To get that, they have you start the timer just after you pee first thing in the morning. After that, everything gets poured into the jug. They recommend a day when you can stay home without interruption.
There are two sets of instructions, one for the jugs with some sort of toxic preservative or other, and another for the non-preservative jugs, which have to be refrigerated. Or kept in a cooler. I was given the non-preservative sort. (I went for the option which *doesn't involve keeping a jug of pee in the same fridge where I keep my food*, and chucked an ice pack in the mini-fridge that used to be in my cube and set it up in the bathroom. THERE WILL BE LYSOL WIPES IN MY FUTURE. I HAVE FORESEEN IT.) In this case, the jug is a plastic cube with a little handle and a screw-top lid in a slightly indented area in the top of the cube. It's made of thin plastic, and they store them folded up, so you have to un-fold them before you pour anything into them. I recommend some sort of poky object. Don't worry about being perfect; the liquid will help it regain its shape.
The collection container only covers part of the toilet, but it's still ... an adventure ... to try and perform other bathroom operations. The less said the better, but I neither contaminated my sample nor lost anything that should have been collected.
Having not previously done anything like this, I was skeptical that the container they gave me would be big enough, but figured that they were the professionals, so I should not question it. I should, in fact, have questioned it. I wound up realizing that I was either going to have to flub the collection (woe!), find another container (er...), or go to the lab and ask for an additional one (as if!) -- or drink less water and risk mildly dehydrating myself. I drank less water.
You're supposed to set an alarm for the end time, and take one last collection at that point (whether you need to or not), to ensure exactly 24 hours. And this happened, without any disasters or sleeping through it. And (just barely) without the need for any additional containers.
Before the other things today, I shoved the jug into the appointed paper bag after labeling it, then put that and the ice pack into an additional canvas bag that would wash nicely. I dropped it off at the lab before going off elsewhere.
Today: whooooo boy. Aforementioned lab drop-off, then I picked up
quartzpebble and we went all the way out to the back of beyond to talk with the sleep neurologist who wasn't Dr. Asshole. Appointment went okay. This doctor wasn't at all sure what to do with a patient whose depression is rapidly and *extremely* worsened by sleep deprivation (she inquired with some urgent concern whether I was feeling like that now, as she'd have to report that; I was not; she recommended that I see my psych crew to get that taken care of, which MISSED THE POINT ENTIRELY, that if I follow her instructions I'd probably need to be taken inpatient, and if I don't try to fuck with my sleep schedule, I'm pretty much all right except pretty fucking disabled due to the level of difficulty I have maintaining a modern business type schedule), and whose AD(H)D interferes with any and all "sleep hygiene" things that amount to "just get fantastically bored and you'll go to sleep", and whose budget does not presently include a CPAP. (Also, the mouth appliance thing costs more than a CPAP, and stuff in my mouth when I sleep is a hard limit after the misadventures of 1996/1997.) And there's some advice (not all of which can be followed and keep me sane), and there's a CBT class (cognitive behaviour therapy, not the other one), the contents of which I will be running past my Top and perhaps also my morail, as they are among the safeguards against me putting stuff in my head which needs to not be in there.
I only cried a little.
Soooooooo... compared to the appointment with Dr. Asshole, this went astonishingly well.
F and I had a few misadventures in finding a place for food. We settled on a diner. Lumpy's was closed already, since it was a Tuesday. Digger's was astonishingly difficult to find. I refueled, then we finally located it. The sign is not night-friendly, and very stylized.
Food was good. One of the great things about a diner that plays oldies and classic rock -- very little chance of getting the Wham!
The drive back was pretty much uneventful. Except now
quartzpebble smells enough like Purple that I kept getting the "Oh, there's Purple!" pings in my brain. THIS IS WEIRD. My partner called when I was on the way home, and we talked about stuff. Logistics for some things are difficult.
I talk to my (prescribing) psych tomorrow, and I'll probably poke Purple for dinner. Whee!
no subject
And huge kudos for the sleep neurologist appointment, since going to that can't have been easy after the last one. And sounds like it wasn't easy anyway, except by comparison with Dr Asshole.
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And I'm glad the appointment went as well as it did, even if it didn't go as well as it could have.
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Would you be interested in hearing what's helped me? I know unsolicited advice is obnoxious and the things that work for me might not help you/you may have already tried them.
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no subject
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You're very welcome to share the stuff that's helped you; if it's not relevant to me, it may be relevant to some of the others!
no subject