One of the most frustrating parts of the era of capitalism we currently live in (at least in the US, since I think that the specific combination of problems turning into this particular disastrous megazord of malpractice is unique to the country of my birth) is that there are lots of companies out there that will just lie to you or attempt to defraud you because most people won’t put up a fight. It’s the same pattern of behavior that scammers follow, except it’s insurance agencies or medical suppliers so people tend to trust them more readily which means they have a much higher rate of success than scammers do. It is insurance companies denying your claims after the fact or attempting to prevent coverage altogether. It is the dubious practice of sending summaries of charges that look exactly like bills but aren’t actually bills. It is companies giving you the “post insurance” price for something you’re ordering but then you getting hit for so much more because it turns out that insurance only covers that much once you’ve reached your yearly out-of-pocket maximum. Or, in the case that prompted this furious reflection, a company somehow signing you up for automatic resupply on some medical supplies you ordered without you being involved, shipping an entire order without notifying you, and then sending you bills that don’t actually list anything but the words “medical supplies” on several lines, each with their own inexplicably different price. I’ve cleared up the problem, supposedly, but it was a frustrating experience that ate up an evening and most of a morning to get it resolved and even then I’m not entirely sure that things have actually settled given that any trust I had in this company (which wasn’t much) is completely shot.
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A Mixture Of Hope And Frustration: The Story Of 2025
As I spend time during the last few days of my vacation rebuilding my buffer and trying to get myself some breathing room to write (and some breathing room to miss a day of writing by loading up some posts that could be dropped in as-needed, though I’m struggling to come up with enough topics that can be dropped in without any acknowledgment of the day they were written), one of the things I’m noticing as I consider the end of this period of rest is that I’m kind of ready to be doing things again. I think I’m going to get a couple weeks in and be exhausted again, since that’s just how the last few years of my life have gone, but I am trying to convince myself that I’ve got reasons to hope for something better than what was going on before this break. After all, as of the day I’m writing this, I’m three weeks of the medication I was taking for almost all of 2024 and not only can I walk down stairs again without needing to brace myself, I’m back to healing pretty quickly and my back rarely hurts the way it used to on a “good” day. Hell, barely any part of me hurts or aches in comparison to how I felt even a month ago. My muscles and joints still ache, sure, but it’s a 1-3 ache rather than a constant 5 (numbers are out of 10 on the pain scale). It’s a VAST improvement and it is giving me hope that I’ll be able to actually feel better and rested in the upcoming busy months. Or that I’ll at least not get progressively worse every day.
Continue readingAn Ignoble End To August As My Eye Irritates Itself Once More
You ever have one of those days where you want to lay your head down on your desk and just let the world spin unremarked for a day or two? I’m having one of those days today, which is frustrating because I had a decent weekend. I got to play video games with some friends, hang out online with those same friends while I cleared most of Dragon Age: Origins (which you’ll have read about by the time you read this since I was too busy last Friday to write a blog post and will just be pitching a post about that into the empty Friday slot from last week), and had a great and intense D&D session session to close it out. I can’t really feel positive about that, though, because the eye problems that are not even two weeks past clearing up have flared up again which means that even my previous maintenance care is no longer working and I’m not sure why. I could make some guesses if I had to, but I’d be shooting in the dark and firing at random rather than at any kind of target. The best of these possibilities is “something has changed for the worse” and that sucks because it is probably the case. The next-most plausible is “the bottle of eye drops I’ve been using isn’t as effective as the one I was using the recovery period of the last flare up” which sucks because they’re supposed to be the exact same stuff and this would mean that I got incredibly unlucky and was given a bad bottle of eye drops prior to my latest refill.
Continue readingExhaustion As A Side-Effect Is Preventing Me From Overworking Myself
I recently (aka, two days ago after one hell of a delay due to so many convoluted bits of bullshit) changed up the medications I’m taking and have been knocked on my ass more completely by this change than by anything but that time I got the flu back in 2019. I spent an entire day basically immobilized once I discovered that the medication didn’t make me weak, it just SEVERELY limited the amount of energy I had in a day. I literally worked out and then immediately discovered that I was so worn out that I had trouble walking down the stairs. Needless to say, that and another side effect ensured I spent the day working from home as much as I could manage. The other side effect was some stomach stuff, no worse than my lactose intolerance inflicts on me when I fail to manage my dairy intake properly, but the muscle weakness and exhaustion were incredibly defeating. Since then, I’ve been slowly recovering. The stomach issues are mostly gone (though apparently eating more than a couple cashews makes me nauseas now?) but the severe limit on my energy has been slower to depart. I wisely didn’t complete a full workout yesterday, which meant I was able to get through almost an entire day of work before the exhaustion drove me into my chair (which is a problem considering that my desk at work is a standing desk, isn’t adjustable, and my chair is meant for a sitting desk). Today, I managed a full workout and am still standing at the end of the day, but I can feel the exhaustion starting to bear down on me. Literally the only thing making this tolerable is the knowledge that, ultimately, even if these side-effects diminish beyond this point, I can stop taking this medication eventually.
Continue readingVaccines and Convenient Healthcare
Today, after many delays due to scheduling issues, not being able to handle downtime from potential side-effects, and being just too tired and out of spoons to handle anything other than what I absolutely had to do in a day, I’m finally getting my second booster shot of the Covid vaccine. I was eligible a while ago, but I’d wanted to wait for the much-touted version to come out since it had proven effective against the strains of the spring and summer, but now I’m wondering if the current strains of the virus have mutated so much that we’re going to need a whole ‘nother booster to be as effective at countering them. I went to do some research, since that’s usually what I do with questions like this, but I discovered it had gotten difficult to find information that talked about vaccines and the pandemic as an on-going concern. In fact, the manipulation of SEO meant that I had to scroll a few pages down to find anything useful that wasn’t about economics or how the current administration in the US is to blame for how tired people are of the pandemic and so on.
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