http://azurelunatic.tumblr.com/post/155137530202/clue-ambassador-stories-pcos -- with a few extra details edited in.

If you have been diagnosed with PCOS, please follow up about annoying symptoms like extra heavy periods and changes in discharge! ( Backstory. )

I had vaginal brachytherapy for the radiation follow-up, which was essentially three sessions, each consisting of an hour or so of boring being still, followed by ten minutes of also boring being still with a danger dildo. There were minimal side effects.

( Details. )

I got an appointment for Tuesday the 16th to make sure that my incisions were not infected. I learned that I didn't need to take my entire top off for these things if it was loose, that the incisions were not infected, that they weren't sure which surgical tape they'd used, but whatever it was, I shouldn't use it again.

They were claiming it was the adhesive. I disregarded the precised details of this claim, as the irritation which could be traced to the tape was only at the top and bottom edges of where the tape was and not the sides or the entire area covered by the tape. Therefore it must have been something in the cut edge, and not in the bottom layer of adhesive or in the bound edge.

I got an internal exam, where they peered at the stitches. The first speculum didn't let them see properly, so a second one was brought out. I had my typical reaction to pelvic exams, with a bonus former-cervical-area discomfort, as they'd disarranged the area just a bit. (Plus the bad reaction to overdoing things had annoyed it on Saturday night.)

They discussed the lab results. This is perhaps not the conversation to be having while wearing a shirt and an exam drape over your lower half. They discussed the general type of follow-up appointment I'll be needing.

I used the iPad to "scan"-and-email the lab results to the top recipient on my needs-updates list. I called norabombay and left a message.

Chatted with people.

Went to dinner with Purple (as it was a Tuesday, and I had warned him that I might need human company for after) and had various terrible conversation. (He is terrible, and should feel terrific.) We looked over the diagnosis together. I ... may have cold-spider-ed at him pretty hard. (He may have also held on to me quite a bit.) He also made terrible, terrible jokes. I told him about my typical reaction to pelvic exams, and how that at least had not been substantially changed by the operation. More terrible jokes.

I was Feeling Not Quite The Thing into the afternoon, and fell over for a nap sufficiently substantial that I had nearly no time to run the errands I'd planned to. I was going to meet up with Guide Dog Aunt for a movie this evening. (Wednesdays are no good: she has Boat that night. Boat is her granddog. Boat has enough German Shepherd to be a terror.)

I started having what may have been hot flashes over the weekend. Small ones. (Mumble) did the responsible-and-helpful thing (genuinely) and poked me to poke the doctor's office about it. I emailed. (They called me at fuck o'clock on Monday morning, left a voicemail saying I should call them, but just in case because I'd said that the phone was "hard" -- I'd said that the phone was the worst way for contact, in fact -- that they'd email too.) Their return email said that I should take my temperature twice a day, and if anything hit above 100F, to take my temperature an hour later, and call them immediately if it went over that.

FRIEND NURSE, I ASKED YOU ABOUT HOT FLASHES. THIS IS THE FEVER INFORMATION YOU HAVE GIVEN ME.

Also, since I haven't had a child living with me in ... ages, I did not in fact have a functional thermometer.

It turns out that iPods do not like playlists with All The Stuff on it. And that turning off podcast syncing will in fact empty the iPod of all podcasts. This means that re-syncing takes about an hour, if it's the old-style thing and you've got about 5-6 gigs of audio to get back on the thing.

So just as my aunt was finding a parking space, I rolled in with my new thermometer and some cold groceries to put away. We then zipped off to the library to find some movies of mutual interest.

On the way, I gave her the update on the Latest Information On My Social Life. This included a super awkward conversation about a delicate topic, lasting basically until we got through the library doors, and commencing again once we left. *facepalm* Family, gentlefolks. Honesty can be helpful. Honesty can also be utterly embarrassing.

I had not, in fact, seen Pride and Prejudice, though I have certainly read the book. Guide Dog Aunt thinks Matthew Macfadyen resembles a young Dylan Moran, and I can see the resemblance.

IRC on the iPad, and a keyboard in my pocket, kept me moderately chatty with the usual suspect(s) during quieter moments of the movie.

The house is in moderate chaos. The solar panels are on the roof; tomorrow's the day when all the electricity gets shut off in order to hook those in. (I registered a charger for some electric vehicle or other. I think Woodworking Uncle may have a new toy.) Guide Dog Aunt's kitchen is getting renovated hardcore. There are boxed-up appliances shoved in the parlor, and the two big chairs have been replaced by something a little less murderous on the back.

As I headed out, I saw a familiar black-and-white striped rump and tail disappearing under the porch. My aunt had thought that the underside of the house had been rendered sufficiently inaccessible to skunk-kind. Apparently not. And she's got Boat (the shepherd with no chill) tomorrow. Fortunately she's got about a gallon of skunk-wash on hand...

Next doctor's appointment is Tuesday morning, in Oakland. quartzpebble plans to meet me there, for backup.

The original of this was written on Thursday, August 4th, after I got home from the hospital, and sent to a selection of friends and family. I have redacted some bits, added other bits, and corrected some details.

I am settled in back at home, and have been up and walking around, sitting up at the computer, and napping. I am sore, but not more than is reasonable. I have a dotted line of five 4x2" bandages across the middle of my abdomen, and a not-so-mysterious sore spot where my cervix used to be. There are marks of adhesive tape on my hands and arms and basically everywhere which I am slowly scrubbing off with alcohol wipes, and I'm still discovering little stick-on snaps from the monitoring leads that they didn't entirely remove after I came out of surgery.

I'm doing okay and will hear more back from the doctor in about a week, and I have a follow-up appointment for the 22nd. They think they got everything of concern out with the uterus, tubes, and ovaries, but they will follow up to make sure. I should be able to resume normal activities in 6-8 weeks. I probably shouldn't be driving for several more days, but I've been sitting up and walking around without any particularly large amount of pain for the past 6 hours, so I may be ready for that sooner than I initially thought. [I wound up driving on Sunday.]


The long version follows.

( Read more... )

Got the uterus (and tubes, and ovaries) out yesterday. Spent the night at the hospital.

Got home today just after noonish, and shortly thereafter fell over for a much-needed nap.

Pain is mostly being covered, and I've been sitting up and walking around. Tomorrow I may venture further afield. No driving for a bit yet, though.

I'm very happy to be rid of my uterus. Of particular note: #bloodcannon is not happening anymore!

I may post a more detailed version in a while.

In the battle between Robots and Azz's uterus, the robot side emerges
victorious. The uterus and it's fellow travelers- Fallopian tubes and the
like are removed.

Due to medical waste laws, the organs will not be bedazzled and mounted as
trophies, nor will they be given a proper pagan funeral. This is sad,
because we all know that if anyone was to bedazzle a defeated enemy and
cover it with blinky led lights, it would be Azz. They have a well known
gift for the sparkly.

Azz is hitting recovery right about now, and they should be pretty out of
it for the rest of the night. I will update on their condition as I get
updates.

/norabombay

So as I mentioned a while back, I'd had an IUD placed and had an endometrial biopsy. The results came back -- abnormal, which is the lowest of the five levels of Shit Be Wack, y0. The phrasing on that, by the way, is interesting; there are various levels of panic, in a way that indicates that even in the face of a patient's body rebelling and trying to kill them, doctors still have a bit of a sense of humor. Sometimes that's all you've got.

After a very short time, the sort of timeframe that makes you wonder whether you're having emergency surgery or whether Kaiser's just been greasing your roller skates before sending you down Arch Street, it turns out I'm getting a hysterectomy, tubes and ovaries and all. They'll send it to Pathology while I'm out, and will take out some lymph nodes if they find anything bad enough. It was the roller skates, after all: they're not expecting anything too bad, but there's always that concern.

It's planned to be laparoscopic, with robots; the abdominal incisions should be very small.

I should be awake sometime in the evening, if not online; I should be home sometime Thursday, although scarce while I recover enough to actually sit at the computer.

Thanks to post-via-email, two of my friends have post-only access to my journal. They cannot read any of your locked entries, although with the post-via-email PIN and a T.A.R.D.I.S. they could probably gain access to an old workplace of mine. The plan is that ryan will email the small list of friends and family who need immediate updates, and then my friends with the keys will update DW at their discretion.

I expect that my own replies to stuff will be substantially delayed on account of, you know, hysterectomy.

(Purple, and other parties, have been excellent throughout all this, and tolerated my increasingly pathetic requests to them for hugs with good grace.)

Been a while since a proper update! This is not quite a proper update, but at least it's substantial?


"I found whistles, maracas, 5 hour energy, coffee mugs, headphones, and a cellphone charger, but I did not find the other webcam."


Faceblindness! It's fun for the whole family! I'm not sure if I've properly told the "some woman" story about my faceblindness on DW as yet, but it's become my go-to story for "no, really, Rev. Lunatic is faceblind" though to be fair, Mama says that it took seeing Tay walk (well, bounce) in the airport to recognize her, since she's changed a lot.

However, in compensation, I have a small non-face-related superpower. I had a really fun encounter in the past year-ish where lb showed me some photos from his mid-90s college crew, and I was able to identify lb in a group photo where lb himself wasn't quite sure which of two people he was. This was based on my knowledge of how lb stands, and another photo which established what lb was wearing. ( Read more... )

I cannot perform this party trick with just anyone, but I can usually spot Purple in very large group shots if I know vaguely where he was in the crowd. Sometimes it's based on a sneaker. (Purple wears white sneakers that trend increasingly towards grey and ragged until he gets replacements. He also lounges ostentatiously, Kirklike/catlike. I find both somewhat endearing, but I would.)


One of my forms of comfortgoogling is chicken pictures. Current small pet peeve: when any old picture of a hen on a nest is used to illustrate "broody". Broody is a very specific state of chicken, generally characterized by unwillingness to get off the nest and hoard eggs, and sit there until the chicks hatch. Broodies are cranky, will cut you, have flattened themselves on the nests with wings slightly out away from their sides, have their necks pulled way down into their feathers and their tails raised so usually the tail-bump is higher than the head. They make a characteristic rhythmic "clook ... clook ... clook ..." noise (similar to the syllable of the rapid "buk-buk-buk" tidbitting noise but more spaced out, and more relaxed than any part of the "buk-buk-buk-buk-ba-DAWK-et!" alarm call which often follows egg-laying, fox sighting, bush rustling, or Disturbance in the Force). If you try to steal their eggs, they will growl/roar and also try and cut you.


Fishie is finishing up sophomore year at college. (OMG, how time flies.) She'll be 20 soon. She's majoring in computer science now, and doing things like acing the midterm where the median grade was ... not super great. The teacher for that class will be pleased to write her an academic recommendation, and says that she'll be able to do anything she puts her mind to. I am so proud of her. She works so hard, and she's getting so much better at picking her battles. She has been figuring out her summer activities: after finals, she goes to her internship Down South. After that she may wind up going to see her grandma, and after that, spending time with a friend in San Diego.

The concept of "like 5, 6 nice" has entered our dialogues because Fishie's Terrible Mom #yamappendix would make a big deal like "I AM BEING THE NICEST PERSON EVARRRR BECAUSE I LOVE YOU SO MUCH" when doing normal and expected things. So when Fishie encounters people who are being genuinely kind, she is equally floored by small kindnesses that don't inconvenience others, and big kindnesses which do inconvenience others. It's all pegged at like 10 nice for her, when someone with a scale that isn't at "Mommy is an abusive fuckwad ( Read more... )" might view it as maybe a 3,4 nice.


For those who don't dwell anywhere near Silly Valley and also aren't tapped in to the latest tech tat, "hoverboards" have been A Thing for a while. It used to be that there was just the one dude at work who rode one around, and he was proficient and discreet except for how he was going pretty fast and kind of gliding. Now, of course, many tech bros with more money than sense either have one of their own, or have access to one. Thus it was that one dude who I IRC with wound up in the ER one fine evening after doing a wipeout on his hoverboard while at work. In a subsequent all-hands at his company, there was a safety admonishment about unwise hoverboard usage.
Tech Bro 1: "haha bet I know what happened."
Tech Bro 2: "hahah yeah I heard about that."
Tech Bro 1: "sucks that K had to go to the ER tho."
Tech Bro 2: "wait, K had a wipeout too? I was talking about X."
Tech Bro 1: "Oh, what happened with X?"
Multiple hoverboard collisions in one week: not a good thing.


One of the best days of my young life was the day my father brought home a label-maker. It was a about the size of a large typewriter. I recall it having a few large font wheels. We started labeling everything. We kids dubbed it "The Advance", because it had a large key labeled "Advance" in place of an Enter/Return key. The key fed blank tape.
One of the most tragic and terrifying days of my young life was the day when the label-maker caught on fire. I saw black smoke rising up out of it, and immediately began screaming and jumping up and down. Fortunately it was winter. This meant that the appropriate response, which my dad immediately took, was to unplug it, pick it up (it was smoking, not flaming) and hurl it out the front door into a convenient snowbank.
After that we didn't have a label-maker anymore.


"I feel like both of these perspectives are valid, but they're not compatible."


Being around a whole whackton of other non-binary-gendered folks has helped me focus my gender identity feels some. It looks like the identity that best fits is agender. Non-male-identified, though sometimes I present masc and sometimes I present High Soft Femme. Though maintaining High Femme feels kind of like the thing where you're clamping down in the vain hope that you won't bleed all over everything before you get to a bathroom with supplies.

"... a bit of a radfem (without the skateboard)" (said of a radical feminist who might not so much be the "raaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaadical, duuuuuuuude!" kind)


Hard problems in gender, privacy, and community safety: where is the line between outing and community safety, when you happen to know that someone who has Caused Problems Before is in a community [a different one] under an identity that is at least slightly discontinuous with their old one, and the new identity is tied to a gender marker change (and the old identity is really most sincerely dead)? (Tentative answer: take it case by case and hope you get it right.)


Once upon a time, Reverend Lunatic gave themselves hiccups as the result of an orgasm. Once not that long ago ... ( Read more... )


I have started watching the Great British Bake-Off, finally. It is so charming! I appreciate that all the contestants and guests are treated respectfully by the editing and camera, in a way that US television rarely does. And it's just so amazingly sweet!


Now that the conference is wrapping up, I'm down to just job-searching with a side of wrap-up work, not job-searching AND ALL THE CONFERENCE. This makes more time to tidy. Last fall, I'd decided to re-arrange my apartment. It got halted halfway through, and the result was nothing short of chaotic (though better arranged for certain things like sleep and computer). I decided that enough was enough, and I would work slowly but steadily in the direction of making it guest-appropriate. It's been coming along nicely, though it still is like a bit of a wacky game of 2048, where you have to calculate and carefully merge two things into the same space without upsetting anything else or making anything important too hard to reach quickly. This has resulted in random acts of mending, because part of this is seeing problems and fixing them.


My favorite hair ornament is a little basket of wires that's secured with two long metal spikes with glass knobs at the ends. Unfortunately, our relative heights are such that when I wear it, I spike Purple in the face with it when he hugs me goodnight. I have determined that I will seek alternate updo-securement, and have located a thing or two which should work better. Purple was a little "but you didn't have to -- it didn't draw *blood*!" when I showed him. :>

Saturday: woke up at a surprisingly early hour for me, then didn't nap.

Sunday: went with a burrito-railgun group to dinner, and met all sorts of delightful people in person. Then did laundry.

Today: work, which went later than anticipated as Purple was face-down in Getting Computers To Talk To Themselves while I was still clearing old stuff out of my inbox.

Lunch was pleasant, and involved a substantial amount of spirited agreement between a UX minion, a UI guy, and an engineer with Opinions about UX.

Purple demonstrated the dead fish handshake to me, to much hilarity.


Meds:
Turns out that the new lineup gives me side effects that *nearly exactly mimic* getting bell peppered, which of course pokes at a phobia to boot.
* Side effects Thursday, first day of increased dose; thought it was hidden bell pepper
* Cafe said no bell pepper; side effects Friday also in the same fashion; realized it had to be meds
* not noticed Saturday
* noticed Sunday to my annoyance
* very carefully avoided today

Bloodcannon:
* #bloodcannon
* BLOODCANNON

Sunday was not a great day in the department of menstruation. Specifically, it all decided to come out at a great rate. After I got to sleep from the whole electrical fire, I had to get up and ditch blood regularly. Sunday was a quiet day. Then I went to bed early and was more or less asleep for thirteen hours.

At lunch, I came to the gentle realization that one of the reasons that I had been so nervous about telling Darkside that [birthname] is not really one that I answer to anymore, is because I was not allowed to have preferences of my own around Shawn. Purple saw the dawning horror on my face and said many sweetly vicious things that prompted me to smile mistily and press paired fingers against his sleeve. norabombay mentioned, later, that a name change is a significant thing that comes with a nonzero chance of friends and family rejecting it, even people who ought to be close and ought to know better. But yeah, Shawn's shadow looms longer than previously thought.

lb saw a familiar face on campus, in the company of a recruiter.

My phone's battery has been not great. Alas.

The Stage Manager left me a donation toward my candy dish.

Today was one of those days where it seemed like all I did was talk with helpdesk. I also tried to do beta on some helpdesk stuff, but not all of the pieces were in order. Then I tried to put some stuff in the wiki, only to find that the wiki was broken. So I had to call helpdesk again.

The white sour balls may be possibly pear-flavored, Purple said.

He'd come in late enough to have a parking spot of opportunity. Mine was further down the same row, at the other end. We chatted for a while. My eyeshadow included some glitter, which had been catching the light and reflecting off my glasses, causing slight distraction. This was not a light source Purple would have guessed. He hugged me gently but thoroughly and we split. Tomorrow night is the deadline for some papers that have to be graded. He has a couple left.

I did get a good chat in with Nora, through the commute and into the grocery store. Then I came home and started laundry and cooked dinner and read some internet.