Previously: line up AM pills on the left side of the desk, PM pills on the right side, and Both pills in the middle (to be added to boxes after AM pills, and then put on the PM side). This requires extra clearing off of desk space to make sure they all fit. (Bottles that have already been loaded in go back into the "Come With Me If You Want to Live" drawer, either right-side-up if I don't need to do anything else, upside-down in the fabric organizer that the primary stack of filled boxes will go in if they need a refill soon, and upside-down in that place with a little plastic dot inside them if I ran out midway; a set of matching plastic dots mark the compartments where there aren't that pill.)

New procedure: AM pills go in the pink bins on-or-near the desk, PM pills go in the blue (teal) bins, and Both Times pills go in the white bins and migrate to Blue after they've been added to AM.

The colored plastic dots come from Microlet lancet tip protectors. (Used lancets go in my mini Sharps jar, which started life as a Costco Loratadine jar and then got a red paint job on the lid and bottom using some non-preferred nail polish, and a label saying SHARPS on the side, implying Please Don't Fill Above This Line. I dump it into the big sharps bin in the bathroom.)

This weekend featured some Bodily Fail, over which I am still Disgruntled and Apologetic. Fucking cancer. Fucking cancer treatments.


Book status: finished with The Curse of Chalion a day before the audiobook was going to get whisked back to the library, and into Paladin of Souls. (We will probably not do The Hallowed Hunt, and the next person to breathlessly suggest that we do any Sharing Knife gets The Cut Direct. However: Penric, my beloved.)

In other book news, I waxed enthusiastic about All The Warnings on Cyteen to alexseanchai, concluding "But it's great about Growing Up Autistic Under Surveillance" although modern understanding of neurotypes and Azi vs Cit psychology suggests that uh, starting a kid off via 100% Tape-based learning would Probably Not result in Autism. "Oh, they're not sensitive to their discussion, are you Florian" "No, sera" (paraphrase of Ari I and Florian I) hits Significantly Different in context of Autism "Speaks", those morally bankrupt allistic and about-us-without-us fuckers.


Relevant to The Locked Tomb, Target's Halloween shit is coming out, and they have a skull-topped decorative bottle, some blatantly 3rd House skulls that are bedazzled to fuck and back, and a "Finally, some peace and quiet" coffin shaped motto board with a skull that could be painted into a number of different House skulls.

April 1: I was basically on Tumblr, rickrolling and booping.

April 2: Achievement unlocked: first infusion in Short Duration (1 hour or less of active time). I was early, which hopefully helped everyone get out of there on time or early.

April 3: Food poisoning, probably. Belovedest went to the store and got various clear liquids for everyone who needed clear liquids today.

Good appointment with Dr. Chemdrips. I'm done with chemo for the foreseeable future. Immunotherapy next. I've been ordered to celebrate.

Taped to the inside of the glass door of the infusion suite, curtain stored behind the chair that the elusive woods gremlin was sitting in, Aranet 4 monitor on the adjustable height C shaped medical table.

Feedback from medical team, almost unanimous: pleasure at me being able to communicate my needs so clearly.

( obnoxious formatting )

My eyebrows are ghosts of their former selves, and I'm debating whether or not to tweeze some of the hairs that are outside even the generous lines of where I want my eyebrows to be.

My eyelashes look like I was interrupted in the act of putting on fake ones, with a few clumps here and there.

So yesterday when we went out for errands, I put on the dollar store magnetic eyelashes that I'd bought for just such an occasion.

You put on at least two layers of the magnetic eyeliner. Then, while it's still sticky, you put on the eyelashes. The result being that the eyelashes are both slightly stuck with the tackiness and continue to be stuck with the magnets.

I am not great at putting on eyeliner unless the applicator is made to help compensate for my shortcomings. This applicator is very much not. So I had to take some alcohol wipes to the situation to erase where I'd blinked and gotten quite a lot of eyeliner well above where it should have been, and the place where I'd sort of made a vertical line with no good reason to have it there.

But the eyelashes held all through errands, though I did feel the little rectangular magnet on one of my eyes because I'd placed it imperfectly. Belovedest said that if you didn't know what you were looking for, you probably couldn't tell. Also the dramatic eyeliner rather distracts from the eyelashes. If we were going somewhere that we wouldn't be wearing masks, I'd have worn lipstick. Normally my eyebrows are loud enough to shout down nearly everything else on my face, but I'm considering whether it's time to break out the temporary eyebrow tattoos to compensate.

... is a pure delight, and I have additionally sent my social worker a picture of the dog tag I have dangling through the biohazard necklace I wear during chemo weeks. The tag has a medical alert symbol and CHEMOTHERAPY on the one side, and a notice that sometimes chemo and one of my other conditions could interact in a way that could make me look drunk, that this is in fact a medical emergency, and the correct thing to do is offer me sugar and call 911.

My next chemo is on the 30th. In the interim, I need to get two medical systems talking to each other, hopefully without me having to interface all that much.

So yeah, 2023 has been the year of My Fucking Hip.

I'm in so much less pain than last year, omg.

I spent this afternoon compiling several hundred pages of Ask A Manager comments so I can read through the entire My New Job Is A Nightmare Built On A Hellmouth saga. (Hellmouth has been safely in a new job for a while now.) Purely for my own entertainment.

I have an appointment to fix my port on the 3rd, and my next chemo on the 4th. Last chemo is near the end of January. Then it's immunotherapy and some other things. I should ask Dr. Chemdrips some more questions about the osteoporosis drug he's recommending, since I have the Dad's Family bones, not Mama's.

The anemia is obnoxious and a limiting factor. I have more peripheral neuropathy after this round, including phantom toenail pressure and the sensation that I have been describing as ( ow ). Which will unerringly get me to chug a painkiller in the middle of whatever the F I happen to be doing at the time.

At least the buzzing sensation in my hands has receded?

Belovedest and I have moved on to the audiobook of Harrow the Ninth, and I am doing my best to be enlightening without too many actual spoilers. Other than the ones that they'll have picked up from my various enthusiasms about the series. Such as the discussion of whether the Locked Tomb's version of Mr. Musk is actually less of an asshole than John. (I'm choosing Mr. Musk by name because he's a billionaire spaceship guy, and also an asshole.)

Now that the fireworks have mostly stopped, Yellface has come out from behind the dragon-sized chair and has started yelling at us about bedtime.

The chemo session notes were approximately "patient tolerated chemo well."

TUESDAY WAS NOT AN UNEVENTFUL CHEMO SESSION.

At least I would have expected there to be a note about the IV being obstructed constantly.

I have an appointment with normal radiology for yet another fucking chest x-ray, so they can refer me along to interventional radiology. I have composed a message to Dr. Chemdrips' team about how Tuesday actually went.

It has been a grilled cheese kind of weekend.

Yesterday we were almost out of bread, so I carefully limited the number of slices I had so I'd have a few left for lunch, and requested that Belovedest get more sourdough bread, and more small tomatoes, on the way home.

I thought of asking about cheese, but I was almost sure that there was another bag of shredded cheddar in the bottom drawer, so I refrained. No need to overstock cheese just because I was feeling insecure.

( And thereby a small Saga ensued. )

LOOKS LIKE MY PORT FLIPPED, BOYS