Sorry about that.
I love you.
Thank you.
Vashti L. Ross died the morning of July 11, 2023 due to complications from ALS.
To learn more about her journey with this insidious disease, please keep reading, or see https://alsoregon.org/vashti-ross/.
If you would like to help with her final expenses, please visit https://www.gofundme.com/pruzh-dying-is-expensive.
That was the longest break I’ve ever taken. Between no longer having a job, and COVID warping the reality of time itself, the last three months have gone by in an instant and an eon at the same time.
It’s been long enough I think I need to do a general check-in. So that’s what this blog post will be all about. If you don’t care, that’s totally cool and I will have something else for you very soon.
Strength
My FRS scale has gone down a point or two. I’m beginning to notice weakness in my arms now. I can still wiggle my fingers and grasp things between my first finger knuckle and my thumb. That’s going away though. My laptop is becoming too heavy to manage. I can still just about move my toes, I can’t kick with any real strength, but I can stand as long as I’m leaning heavily on something else. This means I can use the walker for a step or two, but I haven’t tested anything longer than a couple steps lately. There’s not really any way to pick me up off the ground if I fall, here, so I’m not going to take stupid risks. I’m still able to transfer myself to my wheelchair, and to the toilet from there, so I’m still pretty independent. I can still write a little bit, especially if I’m using a special pen that one of my blog readers was kind enough to send me. Along with some lovely edible treats. The pen she sent me is a kind of crutch for my finger, and it is much more easy to control with fingers that are weak. I’m not going to be writing any new novels anytime soon, but I can still sign my name and fill out short forms.
Breath
For the longest time, we weren’t able to test my breathing because Covid. When you’re dealing with a disease spread by droplets and aerosols, the last thing you want is someone purposely and forcibly blowing air into your face. Last month during my medical trial though, after getting a Covid test to prove I was clean, we were able to test my forced vital lung capacity. The Covid test sucked so bad. They dug around in the very back of my sinus cavity and I felt like I was a dead body being prepared for mummification and they were going to pull my brain out through my nose. I was coughing and sneezing and I watery for a couple of hours after the test. It sucked, is what I’m saying. The last time we tested my breathing back in March I was at 52%. When this all started I was at 115%, to give you an idea. This last trip I tested at 46%. Quite a drop. I am definitely feeling this change, I am so much more easily out of breath. I am still breathing okay this, I only noticed when I exert myself somehow. If I lose my breath it takes me a bit longer to catch it back. There’s no need for breathing apparatus yet, except the AVAPS machine that I use at night. I’ve still got some time.
Eating
I need help cutting up my food, but I can still feed myself. I have not begun choking on food or having things go down the wrong pipe – at least no more than average people do. It’s awful when I do choke on my own spit though, because in order to get my breath back I have to take these huge ragged breaths in to be able to cough it out, and it makes this horrible death rattley noise when I do it. It scares the living shit out of everyone around me, and I don’t have the breath to explain to them that I’m all right – as long as I’m choking I’m still breathing – but it’s gonna sound like I’m dying for a minute. Which is not to say that I’m not also scared, being unable to breathe is one of the worst things in the world, but I know that the choking is only temporary. And even if I do pass out, there’s a couple of minutes before any possibility of brain damage sets in, and my airway will probably be cleared out by somebody attempted CPR and up be fine again. I have not had to make any concession to the disease with regards to how I eat. So far, we haven’t had to make any concessions to the disease in regards to what I eat, either. I am still fat under medical advice. I have an obscene amount of junk food in my room for snacking on. I mean, obscene. I’ve got a little three drawer shelf unit full to the brim, and two square baskets that slide into IKEA furniture full. I have a habit of craving something obscure, and then allowing myself to get that thing because fuck it, I’m dying, but the only way I’ll be able to find it on Amazon or wherever is by the case. So now I’ve got a case of whatever. People also gift me edible things all the time, because they are amazing, and they don’t want to burden me down with material things but they do want to give me a present. Candy is perfect in that regard. And I love it. I love it all. The problem is I don’t actually eat that much junk food, so will have a couple of pieces of whatever and then it just sits here while everything else piles up around. Hence, three drawers and two baskets. This isn’t a complaint, at all. I love candy. And obscure Australian treats, and macadamia nuts, and pop tarts, and marzipan, and Lara bars, and Apple chips, and every other thing that is currently shoved in to my little space. Love it.
Speech
My voice is becoming affected. If I talk for too long my voice goes a little wobbly and raspy. This is most likely due to my breathing more than anything, there isn’t enough breath being forced out when I speak to make my voice strong. I can still enunciate properly, and get my point across. But something’s happening there.
Mental
ALS doesn’t really affect your cognitive behavior, which is all at once the best and worst thing about this disease. You retain your faculties, but eventually you become trapped in your own body with no way to communicate, still perfectly aware and understanding of everything around you. There are some cognitive issues possible though, and I’m wondering if I’m having problems with that. It seems recently that I have much more of a problem getting my point across because my thoughts are so scattered. It could quite possibly also just be ADHD or something, but I’ve never noticed it so much as in the last year. I have lots of other ADHD traits so who knows. I was never formally diagnosed with that but I also never formally sought out a diagnosis for that. My brain has always gone very quickly in circles and I seem to say something completely unrelated to what we were talking about; but I do have a definite path that I used to arrive at what I said. We were talking about chocolate, which makes me think about dogs being unable to eat chocolate, which makes me think about a cute dog video I saw with a dog biting at a stream of air from a compressor, which makes me think of really windy weather, which makes me think of another video of an umbrella rolling down the beach with dramatic music, which makes me think of going to the beach. And that’s why when you say “I really like this dark chocolate”, I respond “we should go to the beach soon”. There’s a path there, a definite way I arrived where I did, you just don’t see it. Lately I am having trouble even explaining that path out loud, even though my brain understands completely.
Emotional
This one. This is the one I’m struggling with the most, if I’m being honest. I have the absolute worst time being unable to help myself. All my life I have been entirely self reliant, and any help I accepted was on my own terms. I obviously don’t have that luxury anymore. Friends come over and help me unpack, and I can literally do nothing to help them, and that eats at me. Even though I know they don’t mind, and are even happy to do so. I sit here in my room and see something that needs to be done, and it would take me all of five minutes to take care of it forever if I were able-bodied. But I’m not. And so it must become this hour-long effort to get someone here with enough time to spare, and explain what needs to be done, and then have them do it. And so much remains undone because it seems so stupid to call someone in here just to push a thumbtack in that had fallen out of the wall. It is frustrating in a way that I have never thought possible. And it absolutely eats at me to know that it’s just going to get worse. More than my own death, I fear being a burden. And my friends and family can say all they want, that I’m not a burden, but I will never be able to believe that. And that’s just how it is. Still, I have many more good days than bad days. I try to take things at face value as they come and be gracious about the help I do receive. I mean, I’m still going to completely obsess over it mentally and examine it from every angle in minute detail And stare at the ceiling until 3 o’clock in the morning thinking about it, but… um… Where was I going with that.
Anyway.
House
We are slowly but surely getting into this house and settling in. It is taking an excruciatingly long time because of the three people living here only one of them is able-bodied and he has a job. Thanks to some amazing friends who have come over to lend a hand, we are much further along than we would otherwise be. For example this is what my study looks like now!
Neato torpedo. The place is actually beginning to resemble my living space now. We’ve been pulling things out of boxes that I haven’t looked at in over five years because they were packed up from the house that I owned and then just put into storage while I lived in the apartment. It’s nice to be able to go through these things, and get rid of so much. My friend Tamra did all of the work you see up there. She is absolutely an amazing person and I’m lucky to know her. We have some semblance of the living room, rather than boxes piled upon tables and couches, you could almost sit in it. We are still discovering the um.. Character that this house has. Like the skeleton of a rat in a rat trap in the crawlspace. And the very interesting decisions or more owners made in regards to the electrical wiring. And duct placement. Our back porch is still a mess of boxes and other things needing to be sorted and there’s an entire storage unit out there, full of even more stuff from my old storage that we need to go through. We are taking it a little bit at a time. This house feels much more like a home now, already, and it will only become homier.
Travel
I am still participating in a medical trial which necessitates traveling by plane to San Francisco once a month. It’s usually a two or three day trip, but it seems to take half the month to prepare and recover from it. As per my previous post, traveling in a wheelchair is not easy. I can’t tell you much about the trial itself, except that I do undergo a spinal tap each and every time. It’s… becoming routine. Which is not something I ever thought I’d say – spinal taps aren’t something I would ever think someone could get used to? But here we are. I can, however, slip you this link which details some of the preliminary findings of the trial in general. The results are looking pretty good.
Outside influences
I have to keep all of my mental and emotional facilities trained to what’s immediately around me, because the outside world is pretty fucking scary right now. I live near Portland, which the president is trying to paint as a lawless expanse of criminals and terrorists, but really there’s protests happening in two square blocks in the inner city and the damage is mostly confined to the federal buildings. Driving through downtown is not unsafe. The president has promised a tax break should he get reelected, which would mean disability becoming unfunded by next year, so I’m pretty scared about that. I’m really scared about the slide into fascism that our country is taking and the wannabe dictator going unchecked when he says really dangerous shit. Some really scary shit going on outside and I can’t do anything about it, so I do my best to bury my head and just not think about it. Sometimes that works. Sometimes it takes Ativan. Otherwise I spend every waking minute angry and terrified. I cannot wait for a time when a week can go by and I don’t even think about the president. I hope I live to see that.
Overall though there’s nothing too horrible or too awesome to report. I’m settling into the new normal at the house, settling into the new normal of my disease day by day, and settling into a sort of routine. One of my absolute biggest stresses was finding a house, and getting this place has helped immeasurably. So I don’t really have all that much to complain about. Overall I’m doing pretty good. I still feel like I have some time. I still have things to do, things to say, cats to pet.
And all this junk food to consume.
I’m not dead yet!
Darlings, the move was a DISASTER. But it’s over! Now I just have to deal with my guilt over not being able to help unpack. J the Magnificent bought me Animal Crossing to occupy my brain instead, so my life the last month has been this
and this
J is doing what he can, and people are offering to help, but so much is dependent on other things – for instance, I can’t have most of those boxes unpacked until I get shelves installed because I have no places to PUT things yet. My awesome brother is helping with the shelves (as well as refinishing the floors before we moved in, and installing sink and toilets, and moving an entire wall) but he’s on-call as a tow driver so he can’t come over regularly to help.
So it’s moving sloooooowly.
This might well take the rest of my life (har har) but we’ll get it there. In the meantime I’m set up enough to be comfortable in my nest of a bed, the cats are introducing themselves to each other, and I have animals to cross.
I’m doing okay. I hope you are, too.
Seven years ago today, I had just started cleaning and painting my new home. I’d had keys for a scant two days and there was a lot to be done. Seven years and two days ago my dream of homeownership had finally come true. It was pretty much my dream home. Huge backyard, a shed AND two car garage for storage, five bedrooms, huge kitchen. I had such dreams for that house. I was going to convert one of the bedrooms to be a kitten room and foster kittens. I was going to install baker’s racks I my kitchen and get serious about patisserie in my spare time. My office was set up for studying for my computer science degree in the works, a spare bedroom-slash-library for guests, my bedroom with a ceiling like the night sky. It was gonna be a giant garden in the back and a haven for the snakes I was delighted to learn lived there. I was going to install bat houses.
Six years, eight weeks and one day ago I received news that changed everything.
One of the first things to hit me, after the whole “holy shit, I have a terminal disease and I’m going to die” thing was “oh no I have to sell my house.” My new dream house was two story you see. I was beyond crushed, I was devastated. I hadn’t even had it for a year and now I was looking at having to give it up. And unfortunately giving it up was not a question. I tried every scheme I could come up with. There was no way to put a master bedroom downstairs, no way to expand the downstairs bedroom to encompass a roll in shower, no way to put a lift in to get the wheelchair upstairs. The hallway was just too narrow. The layout was just too open downstairs. The only aspect of choice I had was, do I sell it now? Or do I wait until I’m physically forced out of the place.
I chose option one. The thinking was, I could get out of this house and purchase a new one while there was still ability in me to decorate the new place. If I waited until I was wheelchair-bound and had useless hands, I wouldn’t be able to make the new place my own. So I sold it pretty much right away, at a nice profit, even. It wasn’t even on the market a week. I had owned my dream house for just over two years. I rented an apartment as a temporary measure, because I knew it would be a little bit before I could find the perfect place. The new place had to be single-story, had to be wheelchair accessible or at least have the bones to renovated to be so. And crucially? It had to be affordable on what I was going to make while on disability. I had estimates of what I was going to be earning, and at the time Danielle was going to move in with me so I would have help with the mortgage.
It has turned out to be a nigh impossible task. The economy recovered in spades, and suddenly I couldn’t afford literally anything in the area. People were coming from California and other places with cash to purchase homes and I simply could not compete. Real life then conspired to interfere, Danielle and I split as friends, so I was suddenly going it alone. Jay decided to move in with me and so all of his needs also needed to be addressed in the house search. My stepfather passed away, leaving my mother unable to afford her home, and so I moved her in with me in my 2 bedroom apartment and we weren’t sure what was going to become of that, if her living with me would be a permanent solution or not. My needs became very, very complicated, my buying power dwindled to almost nothing thanks to the booming house market and the pittance you earn on disability, and my “temporary” apartment became more of an unwanted permanent fixture.
Staying permanently in an apartment was never an option though. I need a roll in shower. Apartment complexes tend to frown upon you doing demolition in their units, so installing one here is not an option. Ideally I wanted to stay in the same-ish area so I could keep near my support network. Leaving Portland metro, thus leaving the care of Doctor Goslin, was NEVER an option. I need a bedroom big enough for my bed, wheelchair, and a lift to eventually get me out of bed into the wheelchair. This place simply does not have that much space; I play a stupid game of Tetris with my wheelchair, walker, cat scratcher, and closet door every time I get dressed. And even after the economy recovered somewhat, and even though Jay was willing to commute up to an hour each way to work every day so I could extend our search parameters to include BanjoLand (where our neighbors were GUARANTEED to hate our liberal asses), there was simply nothing out there for me. Everything we found was falling apart, or the master bathroom wasn’t even big enough to get a wheelchair in, much less turnaround in, or the side bedrooms where J and my mother would be staying were closets.
Quick shout out here because credit where credit is fucking DUE. My real estate agent Christina Griffith is one of the most patient people on the face of this planet. I half expected her to give me up as a client at any time. It was frustrating for us both, but she never quit on me. I didn’t have an option to quit and she did, and I’m grateful as FUCK she did not take that route.
All I wanted was a place to live until I died, one way or another. My last breath in my own bed, with my cats beside me. No more transition housing. A place I could get around in my wheelchair, with place to store all of the necessary equipment (like a huge-ass Hoyer lift) that will become part of my life as the disease progresses, with space for the people taking care of me. (And the option for grocery delivery because I’m in a wheelchair and mom is blind and J can’t do everything.) I didn’t care what kind of dwelling it was. House, condo, manufactured home, as long as it was accessible, and affordable, I could literally give a shit. It has been the single greatest stressor in my life ever since I was diagnosed. No hyperbole. All I want is a place to just be and be allowed to die in and not have to worry about my belongings getting packed up and my cats transitioned a to new environment separate from me while I still drew breath. The actual disease and its effects have actually been secondary to all of this. My life has primarily been all about finding a home.
It’s taken five years.
One thing I’m definitely grateful for is all of the people helping me look. My realtor is amazing, as I said, (seriously if you’re in the Portland metro area look her up) and I had lots of friends and family keeping an eye out for me, as well as automated searches on places like redfin. This lead came from my psychiatrist of all people. He’d been keeping an eye out, but most of the places he found were way out of my price range. A client of his was sadly transitioning to a care home, and his wife had to sell their home. It was a depressing thing for them but could be a godsend for me – it was already ADA set up. Ramps to everything, even the backyard, doors wide enough for a chair in every room. He gave me the owner’s email address, and I didn’t have high hopes to be honest, because there was no way I was going to be able to afford this place. I contacted them anyway, and the wife turned out to be a total peach. She answered all of my questions gracefully, but sure enough their asking price was $50,000 more than I had been approved for. I told her thanks anyway. She said hang on. let’s talk. It meant a lot to her that we’d been introduced through my shrink, and she really wanted the accessibility features to be of use to someone. Let’s have me look at the place, she said, and we can discuss it.
I didn’t get my hopes up. I didn’t dare.
We toured the place, and it was such an awesome feeling to be able to actually go into a house I was looking at purchasing, and wheel around freely with nothing off-limits to me. Typically when we go to look at a house, I stay in the van while J and Christina go inside and then report back to me. All I’ve had to go off of was their opinions and maybe a video tour taken on Christina’s cellphone. But here, here I was able to see for myself. And here I was able to see myself living in this space. This could be My House. The space was big enough. There are already ramps everywhere. The shower even was already a roll in shower. It was not quite perfect, the other two bedrooms were still kind of small. But with a little renovation we could make things work. So not daring to get my hopes up, I checked with my bank to see if maybe I could get approved for just a little more money. It still wasn’t what they were asking, but it was all I could afford. The bank said OK, and I presented an offer tens of thousands less than they’d said they were going to ask, fully expecting a counteroffer or flat-out refusal.
They said yes.
I get the keys tomorrow.
It’s been a very fast roller coaster ride, having to scramble to get all the paperwork together, and proving that even on SSDI I can make the mortgage (thanks ENTIRELY to Intel’s retirement plan), getting everything coordinated and submitted and 10,000 signatures on triplicate and witnessed by two rabbis and a chimpanzee, but it’s all sorted. It’s taking literally everything I have saved and my 401(k) and what little stock I still owned, but we’re doing it. There’s gonna be some work to do, we need to move a wall to make one of the bedrooms a livable size for J. There’s painting of course, but that’s just cosmetics. My fondest wish is to see what putting in central AC will cost, because the placement of the windows are not great for the window units that I have and I am a huge baby when it comes to heat and it’s going to SUCK when I’m too hot and unable to push the covers off. I’m not sure I’m going to be afford AC, but it’s a dream I have. Buying a house is incredibly expensive and there’s always going to be one more thing to purchase that you never thought of. I have to hire movers. Not that I don’t have a squad of willing volunteers, but for one – COVID is still very much a thing, even though America has seemed to decide that it’s boring now so we’re just not gonna quarantine anymore – and for two, most of my friends are willing but not necessarily able. I’m 45 years old and most of my friends are around the same age bracket. We can’t just haul shit around willy-nilly anymore. And my adjustable bed weighs a ton and I’m not subjecting people I love to that nonsense. So I’m doing what I can and praying that I am able to afford it all. So hey, if you ever thought about dropping a dime into my GoFundMe, now would definitely be a good time.
I called all of the utilities today to transfer them into my name, and every single one of them wished me congratulations on the new house. It’s a magical phrase. My new house. I was sincerely beginning to despair it was ever going to happen, and I would be relegated to sponge baths in my bed until I needed to be transferred to a care facility. I’m so happy it was wrong. I’m so happy this finally happened. I’m so glad I get a permanent address at last. I wish it hadn’t taken so long, and I’m no longer able to do all the decorating myself, but I can be a damn good supervisor and project leader. My friends are amazing and they will help me. I will have the space worthy of dying in, at last.
My final resting place.
Excuse me while I slip into my patented Rants Pants ™.
I’m going to make a very simple, polite request of you, and then I’m going to share a maddening picture, and then I’m going to rant for a bit. Ready? Here we go!
A simple request: please do not use the phrase “wheelchair-bound” or “confined to a wheelchair”.
Here is the picture:
DISCLAIMER: I actually love the sculpture here. It’s a very sweet tribute, and a very impressive bit of engineering. The picture’s awesome except that caption.
Okay. Here’s the rant:
I get what the original picture was going for, and it’s a very sweet sentiment, and the person who posted that picture meant well. How-the-fuck-ever, it is not accurate, honest, or just. It is exactly backwards. The wheelchair is not the confinement, it is the freedom. The wheelchair is not the problem, it is the goddamn solution. Until there is a cure for ALS, the closest thing we have is motherfucking technology. This modern miracle of metal and plastic and circuitry is the only reason I have anything close to a semblance of a normal life anymore.
I ain’t confined to SHIT.
The only thing I am bound to is this defective body. I am beholden to this shit-tastic disease. I am not confined to my wheelchair. I am not bound to it. It is not some magical item that I need to spend willpower on to activate. (That was an nerd reference for nerds.) The only binding my wheelchair provides is in the very literal sense when I am seatbelted into it for safety.
My wheelchair, the $47,000 marvel of technology that is the SS Opportunity, is my freedom.
Without my wheelchair, I would’ve had to quit my job more than six months before I actually did. Because I had the wheelchair, I was able to stick it out at work and have the energy to show up every day and do my work and still have some bit of energy left at the end of the day. Without it, I often went without lunch because I simply did not have the energy to go downstairs – literally immediately downstairs – to get some lunch. Without it, I had to constantly bother my fellow employees to do basic tasks that were actually part of my job such as fetching packages and mail because I did not have free hands to carry those things because I had a death grip on my walker. Without my wheelchair, I had to agonizingly plan every aspect of my work day to best budget the limited energy I had with my walker to get around. Without my wheelchair, I would have missed every work meeting I was not able to dial into. I would have missed every break room celebration of birthdays. Without it, I spent every day dehydrated because I couldn’t bring myself to ask a coworker to bring me something to drink as often as I needed it. Without it, I literally peed my pants at work because I was not able to get to the bathroom fast enough.
Even after my disability deprived me of my job, my wheelchair continues to afford me amazing freedom. Without my wheelchair, there would be no quick trips on my own to check the mail. Without my wheelchair, I would have to ask other people to lay out my clothes for me literally every fucking day because without it I cannot get into my closet. Without it, there would be no getting out of this apartment when I go stir crazy to catch a few Pokémon or whatever. Without my wheelchair, I would be confined to bed. All the time. There would be no grocery trips, no game nights, no dinners out with friends. My wheelchair allows me to do these things. My wheelchair is literally the only thing that allows me to leave the house. At all. Ever.
I fucking love my wheelchair.
So please, please stop saying ‘bound to a wheelchair’ or ‘confined’ or any other limiting word that is the exact opposite of what a wheelchair truly is. Until medical insurance covers palanquins, it is the key to my independence and literally the most liberating thing that I own.
deep breath
Okay, thank you for coming to my TED Talk. I’m going to take my Rants Pants ™ off now.
I love you. Please go about your business. And enjoy your freedom, as I enjoy mine.
If I’d been told five years ago what ALS was, and been allowed to do as much research as I like, and then been asked to write down everything I thought might be a problem for someone with the disease, I’d still have gotten most of it wrong.
That’s part of why I made this blog, I guess. To track those things. Even things I probably would have mentioned, I would not have gotten completely right. I am very, very lucky that I am not the first person with this disease, and so every little one of these little problems that have come up almost always has a solution. And usually? Even a marketed product to fix it. A law to address it. Something.
For example! I have no strength in my feet. That’s a duh observation. But one of the unexpected consequences of that fact is that at night, the weight of the blankets simply resting on top of them becomes painful. The weight of the blankets push my feet down so my toes curl and my heels dig into the mattress. When you have strength in your toes you don’t even register the weight. When your feet are useless, you can actually get bedsores on your ankles and heels just from that little bit of weight. So now you know!
Luckily, folks have had this problem addressed before. One answer is a kind of cushiony boot that you wear to bed, to give your ankles extra cushion. But the BETTER solution is something called a bed cradle – a C shaped frame that slips under your mattress and keeps the covers up off your feet. It’s also awesome for cats to lean against, apparently.
(there will be a cute pic of my cats leaning against the bed cradle here as soon as my site stops being a shit head and lets me upload)
I love this thing.
One thing that ABSOLUTELY occurred to me as a need, however, was the need for a bathroom with bars and enough space to get a wheelchair in. It’s a no-brainer. And yet. AND YET. So many places get it wrong. I …hold on, before I get into this rant, I’ma look up what the legal requirements are. If i were a benevolent dictator, everyone who owns a public place would have to do a day in a wheelchair to get a feel for it and see what the hell people have to deal with, so they could visualize how best to build a proper fucking bathroom. And I know there are absolutely the kind of assholes who comply with the absolute letter of the ADA law but to the point of practical uselessness. I suspect that is the case for the Lake Oswego Stanford’s restaurant, which I’m about to rant about in a second. I am calling them out specifically here because we went there for Thanksgiving, and my experience with their toilet was so goddamned frustrating it verrrrrrrrrrrrry nearly ruined my day because I almost had to call J to come rescue me.
…hoooboy yah that stall was NOT compliant. OK so here is the photo I took of myself sitting on the toilet, in preparation for sending it to J by way of explanation why I needed him to come get me.
(there will be a pic of the bathroom stall here as soon as my site stops being a shit head and lets me upload)
My wheelchair is backed all the fuck back against the door. The foot rests on my wheelchair had to be folded up to get my chair in all the way so I could close the door. My knees are apart because there is literally three inches between the edge of my chair and the toilet bowl. On the one side of the stall is a very flimsy wooden partition and no grab bar. On the other wall? A grab bar AND THE FUCKING DIAPER CHANGE STATION MOUNTED ONE INCH ABOVE IT. The bar was rendered completely fucking useless because of that goddamned thing. There was another bar along the back wall, mounted one inch above the toilet tank.
RESTAURANTS AND OTHERS, Y U DO DIS
I should have not bothered, but I really had to go, so I managed to maneuver the chair in at an angle. I was able to get out of the chair thanks to its seat tilt function, but A GRAB BAR ON THAT WALL WOULD HAVE BEEN FUCKING NICE. Using the bar against the back wall I was able to pull myself forward to lean against the back wall to undress. Then carefully lower myself down, because I couldn’t even lean on that non-bar wall for support (see: flimsy-ass wooden partition). The toilet was lower than my chair, and the instant I sat down I knew I was not going to be able to get back up with any sort of ease.
I finished up and took a long time to figure out how the fuck I was going to get back up. Long enough that J was sending me a text to ask if I was okay, but I was already planning on what I was going to say to him to explain I was going to need his help to get out. Meanwhile the bathroom was suddenly full of women, there was a line for the two stalls, including one woman saying she couldn’t use the other stall because she needed the bars. I almost called out to her that the handicap stall wasn’t going to be of any use to her.
After some consideration, I wound up having to lift my leg to it sidesaddle on the toilet, swivel my bare ass on to my wheelchair from the toilet, then lift myself up from there to pull my underwear back up and my skirt down. When I sat back down, I was out of breath. Humiliated. And then had to open the stall door and do a six point turn in a crowded goddamned bathroom to get to the sink while being stared at by a line of ladies. The woman who needed the stall had to wait for me to wait for both sinks to be clear, because the handicap stall door opened almost against the sink and I had to be completely out of its way to let the door close. Which meant once she was in there and the door closed, I effectively trapped her in there with my chair while I went back up to the sink to wash my hands. I’d wanted to take a picture of the stall with the fucking diaper station obstructing the bar, but there was a very long line waiting for that toilet.
I’m simply saying that Stanford’s was really lucky their pumpkin cheesecake was delicious because I might have burned the fucking place down after that.
As it is, now that I’ve seen the legal requirements and know goddamned well they are not in compliance, I’m proooooooooolly gonna lodge a formal goddamned complaint. We like to go there for family gatherings, but I’d never had to use the bathroom before. I’ve sometimes thought about starting a sideblog for really terrible public toilets and why they are not useful for actual ADA people, but I think it would just be supremely rage inducing for me and no one would give a shit who had any power to change it.
So instead I rant here in slightly TMI tones for y’all folks to read about. You’re welcome.
My bed cradle is still fucking awesome though.
Good thing we’re gonna go ahead and do the port; when the dressing was swapped out Thursday, my skin was all KINDS of pissed off. I was pretty sure I was having at least a mild reaction to the adhesive, because surely it shouldn’t be THAT itchy? Apparently no. It should not.
Soo we are trying a different adhesive that doesn’t adhere as well, I’m finding, and we will hopefully get the port installed soon.
The latest word on the street in ALS Land is Radicava.
It’s a new, FDA approved treatment, and we’re all pretty dang excited about it because there’s been nothing new AT ALL in 30 years. All we have is riluzole (brand name Rilutek) which you take twice a day and maaaaaaaaaybe gives you another six months or so? Or maybe destroys your liver? Other than that, the only treatment is really an attempt to mitigate some of the symptoms, like the muscle twitches (‘fasciculations’) and cramps, your muscles locking in place (spasticity), the complete fatigue because everything is a lot harder when half the muscles in your legs are gone, depression and anxiety – because it’s not really the five stages of grief so much as the five constantly cycling whirlwind moods of grief. Sometimes I hit them all on the same day.
Radicava (generic name edaravone) isn’t a miracle drug, by any means. It’s completely ineffective for a lot of people, and at best gives just a 33% reduction in the rate of decline. It has a lot of issues, of course, it can cause problems in people with asthma, and well..it’s expensive as all hell. I’ll get to that in a moment. For now, here’s the basics, if you want to read some more, and here are some of the naysayings about it.
Me, though, I wanted to try it from the get-go. I’ve been abundantly clear (or so I thought) that I am willing to try any new treatment, just to be doing something, to provide a little more data for future research, if nothing else. Every Clinic Day, we asked about the latest updates, the most recent news, when is it available. And so I was frankly…crushed, and a bit angry when I found out at last Clinic that people have already been trying it and I wasn’t contacted. That anger increased when they seemed surprised that I was interested in trying it. Like..how could I have been more clear?
Anger turned to rage when I was told that insurance would not pay for it. Because..once again..I have had ALS for too long. Because statistically, I should be dying any minute now. The average life expectancy is three to five years, and I hit three years in April. Never mind in actuality I’m still VERY MUCH alive and not going anywhere soon, thenkyouverymuch. And it wasn’t the pharmaceutical company denying me, it was the insurance company. I wasn’t worth the cost. If I’m statistically almost dead already, it’s not cost effective for them to pay for this. You’ll recall I said it was expensive – let me show you how expensive. Radicava is administered by infusion. Each infusion lasts for about one hour and administers a 60mg dose. The cost for each infusion is as follows:
The medication itself: $1238.80
The medication to flush the IV/PICC/port line into your vein: $180
If you do in-home infusion, the nurse’s time costs $251.20 for the first 2 hrs, $86.10 each hour after if needed
If you go to an infusion clinic, the cost for nursing is $107.10 for the first 2 hours, $50 after.
Now, since it’s not easy to get anywhere and do anything with ALS, we’ll go with in-home infusions, so that is $1,670. Per dose. How many doses do you need? Well, you start treatment with 14 consecutive days of infusions. That’s $23,380. Then you take 14 days off. Then you do 10 consecutive doses over the next 14 days. Then 2 weeks off. Then 10 over 14. For the rest of your life. It’s over twice what I make a year, to use this drug. As much as I hate it, I get why insurance would consider this a dumb investment. I hate that that is even a consideration in whether or not I have access to this.
Knowing that I was going to get denied, I asked to try anyway. I filled out a form giving the infusion clinic access to my medical records, on the off chance they could use this to leverage my insurance company to pony up some dollars to help a dying girl out. Monday I got a call from Searchlight, the company coordinating the treatment, and they said that typically my insurance covered this treatment after a 5% copay. Luckily, she said, once I hit my out of pocket max, it’s all covered. Did I have any questions?
“Yes,” I said. “…Does this mean that I actually am going to be covered for this?”
“Well, we’ll be sending your information along to your doctor provider, but it looks like we’re good to go.”
I dared to let myself hope. Just for a moment. I went out with J and had celebratory sushi, but said nothing to anyone else (except my mom, who was here when I got the call) just in case it was a misunderstanding.
It wasn’t.
Wednesday I got a call from the nurse to discuss the actual cost, how much I was responsible for, and to start making appointments. She gave me the above price list, and we discussed would I like a PICC line or a port? Since this was pretty much going to be a regular thing, infusions by regular IV aren’t an option – imagine having to get your vein stabbed every day for an hour long IV drip. Folks on dialysis, infusions, or chemotherapy usually opt for either a PICC line or an implantable port. A PICC (peripherally inserted central catheter) line goes in your upper arm, and then into a central vein in your chest. An implantable port, or port-a-cath, gets implanted under the skin in your chest and also snakes into a central vein. PICC lines are technically good for a month, though if you treat it carefully, it can last much longer. A port-a-cath is considered a permanent implant. PICC lines are much simpler to install, it’s just a complicated IV insert with a chest x-ray to make sure it’s done right, but a port requires at least conscious sedation. A PICC line needs upkeep once installed; it’s basically two little ‘pigtails’ as she called it, sticking out of your skin and held in place by tape. You can’t get it wet, and have to wear some kind of sleeve to keep it from getting caught on things. A port is just a little bump under your skin, no maintenance required. PICCs are easy to remove if you change your mind. You’re kind of stuck with a port for the rest of your days.
So yesterday I had a PICC line installed.
If I tolerate the meds, we’ll install a port.
This is happening. Even if it does me no good at all, even if it actually makes things worse, we have tried. I am a data point. I did something. I did everything I could. I should start infusions next week.
I can’t wait to keep you guys posted.
Ok, so this isn’t one of those “little things have big impacts” kind of stories, though it sort of is. It’s a “help from unexpected sources” story more than that. In a really stupid goofy way. Some background:
1) My friend Nathan bought me a subscription to LootCrate. I’ve raved about that before, but let me do it again. We weren’t ever really the best of friends or anything, just work friends, and we lost contact for a few years. Like ya do. When he found out about my diagnosis, he bought me this subscription so I could have something fun to look forward to every month. It was an unexpected surprise and I can’t even remotely convey how much joy this brings me, for a lot of reasons.
2) LootCrate is a collection of VERY geeky things, from all kinds of fandoms. I’ve gotten t-shirts from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to Overwatch to James Bond and everything in between. It’s current pop culture and retro childhood stuff, and I’ve gotten a lot of really awesome swag, including stuff you literally can not get anywhere else. Tetris fridge magnets. A Tron pencil bag that glows in the dark. SO MANY TOYS. And awesome aforementioned t-shirts. Like, half of the t-shirts I wear are now LootCrate shirts.
So this month’s crate theme was “animation”. It included swag from a couple of things I’m not that into (it happens, but I ALWAYS find someone who really loves said fandom and is happy to take things off my hands), and drink koozies from the show Futurama. Full disclosure? I’ve always kinda hated drink koozies. They strike me as a bit white trashy and that’s not helped by them USUALLY being branded with some stupid or plain offensive not-really-a-joke. But I loved Futurama, and this was a fun thing, and I’m ALWAYS drinking soda (Sorry Kelly, I know I need to be drinking water but CHERRY COKE ZERO IS DELICIOUS), so I slid my can into one.
Oh my god guys.
THE CAN IS SO MUCH EASIER TO PICK UP.
I typically have to use two hands to pick up a full can of soda, and as I drink it, I press a dent into the can to help me grip it. Hang on..lemme take a picture.
Every can I drink from has that little divot for my thumb. heh. But with the drink koozie, I don’t need it! It’s squishy so I can get a good grip on the thing without leaving a little dent in. I bet Nathan never knew he was signing me on for handicap aids. But that’s what I got this month, and I never would have figured this out on my own.
So that’s a happy thing that happened.
I have things to report and ruminate on and whatnot, but it’s a lot, and I’m still processing. It was a very complicated weekend after a very emotional week (by which I mean panic attacks and crying and fighting and more ativan taken in three days than in the last three months). Things are okay. But they’re hitting hard and fast and yeah. I’ll tell you all about it, in a bit.
But for now? One of my fellow ALS peeps posted this to her Facebook page today and I love it, so I’m sharing it with you.
All is well.
A vast number of things have prevented me from completing my voice banking. Changing acoustics in my office due to the move being the primary, but various other things have factored in, like the time my hard drive died and I lost the existing in progress file. I finally had it occur to me that work has phone booths, private little sound-muffled rooms. So I have brought my headset in to work, and finally – FINALLY! – started the process over.
And then this.
Maybe you don’t know Tom Waits, and don’t care. That’s okay! You should go YouTube something of his and then imagine a digital voice like that. I said that I should make a tumblr for Tom Waits poetry inspired by the ModelTalker software prompts. It would be awesome. And then read that poetry with the Tom Waits digital voice, and the world would cease to be, because it’s just too cool for words. And voices.
I might continue to bug you guys with examples of the ModelTalker reading prompts though. They’re delightfully bizarre.
“The wolves surged to meet him.”
“He had rides in the wheelbarrow.”
“The grizzled old fellow could only see on one side.”
Oh, and the original line was “There’s another way you can get a tooth out.”
Not even an hour after I posted that last entry, and sat here, feeling very small and afraid and helpless, my little brother Eric sent me this:
And I went from crying with grief to crying in laughter.
And that’s how I know I have the best planets in my orbit.
I imagine a lot of people out there share my weekly regime of tipping pills from many bottles into little plastic containers that mark the days by day and night. Times were, I took nothing (though my recurrent anemia said I really ought to be taking iron, and my living in Oregon says some vitamin D would be good). Occasionally I’d get a wild hair and buy some supplements and taking them maybe a week or two before I tired of it. I don’t have the luxury of tiring of it and setting the pills aside anymore, so once a week, I pull many bottles off of the apothecary shelves, and count them out into little daily pods.
9 in the morning. Gabapentin (twitches/cramps), riluzole (the only ALS drug), buproprion (for depression), armodafinil (for energy), citalopram (for anxiety), ranitidine (for heartburn caused by these pills), vitamin D (for missed sunshine), coconut oil (because maybe it helps, studies are out). Usually magnesium (for muscles and nerves), but I’m out of it just now.
At 2PM, another gabapentin.
When I get home, another riluzole and buproprion. Also vitamin C, iron, and a multivitamin (because you know why). Yes that is a children’s chewable. Deal with it.
At 10PM, another gabapentin.
5 of these are to deal with effects of ALS. One is to counter the effects of the drugs I take to deal with the effects of ALS. And then supplements, because my body needs all the help it can get. So many pills, and I have never calculated how much this costs me per day. Maybe I ought to. I’d probably be afraid. And then there’s the three optionals I have; cyclobenzaprine (for really bad headaches and stress tightness), lorazepam (for when I start to freak out), and zolpidem tartrate (for when I can’t sleep). I don’t take those very often. The cyclobenzaprine (flexeril) is an emergency maneuver – I’m prone to headaches and this is for when they last for days and for fucks’ sake I just want to relax and sleep. The lorazepam (ativan) is usually taken as a preventative when I am going in to a stressful situation (why hello, legal paperwork regarding my death) or when I have panic attacks. And I’ve had the zolpidem tartrate (ambien) on prescription for ages because I sleep for SHIT. But I rarely ever take it, one bottle of 30 of them lasted me nearly 6 months. They’re also an emergency maneuver (hello, trying to fall asleep with CPAP for the first time), reactionary rather than preventative.
And there is another one out there. A possible addition to my chemical combination.
It’s called GM604. There has been a very limited trial, it’s still crazy early, but they’ve shown it to slow the progression of the disease, and even one specific trial showed a minor return of ability. As you might expect, there are a lot of people trying to get it fast-tracked through FDA approval. There’s a petition here, and a Google Group here. The company producing it is called Genervon, which sounds like something Transformers use to make new Transformers. They’ve been keeping the world aware of their progress through press releases.
At the moment, Genervon is awaiting a decision from the FDA. If they’re approved, GM604 will be available and covered by insurance. If they’re not, they must continue through Phase 3 trials, which even at an accelerated rate that the FDA has promised will still take 3 years. Which means most of the people alive with ALS today will not live to see it. There really hasn’t been enough evidence, though, that it works. There’s enough evidence to prove that they should keep studying it, and have further trials, definitely. But not enough to prove it works.
The MS/ALS news magazine, the ALS Therapy Development Institute, and The Robert Packard Center for ALS Research at Johns Hopkins (yeah I totally cut and pasted that from the website) and many many others are watching this with cautious optimism, but not committing to either endorsing or condemning the drug. They want more trials to make certain it’s safe.
“Wait and see.”
“But we QUITE LITERALLY DO NOT HAVE THE TIME TO WAIT,” says just about everyone with ALS or caretaking someone or in the Silk Circle somehow. “GIVE US THE DRUG.”
“We don’t have enough tests to prove it’s safe,” says the FDA.
“What’s it gonna do,” ALS peeps say, “kill us!?”
And so the world waits. Maybe this is a miracle drug. It’s certainly not a cure, but it may be a substantial step.
Next stop: someone stealing the formula from Genervon and producing it in Mexico. Cue many, many ALS peeps taking vacations in Mexico. Because they just want to live awhile longer and will risk anything to get it. Their life is literally on the line.
I don’t know how I feel about it either way, to be honest. My progression might be slow enough that I’ll live to see the results of that trial. But I also fully identify with wanting to take a chance, if it means more time. More ability. More quality of shortened life. I’ve already said I would participate in trials, and I meant it. If I can create clinical data for this drug by taking it and checking in with doctors, sign me up. If it kills me faster, well, now you have a data point. And if it doesn’t, you also have a data point. From a medical trial standpoint, you win either way. From my standpoint, I might come out better than I went in. Or I might die, which I was going to do anyway. I definitely want to see more testing. Either controlled by the FDA or released into the wild and see what happens.
I’m excited that there is SOMETHING happening, in any case. Even if it’s potentially one more pill in my cases.
Overwhelmed. In the BEST of ways.
I’ve gone on and on before about how grateful I am for the support I’ve gotten, how much I appreciate the support I’ve been given, how blown away at the love I’ve been shown. It’s probably become a little bit tiresome.
Well, suck it. There’s a lot more coming.
I admit I totally got press-ganged into doing the Walk in the first place. The Veterans Resource Group had a table in the cafe at work. I stopped by to chat, and met another person who ALSO had ALS for the first time. (I’ve met a fair few since then. We’re a small crew, but we run – or hobble or ride – in the same circles.) Part of the table’s purpose, besides awareness, was to recruit people for the Walk to Defeat ALS. “You should form a team,” I was told. “I bet you’d get a lot of support.”
I was of two opinions on that. On the one hand, it’s asking for something. I’m not good at that. On the other hand, a tiny irrational fear, ‘what if I form a team and no one shows up?’ While I was debating this in my head, a coworker walked up to the table to see what I was up to.
“Vashti’s making a walk team, do you want to join her?”
He looked at me, “You are?”
“I…uh. Apparently!”
And that’s how it started. I put up a poster outside my cube, I wore the red wristband, I talked openly and honestly about the diagnosis when I was asked, but I felt really weird about asking my friends to come over in support of me. I caved and asked my friends to help me name the team at least. We had a lot of really good suggestions, but in the end, The Godzilla Squad won out. On the 16th, I posted my team link.
On the 17th of August – the next DAY, for those of you playing at home – I was at 17 members and over $1000 raised.
To say I was overwhelmed is a gross understatement. So, fun fact! I’d never cried for joy before. I always thought it would be kind of cool if something like that happened to me, but I am not sentimental in the right ways, I guess, so it never happened. Until then.
The Ice Bucket Challenge gained serious momentum, and so did my team. On the 26th, I was at $3k and 26 people. A dear friend of mine in Sacramento also started a team in my name, Team Dinsdale. We met online waaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyy back in the day, before the Internet was a thing, when you had to dial directly in to someone’s computer and leave messages on a digital bulletin board. In the BBS days, my first handle was Dinsdale.
Life continued its usual frantic pace, there was a lot happening, and before I knew it, it was the final weekend. I had four people staying at my house to attend, and one flew in from Sacramento to be here for me. I was spoiled absolutely ROTTEN that weekend, with homemade Ethiopian food of amazingness, fancyface ice cream and donuts for dessert, and the best company a girl could ever ask for.
And then, Walk Day. This is my team:
Amazing people, every one.
We gathered in a spot that was strategic and awesome until the live band started playing. Right. Bloody. There. But we were VERY easily distinguishable in the crowd with the hoodies (OMG SO AMAZING LEENDAH I LOVE YOU) and Danielle, my main babe, had printed out the kitten-vs-Godzilla picture I’d been using for my Walk page, and attached them to an umbrella. And Matt. Oh my golly Matt. He had commissioned a mighty cape of DOOM and a head cover for his staff:
IS THAT NOT AWESOME.
Yes of course it is, don’t even bother answering.
There were a LOT of people there. Oh my god so many. I’m really glad I had my team around me so I was constantly distracted by OH MY GOD HI I HAVEN’T SEEN YOU IN FOREVER instead of ..holy crap I am in the biggest of big crowds and this sucks. We borrowed wheelchairs,Danielle and I, because I can walk a mile, but it sucks, and I think three is out of the question. Danielle had to borrow one because her foot is borked and it hurts her a lot to be on her feet at ALL and walking three miles is similarly out of the question.
It was a FANTASTIC walk. Well. Roll. I got pushed. The chair was surprisingly easy to wheel myself around in, but I had a lot of people willing to help me out. There’d been cold and rain suddenly, but it cleared up in time to be LOVELY for the walk day. Even a little too warm to wear the hoodies all day, for they were made of fleece and are SO COMFY AND WARM but maybe not the best when standing for a while in direct sunlight. Megan was the smart one, she held the umbrella. Some surprise faces showed up – I didn’t expect my older brother there, he told me he had to work but then didn’t have to! – and met a couple new friend-of-friend faces and did not at ALL have time to introduce everybody to everybody. We walked a really pleasant stroll along the waterfront, and groups connected and drifted as we walked.
We finished, exultant, and some of us stayed for a picnic, and some of us had to get back on the road.
I am so. so. so incredibly grateful. I am grateful to everyone who came. Everyone who couldn’t come but donated. Everyone who couldn’t come OR donate, but thought about me.
In the end, my team was 49 members strong, more than 35 of whom showed up to walk, and $5460 raised.
I’ve always strived to be the kind of person someone would care deeply about, and like having around. I …I guess I managed that, if the support and love I’ve been shown is ANY kind of indicator.
I love you all. You’re amazing and the world is lucky to have you in it.
Speaking of cards!! You may remember a conversation I had with my dear friend Megan about playing the “I’m dying” card, and she decided to needed to make me actual cards with various demands.
GUESS WHAT.
SHE MADE ME THE CARDS.
She and her fantastic husband Colin actually made me the cards. They are a physical thing. They are sparkly embossed and amazing. They ALSO gave me the Jack Skellington and Oogie Boogie figurines you see (and I heart them SO HARD) and the black heart decoration which does not at ALL show up in this picture. But it is soft and awesome.
Megan is one of the most thoughtful people I know. She once made me a little box of lip cutouts that she’d kissed with lipstick on, for when I need smooches and she is not there to give them. I can’t tell you how amazing she is. Her husband Colin, who I’ve known just as long, is also amazing and full of love. He is the perfect partner in crime for her and I love them more than I can ever possibly tell you.
And THIS, THIS is how I survive with a smile. I am orbited by planets of awesome, and the pull of their gravity keeps me from collapsing in on myself.
I love these cards and I am looking forward to the looks on people’s faces when I actually use them. I love the people who made them. I love the people who gave suggestions for them. I love that I have such amazing people in my life. I love that my diagnosis has shown me exactly how loved I am, and how completely I am surrounded by the brightest and best people in the universe.
I love my life, ALS and all.
Longer post to come. But I am so, so grateful to everyone that came out to show me love and support today. So grateful to those that could not but wanted to. So grateful to everyone everywhere who ever gave a shit about another human being. I am so glad to be alive and in such excellent company.
I am so fucking lucky.
When I get up in the morning, once I’ve managed to drag my ass out of bed (NOoooooo sleep is my favorite hobby), this is what I have for breakfast. 8 pills and enough juice to wash ’em down. 
And then once I get to work, I have Second Breakfast! 
George Carlin wrote in one of his books, “The sicker you get, the harder it is to remember if you took your medicine.” I’m finding it’s truer (more true? Truthier?) than I figured when I first read it. With the sixteen pills I take a day come rituals and reminders. You can’t just take some meds and be done with it. They all have their own rules and regulations and side effects. I have to take Riluzole on an empty stomach, it is very specific: “One hour before or two hours after eating”. And then prednisone has to be taken with food. I have to take them both in the morning, so I have to create a behavior that takes those rules into consideration. I take the Riluzole along with everything else in the morning (so it’s not technically an empty stomach, sure, but pills aren’t food, even if the dinosaur multi and the vitamin C ARE chewable). It takes me about an hour to get to work, so by the time I get in, I can take the prednisone. So I have something to eat and then swallow a couple pills. I have a reminder set at 2PM to take my second dose of gabapentin. And then another at 4:30 to take the other Riluzole, so that an hour’s gone by when I get home and start thinking about dinner. When I get home, another three pills wait for me – the second daily dose of buproprion and ranitidine, and the magnesium supplement. At ten PM, another alarm goes off on my phone and I take the day’s final gabapentin.
Six appointments a day. For medicine.
Thank the merciful LORD ABOVE for technology. I don’t know how people did this before phone alerts. I’ve forgotten to brush my teeth some mornings, how the hell am I supposed to be able to remember at what times to take what? So I rely on my phone’s alarm function and one of those stupid little day-of-the-week pill boxes with night and day dose rows. Once a week, I tip the right pills in the right boxes, and then just empty the right one into my hand when I head downstairs to work and swallow them before I leave. And then there’s three bottles of pills in my drawer at work, to be accessed at the right time. I have pills EVERYWHERE. And I should have a small stash of those three pills in my bag, in case I go somewhere on a weekend. Again, a George Carlin quote. “Now you’ve got shit all over the WORRRRLD!”
The sicker I get, the more pills I’m going to have to take.
The sicker I get, the harder it is going to be to remember if I took my medicine.
It’s an obstacle I’ll overcome when I get to it. I’ll have to. At least my phone isn’t affected by all of this – the sicker I get, my phone don’t GIVE a shit – so as long as that works, I’m set. …As long as I remember to take it with me. These rituals and reminders are part of my life now, and that’s okay. It’s not bad, just different. Just one more habit I have to form, one more shift in my lifestyle. And someday I might have a feeding tube, so I won’t even have to swallow the little fuckers. Just bloop bloop bloop, in they go.
As long as I remember to have my phone, to remind me take them.
The top shelf is either decorative bottles or perfume. Because fuck yeah, lovely smells. Kristy, you were EXACTLY right; Cost Plus had precisely what I had in mind. Thank you! It’s going to be AWESOME when all of the bottles are labeled and the cabinet painted/stained.
I got my braces today! These AFOs (ankle/foot orthotics) make walking SO SO SO much easier. All the fashionable Wicked Witches of the East are wearing them this year. I’m going to make leather straps for them, though, because the crunchy crunch of the Velcro is I walk is driving me nuts.
