nosrednayduj

I've had it in mind to give blood for little while, since it's been about five months. But there's always some reason that it's inconvenient, e.g. when my housemates had Covid, I didn't want to do it for a little while after that.

Anyway, I decided to get serious about looking at blood drives, and there was a very convenient one, 1.2 miles from my house. But, then it turned out that I also wanted to get my measles vaccine updated, because I had it before 1968, and people with that vaccine had a lower quality one, and there's outbreaks everywhere and I'm like "how good is my 60-year-old vaccine anyway". Plus I wanted to get my spring Covid booster before I went traveling in the summer, so I was trying to figure out when I was going to do that because you can't give blood for another month after you've had your vaccinations.

So there was this long email conversation with my doctor about whether I was eligible for the measles vaccine and whether they could do it and scheduling (their online thing wasn't working), and they just scheduled me for half an hour before my upcoming mammogram. Which was one day before the convenient blood drive.

Oh well, I said, and I signed up for an earlier, less conveniently located blood drive to which bicycling would not make sense.

Earlier I had learned you do better on the hemoglobin test if your hands are warm. Ken lent me his battery-powered gloves for the drive there. Worked great! Then, the phlebotomist was kind of an artist. She slipped that needle into my vein incredibly quickly and nearly painlessly. Unfortunately, apparently she got the edge of the needle near a valve in the vein, and thus there was some fiddling to keep my blood actually flowing. But, there was success in the end. The fiddling ended up with some bruising on the inside of my elbow, but that doesn't hurt and will go away.

And then yesterday I got myself stabbed in both upper arms, he said that I could do both vaccinations at the same time as long as I did them in different arms. I have had less side effects from the Covid vaccination than earlier times, but perhaps I had the side effects in the middle of the night? I don't know. Sometimes I've only just been very tired and not gotten a fever. I did not set my alarm this morning and only woke up half an hour later than I normally would. Anyway I felt fine today.

So presumably I will be protected on my trip to California in early July. Not that California has been having measles outbreaks, but you never know when your airplane will be diverted to some place in Texas (though my flights are scheduled to be nonstop).

Neglected to blog that a few weeks ago my dentist determined that there was decay under the crown on tooth #15, and on Thursday we had tooth deposed, and will have a new crown when it gets in from the lab. Meanwhile, the temporary.

So Ken got Covid. We have no idea how this happened, because he's as careful as can be. He does go into work, and takes public transit, but he wears an N95 all the time. He has a private office, so he takes it off unless he is having a visitor, or is going outside of his office, and he's pretty religious about that. When he eats with others, he takes his mask and holds it in his offhand, and breathes through it, take a bite, breathe, take a bite, breathe. So I don't know how more careful he could be. Now, he does have a beard, but he has this frame that he's made that compresses the beard to make what appears to be a pretty good seal. He tested it with plastic wrap over the mask and wasn't really able to get much air to come in.

Anyway, he tested with a nucleic test on Wednesday evening after he came down with a fever, and it was negative. So we assumed he didn't have Covid. Then he tested with a multi-disease antigen test Thursday morning, to see if he had flu, and it was negative for both flu and Covid. So we thought it was just a bad cold and while he attempted to not give it to us, he was hanging out in the common areas at home. And then, Friday, we received a different nucleic test system, Plus Life, which had been hung up in customs for a few weeks. So he decided to try one of those, which was also a multi-disease test, and it said he was positive for both Covid and flu. Seemed highly unlikely, so he started using other tests that just did Covid, and they were all positive, antigen and nucleic. So that was a real bummer. Valerie had the booster a few weeks ago, so she's probably in good shape. I didn't get around to having the spring booster yet, so my booster was in October, same as Ken. So, I've been exposed.

We've isolated Ken in his room and are delivering meals and stuff like that. He and I went on a walk today where I tried to stay up wind, so he wouldn't go too stir crazy. So we're just waiting and seeing if I get it. Annoyingly I had plans for both next weekend and the following weekend. So we will see if those plans get canceled; hoping not!

I had a colonoscopy on Monday. They found a polyp and removed it. We will find out if there was anything bad about it in a week or so. Probably there won't be.

I carefully chose an afternoon appointment because the new plan is that you do half of the prep the evening before and finish the prep six hours before your appointment. Which means, if your appointment is at 9 AM, you're up at three in the morning doing it. No thanks! They called me a few days in advance to ask me if I would accept an earlier appointment. I said no way!

So this means that during the "clear liquid diet" day, you're actually just like being yourself until evening. So I went on a 12-mile bike ride among other errands and chores. 7-up and apple juice for calories; salted vegetable broth for electrolytes. I had no energy problems.

After dinner I decided to make a pie on the spur of the moment. I'm doing a low fiber diet for a few days before a colonoscopy, so the regular fruit kind of pies might be contraindicated, but a banana cream pie should work. I've never made one before.

I looked up a recipe in Joy of Cooking. It's the usual mix eggs and milk and heat them carefully over a double boiler, and I pretty much know how to do that, so I'm not daunted. I get the pie dough ready and in the pan and baking and the custard seems to be starting to thicken and all is going well.

I decide it's time to take the custard off the heat, and since I started kind of late, I thought maybe I should help the cooling process by dunking the double boiler insert in a water bath. Unfortunately, I managed to get water in the custard instead. I tried to pour the water off the top of the custard, but that wasn't really successful.

I stuck it back on the heat and stirred for a while. Then I more carefully put it back in the water bath and then I put it in the fridge. After it was cool it did not seem to be setting.

So I put it back on the heat with a random amount of cornstarch and tried again with the whole water bath. By this time it's really getting late. I decide it's actually going to set, so I've put it in the pie pan with the bananas in the fridge and we will eat it tomorrow. Either it will be pie or it will be soup.

Looks like I didn't keep this blog up-to-date.

( The previous thing a couple weeks ago. )( The new thing today. )

I successfully gave blood today. I tried a month ago, and I failed because of low hemoglobin. It turns out if you warm up your hands, you get a better score. I had forgotten this since the previous time I had given blood was in July, and so last month I just went there with my cold hands and I failed. This time I spent the time after checking in and before being called walking around, shaking blood down into my hands, rubbing them together, and so forth, and I raised my score from 12.3 up to 13.9. (12.5 is the cutoff.)

My blood came out really fast, because lately I've been having high blood pressure. Went to my doctor a couple of weeks ago and she said that my blood pressure was kind of high and I should start paying attention to that. I have in the past had the experience of "nurse takes it upon check-in, and it's high, and after chatting with the doctor for half an hour, it's normal", and this did not occur this time. I did gain 6-7 pounds from stress eating over the last few months, and that doesn't help. So I'm pretending to lose weight by trying to substitute low-calorie foods whenever I want to have a handful of chocolate chips. Haven't been doing it for long enough for it to have any effect, so I haven't weighed myself since I started. My current substitution is pumpkin seeds, with hull still on, so pretty much "salty wood". I still have a couple of pumpkins left to process, so I'll be able to do this for a little while. (Yes, salt is not great either, but I'm not eating very many of them at a time, and I mostly eat a low salt diet.) I've also been taking my blood pressure a couple of times a week and recording it. I have an appointment in 3 months with the physician's assistant to report on my results and also bring in my machine so that they can calibrate it. Anyway, if this does not correct itself with weight loss action, probably we're looking at drugs.

She was also slightly concerned about my A1C, which is just over the edge (5.8), and has been for the last several years. My doctor retired last year, so this is a new doctor to me; my previous doctor was much more nonchalant about A1C on the edge. However, weight loss will also help with that. So let's hope I can succeed. I might have to actually go on a diet, which is annoying.

So in my dysfunctional extended family, my stepsister is mad at me for some imagined slight about three years ago. I mean, I guess there was an actual slight, but I was pretty pissed at her for things she said. Anyway, it's why whenever I visit my stepfather, I stay in a hotel and I just see him at a restaurant or visiting the assisted living place that my mom used to live in.

So it had been my habit to call him every week, maybe a little more often. In August, he answered the phone and was very confused and said "I'm getting old", by which he meant that he was feeling his age much more than he has been, feeling bad, having difficulty moving and thinking. Anyway, he said goodbye pretty much immediately. When I called him a few days later he seemed to be in better shape, and we had a more normal conversation. But then I got call from my stepbrother (with whom I have a more normal relationship), who said that things were going downhill fast.

I tried to call at a time when his hired help (same person who took care of my mom before she went into assisted living) would be available, to try to get more details on what does "downhill fast" mean. But she wouldn't talk to me. Either because healthcare privacy, or maybe because my stepsister told her to not talk to me, she did not say why, she just said "I can't give you any details". So I asked her if she thought he would still be alive if I were to visit in three weeks. She hemmed and hawed and didn't really answer the question, but I got the idea that it was more likely than not that he would be alive. This caused my stepsister to call me and tell me that I was not welcome to visit.

After that, my stepfather's phone went straight to voicemail. Blocked? Maybe not, I tried from a lot of different numbers, so maybe it was just off. Then my stepbrother was radio silence because his girlfriend's father is also doing very badly and in some ways he's not all that reliable anyway. So I tried reaching out to some other people, who also didn't return my calls or my texts, and I was pretty panicky about the whole thing. I finally got through to a couple of people, who said that they hadn't heard anything about three weeks to live, or who had heard it, but had gone and visited and didn't believe it when faced with the walking and talking man himself.

My stepbrother came back from radio silence and apologized for leaving me hanging, and it's possible that he will try to facilitate a phone call with my stepfather next time he visits. I hope so.

I'm obviously not happy about the "not welcome to visit" thing, but I imagine that stepchildren have no rights. I think if I could get my stepfather to say that he wants me to visit in the hearing of my stepbrother that maybe I could force the issue. I did have a really lovely visit in May when he was in the rehab place. It's sort of weird that I'm kind of hoping he gets into a situation where he has to go back to rehab, because maybe I could come visit then, because I wouldn't have to go into my stepsister's house.

So that's the news from California, where I do not have any trips planned.

A couple of days ago I saw a picture (filtered) of the sun, and a mention that "a big sunspot is just coming into view." I've been thinking about solar maximum and how I wanted to get out the binoculars with the solar filters (which we have for eclipses) and look at sunspots. So today I did it. There was the "big one coming into view" which was on the left-hand side, and a little archipelago of sunspots on the right-hand side. So then I got out the regular solar filter without magnification, and I could see the big one that way. Can't call it "naked eye", but unmagnified, anyway.

I didn't do any exercise for the day, since I got my Covid vaccine yesterday and it kind of knocked me for a loop, a little more than previous, I think. I'm feeling a lot better this evening, but still kind of wiped out. I made dinner, which was a complicated dinner, and that was a little bit too much effort. I had to get somebody else to do the dinner cleanup.

https://www.olum.org/yduj/recipe/zucchini-lasagne.txt - Made with butternut squash

I continued to have a good time at the square dance convention, so much so that I signed up for next year in San Francisco. There were announcements of people having got Covid, but I crossed my fingers and continued to wear my mask for all dancing. After the announcement, a few more people started wearing masks. I did take it off while I was eating, a few times indoors with other people. I didn't try to do the two-fisted eating thing where you hold your mask in your off hand and stick it over your face every time you want to breathe in, using the dominant hand for wielding your fork.

Last night, 36 hours after getting food from a buffet line where there was no splatter shield, I had the incredible barfs. This is consistent with norovirus incubation time. I'm feeling better this morning, but I'm being cautious about what I eat. I just took a Metrix (nucleic amplification) Covid test on my housemate's suggestion, because pretty much anything can be a symptom of Covid, and it was negative. (I did take a Covid test when I arrived home, but I wouldn't have really caught it yet then. And apparently I haven't caught it yet now either.)

So my stepfather seems to be in pretty good shape. He's definitely well enough to complain :-)

They are not letting him walk by himself. I made them show me him walking. There's kind of a problem with staff where when you want something, it takes forever. We had been sitting and chatting for a couple of hours and I went and asked if we could walk around the building, and they said oh you mean push the wheelchair, and I said no I meant I want to watch him move his feet, and they had to go find a physical therapist to come help us, which took a while and then the PT complained "he's already had physical therapy today" and I explained that I wasn't there then and I was visiting and I wanted to watch him walk. He's using a walker, but he's been using a walker at home for about a year I think, so that's not really new. He seemed to walk okay, and I tried to get the PT to let me walk with him without the PT around, and while his mouth said yes, he accompanied us back to the room, so I think the real answer was no.

He's having a little short-term memory problem, where we talk about something, and then half an hour later we talk about it again, and it seems new to him. But other times he seems quite normally sharp.

My step brother came over for a few hours in the afternoon, and we chatted and that was fun, and a couple of Clyde's friends also stopped by for 20 minutes on their way to Costco (which is fairly near the rehab).

I had a couple of hours to kill while he took a nap and then had dinner, so I drove up to Paradise to see how the rebuilding is going. It's going to be another 5-10 years before it doesn't look like it's a recovering war zone. There are a lot of new houses, but there are still a lot of vacant lots. The land seems to have recovered; nothing really looks scorched anymore, and all the dead trees of been removed, and new scrub has grown up instead, and it looks fine. It's just when you get into town and see alternating new houses, old houses, vacant lots. Some parts of town look better than others, though I didn't really do a full tour, I just tootled around (in my electric rental car, which is charging downstairs in the hotel parking lot).

Then I went back over and we watched my mother's favorite shows, Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy. It's clear that Clyde likes Wheel of Fortune, and is wishy-washy about Jeopardy, because he watched during Wheel of Fortune, and chatted with me during Jeopardy.

Tomorrow will be a repeat of today, with the added fun of me going to the DMV at the beginning of the day and picking up a study guide for the drivers test, which you have to take every time you renew your license after you are some age, and Clyde is well beyond said age. So we will see if this short-term memory thing fixes itself, or if he fails the written test in August.

I'm taking a quick trip to California at the end of this week. My stepfather is in a rehab place, getting IV antibiotics because of a persistent infection that has been plaguing him for a while, and apparently the medical people decided this was the thing to do.

It's actually kind of convenient for me, because my stepsister won't let me in her house, so at least here I can go visit him for large blocks of time, rather than just going out to lunch. Have a little concern that she's going to figure out a way to tell the place not to let me come visit him, even though he's currently mentally competent, so he gets to pick who visits him, and when I had him on the phone yesterday seemed to be excited about my visit. I haven't yet told her I'm coming, but I think I should, so she can choose to avoid me when I'm there if she wants. I think if she came in and I was there, or I walked in and she was there, she would be upset, and make a scene. If I tell her I'm coming, then she can choose to make a scene or not. Maybe I'll text her on Wednesday (travel day) and tell her that I plan to go to the facility around 10 AM Thursday.

Fortunately I have a good relationship with my stepbrother, who's the one who called me and let me know all this. Unfortunately, he lives a two hour drive from his dad, and he has a job, so he only visits occasionally.

So I decided that I was -1 years older than 65, and thus I deserved the Covid booster. So I got one yesterday. We will see if the insurance company decides I need to pay for this privilege. So far, not yet. It knocked me for a little more of a loop than the previous time, I think.

The point of this timing is that in a month we are going to watch the eclipse from a Covid-denying state, so maybe we should be more protected than average.

Too bad they haven't done a reformulation for JN.1. They're just failing to play catch-up.

I was going to go to a New Year's Eve party today, but, instead I have a cold.

How did I get a cold? Well, I went to a party at which I was unsafe on December 16, but that seems like a long time ago. And then I've been to a couple of other parties, December 19 and 23, where I wore a mask but I lowered it occasionally to do things like pop a grape into my mouth. Maybe actually it was lowered more than I think it was. It is true that at the December 23 party there was a person who was blowing her nose.

Anyway, I think I shouldn't bring any respiratory infection to a party, even if it's not Covid (I tested).

So before the square dance that we had last weekend, we were supposed to covid test. Ken had a cold earlier, for which he had rapid tested and gotten a negative result. And then he felt better, but just in case he did the Cue test, which is one of those molecular tests, in addition to rapid test. Well, it was positive! Dang. So I tested with Cue, and I was negative, and also negative on rapid test, so I went to the dance. He did not go. He tested with Cue again the next day and was negative. He's been negative rapid test all along. So we think we might have had a false positive. Which is sad, because he missed a great dance.

So Perry continued to test negative on antigen tests, so we decided that he had had Covid a couple of weeks ago and was on the tail end and no longer contagious, and let him down into the rest of the house.

In personal health news, I had a weird thing happen: I was trying to open a sliding glass door, and something bizarre happened to my hip. I mean you have to torque your body a little bit, especially if it's a door that's a little bit stiff, but the amount of pain was, I felt, inappropriate. And then it hurt the entire rest of the day, and took like a week before it really felt better. I had to skip square dancing. Fortunately, bicycling seemed to actually help it feel better.

Don't get old.

So it's indigenous peoples day weekend, and Perry came home for the weekend.

So we stuck a Covid test up his nose, and we used the fancy kind that is more sensitive (Cue system), and it was positive.

So we used an antigen test, and it was negative.

His room is on the third floor with mine, and so I packed a bag for the weekend and am moving into the guest room on the second floor so he can just have the third floor, and we will deliver him food and communicate by email. It won't really be a lot different from when he's at school. Fortunately, for him it won't be that bad, because mostly he sits in his room with his computer anyway.

We will test him with the antigen repeatedly, and it's possible that he is on the tail end rather than the leading beginning of Covid; he says he hasn't had symptoms, but sometimes you don't. If he is still antigen negative on Sunday, then we will let him back downstairs. The fancy test will test positive for a lot longer than the antigen. So it's actually more likely that he's on the tail end, because the tail end is longer.

Hopefully we will not get it. If he's on the leading end, we would expect the antigen to read positive tomorrow night or Sunday morning. I guess if that happens, we need to keep them here until he's better.

Bah.

Yesterday afternoon I felt it wiggle. Of course, after the dentist closed for the day. It wasn't exactly an emergency, because it doesn't hurt because there's no nerve. So I called soon as I got up this morning, and they got me an appointment midday. The dentist agreed, yes, it was moving, and no, it should not do that.

The way implants are constructed is that there is a larger screw inserted into your bone, and then a smaller screw inside that which can take either a flat piece when you're just chilling and waiting for everything to heal, or a sticky up piece for the crown to be cemented on. So, the sticky up piece was inserted three weeks ago for making the impressions for the crown, and then swapped for the flat piece so it was not annoying while the crown was made, and then the sticky up piece was inserted yesterday, and she supposedly cranked it down hard before cementing on the crown. But, maybe not hard enough.

So, now she needs to remove the crown so she can get access to the inner screw and crank it harder. She tried a couple of different methods, including just grabbing it with a pliers and yanking, to get it to come off without breaking, and failed. So she's going to cut it off, but that will require a much longer appointment than the emergency one that we were able to schedule today. And new impressions and a new waiting two weeks for a new crown. So, I go back Monday. (I'm a little worried about who's going to pay for the second crown. I haven't asked yet. Probably I should.)

As I was leaving, she said not to worry about the fact that it was wiggling, it would be fine, and I said "so I shouldn't floss", and she said "oh no! Do floss! Eat sticky candy! Maybe it will come off!" I thought that was pretty funny. I'm guessing it won't come off. Unfortunately the yanking around has caused the area to be kind of sore, and so I don't really want to chew on that side. And I don't have any sticky candy, because generally speaking, it's better if I just don't eat that kind of thing, given my low-quality teeth. Maybe I'll buy some caramels.

At long last I have had the crown put on my implant on tooth #3. It feels a little weird still. There was this alarming noise and crunching feeling and I said "what was that" when she was done, and she said it was torquing the screw so that it did not come loose. I don't remember that from my previous implant, but perhaps it happened; it was a while ago.

We had some houseguests this weekend. They did an antigen test right before they left home Friday morning, and it was negative, and so we let them in and have been happily having unmasked dinner etc. We decided after they had been here a couple of days maybe we should test again.

Crap: POSITIVE.

Well that was a bummer of a visit. We all stuck masks on our faces and thrashed around for a while and decided that it was worth some money to us to send them home early (they were planning to go home on Monday anyway, but still that's a whole day that they'd be here and we'd be trying to avoid Covid.) So, we paid for the tickets and they're going home tomorrow morning, wearing masks and hoping not to infect anybody on the plane. At least aren't any rules anymore… Otherwise they'd have to stay here for 10 days. Only one of them was positive, but everybody's going home.

Now we have to decide what to do about ourselves. Valerie has a work trip planned, and is trying to decide whether to go. Maybe she can just test every morning and wear a mask everywhere. I will probably just do my usual thing of staying home all the time, so I am easy. Ken will have to decide whether he wants to go to work, or work from home for a few days while he tests every day.

Of course, every time I clear my throat I like freak out, "is this it" even though I can't possibly have gotten infected from them yet.

I had Covid in March, and I had the vaccination in June. So maybe I'm okay. We will see, chewing through our large supply of antigen tests and our small supply of Cue nucleic tests.

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Page generated Jun. 5th, 2025 12:28 pm

Entries tagged with health

Vampire visit and vaccination

I have a plastic tooth in my mouth

the evil bug

semi-decade-ly cleanout

Pi day misadventure

I fought the law and the law won

Merry Christmas to the Red Cross

dysfunctional family fuckery

Sun and food

Convention wrapup

Trip health report

Haring off to CA

Covid booster

Unhappy new year

false positive

All's well I guess

Maybe we should stop having guests

So about that crown

No longer the toothless wonder

Covid reprise?