I remember damage
Feb. 4th, 2023 03:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gwynA lot has happened since the last time I posted. None of it especially great. I will start with the better stuff, though. I have been watching a lot of things on TV because I have HBO, Showtime, and Paramount Plus for a short time, so have been catching up on the buzzy HBO shows and the Trek shows on P+, most of which I've been a bit meh about, but am close to finishing Picard to get ready for its third season. Recently I watched Station Eleven to go along with my other post-apocalypse show, The Last of Us. If you'd told me I was going to get into a fucking zombie show based on a fucking video game (I hate video games) and then fall head over heels for a Nick Offerman character, I would have sneered at you, but here we are. I started watching TLOU for Pedro Pascal, found out there was bonus Anna Torv, and then the third episode wrecked me so much and I loved it so much and I just...well, as I said, here we are.
I knew the show would be better than average because Craig Mazin was the showrunner, and while sometimes he irks me, he created and wrote the magnificent Chernobyl, so he gets a lot of passes from me. The show was...okay, and I sort of half paid attention to it for Pedro, but then they killed off Anna's character and I was like, welp, I might keep watching but I sure as hell am not keeping HBO around just to see it end. But then they went and ran the episode from last Sunday, Long Long Time, and what the actual fuck was that?
This tender, lovely, mini-movie bookended by Joel and Ellie and centering survivalist Bill, played by Offerman, and nice gay guy Frank, played by Murray Bartlett, that's what. They fuckin' made me cry, and I don't cry over TV shows hardly ever! A lot of people keep talking about it being sad, and yes, it's sad in that the characters make the choice to die, but it's also one of the most hopeful and beautiful and just...triumphant endings I've ever seen in a post-apocalypse show--they chose to go out together, they chose their ending, and they made a wonderful life together in the midst of a nightmare and found each other in the most extraordinary circumstances and just...ugh, god it was so incredible. These two queer men found each other, and found love, and one of them was closeted and closed off and misanthropic and yet he opened himself up to another one, and they built a beautiful life and they died at an old age together.
Anyway, there's not a lot of zombie crap in the episode and if you're worried about watching it, and jump scares, etc., I would happily tell you when to FF or look away if you are curious to watch it. If for nothing else, the line "Not today, you New World Order jackboot fucks" is worth it alone. Ugh, Bill + Frank 4ever
And then there was Station Eleven, which is the eerily prescient story of a pandemic that starts in 2020 and kills billions of people. I didn't read the book (I don't really get to read much of anything that isn't work related anymore), and I understand it has some differences, of course, but I would actually love to talk about it (book or show, I do not care about "spoilers" with the book) with anyone else. No one I know has watched it, and I was super dubious about it--I promised my BFF I'd watch it because he adored both the show and the book, but when I talked to him earlier this week, I was...not sure I wanted to stick with it. I was super confused by the different characters and couldn't see how they were going to relate to one another, I found the modern-day parts after the apocalypse annoying and I didn't especially like grown-up Kirsten or really any of the characters, and the pandemic setting was my favorite part but some of it was devoted to characters I kind of couldn't stand, plus my favorite character, Jeevan, literally disappeared partway through and I didn't know if he was coming back.
But wow, I have to give them credit, they pulled all the different threads together and you see the whole tapestry and it's beautiful. When we see what happened to Jeevan and why he disappeared, it's so moving and lovely and heartaching, and then when he and Kirsten are reunited, OMG the feels. I wish more than anything Jeevan's brother Frank could have survived, too, but just knowing that he had found a calling as a doctor and found love and then found Kirsten again, so he knew he hadn't failed her, was just...wow. I'm still a bit unhappy about creepy fucker Tyler getting a free pass after kidnapping children and blowing some of them up, but I guess I'll just have to live with that. Miranda was a bit of a cipher to me, but Danielle Deadwyler is such a good actress that I was willing to see where she went despite the inscrutability, and then that ending, where we find out she was responsible for keeping all those infected people on the plane...that's the kind of amazing storytelling I love.
Anyway, it's been nice to have stuff to watch, because life is pretty scary right now.
I mentioned way back that I was having really terrible pain (like 8 or 9 on the pain scale) in my shoulder and sometimes my neck. I started going to physical therapy a couple times a week and that has helped, but my PT really wanted to have me see someone like a spine specialist or something, and everything was complicated by the fact that my provider left the practice in November, and most of the PAs or MDs I was interested in weren't taking new patients, and their one spine doctor there didn't do anything for me when I saw her years ago for my lower spine. Also, it was Christmas, but there was one day where things were so bad I was like "I need to see someone, anyone." I did finally get an appointment with a DO, and she was okay, but she really wanted me to get an x-ray and then see a sports medicine doctor.
I saw him in early January and he was talking to me about the x-rays looking like "cervical facet arthropathy" which I guess is basically arthritis in the facet joints on the right side of my neck. But he wanted a detailed bone scan to see what was happening in the actual vertebrae, and I had that on Wednesday. It's not the bone scan they give you when you're a menopausal old lady--this one (bone scintigraphy) involves an injection of radioactive stuff and then you go kill time for three hours and then you lie motionless on a flatbed scanner for an hour. It's not...fun, but at least the person who does the scans was super nice and it was on Capitol Hill, so I got to wander around one of my fave areas I haven't been to in years, and I met up with my friend and we went to IHOP (you can eat or drink whatever, you just have to let the radioactive material have enough time to get into your bones).
On Thursday afternoon I got a message saying there was a new test result in MyChart, and it was pretty terrifying. I don't even know what kind of a sociopath dumps something like that in someone's mailbox, essentially, without contextualizing it or explaining the medical jargon, and without letting the medical provider talk to you first. It was just insanely cruel. The report essentially said something I didn't understand and "metasteses" and "myeloma." So I know enough to know that was very double plus ungood, and googled the rest, and it was basically saying that my neck was lit up with potential multiple myeloma, which I guess is bone marrow cancer. There is no cure--there's treatment, but no cure.
Since it was the end of the day, I figured no one was going to be contacting me to discuss this, so I basically wandered around the house being kind of dumbstruck, and my phone was charging in the office while I was lying on the couch, trying to take this in, and I missed the call from Dr. Chung, the rehabilitative medicine guy who ordered the scan. He left a message--I guess he was on vacation this week, poor guy, so I'm sure he was feeling pretty awful about having to talk to me about this. I spent most of the night thinking about all the shit I'd been reading about multiple myeloma, plus I popped my jaw out of alignment and that hurt a fucking lot, and I still can't get it to go back in, which gave me an even worse headache.
I connected with Dr. Chung in the morning, fortunately--his voicemail mentioned seeing a hematology oncologist, and he said he was going to have his office set up an appointment for that and one for an MRI so they can see what the soft tissues look like. He said that the bone scans are not a good tool for diagnosing that kind of illness, and that it might mean that's typical of what you'd see in a scan for someone who does have multiple myeloma but you have to use other means to actually diagnose that. (All of which sound painful.) He was telling me that it's not a definitive statement that I have cancer, just that the technician who reads the bone scans is indicating that's what it could potentially be and why I'm having this pain. He stressed that it could still mean something else along the lines of damage to the joints.
So I have an appointment with a hematology oncologist on the 15th, and am waiting to hear from the MRI people, and that's where I am right now, I guess. This is all really frightening and upsetting--I am not afraid to die, I am perfectly ready to go and the only thing that really keeps me here is mostly my kitty--but I've seen what treatment is like, and I know what this sort of thing can do, and I just don't want to go through the horror that my mom and sister and Sandy went through. I'm sure it's a painful and debilitating cancer if it's in your fucking bones, and when you live alone and far away from friends, dealing with all of that looks pretty fucking bleak.
None of which is helped by that fact that I have fast-growing cataracts and I can't see anything! I got a new glasses prescription in April and by end of July, I already couldn't see super well with them. Even my new computer glasses were losing some of their utility, and my eye doc was like "welp, those beginnings of cataracts I mentioned three months ago are now bad enough that you can't see the top line on the chart, where before you could see the second from the bottom." So I have to get cataract surgery, which terrifies me beyond words, and I was starting to save up and I got a different health plan so that maybe I could have some of it paid for, but then this whole shoulder/neck thing started and all my money started vanishing to PT. (I will spare you the nightmare story about a neat device I was getting for cervical traction and the unexpected ridiculous expense of that.) I'm deeply afraid of anything involving my vision, despite knowing that millions of people do this all the time and my doc having some places he has great faith in, etc.
Plus I'm really overwhelmed by the logistics (I live alone, I have an arthritic old cat I have to feed and clean a box for but you're not supposed to bend, how will I drive with one eye still needing a horrendously bad glasses prescription, etc.) but then this whole bone scan thing above has sent me into a tailspin. If I'm going to do some kind of treatment, assuming I get the bad diagnosis, I would like to at least maybe be able to see while I'm in the death process? But I don't know how something like that could even work--chemo and surgery and all that shit. So obviously the vision would take a back seat. But it's such a drag--I want to be able to go to movies withminim_calibre, but I have such trouble driving in the wet darkness that is Seattle. I can't stop thinking about it and churning everything over in my mind, even though I know it does no good. Man, wan't it enough to have colon cancer and my face getting carved up with skin cancers and just having a bad shoulder and generally exceeding my design parameters by being tall?
All of this feels way too flaily. I suppose that's why I'm so caught up in gay middle-age men romancing each other in the zombie apocalypse.
I knew the show would be better than average because Craig Mazin was the showrunner, and while sometimes he irks me, he created and wrote the magnificent Chernobyl, so he gets a lot of passes from me. The show was...okay, and I sort of half paid attention to it for Pedro, but then they killed off Anna's character and I was like, welp, I might keep watching but I sure as hell am not keeping HBO around just to see it end. But then they went and ran the episode from last Sunday, Long Long Time, and what the actual fuck was that?
This tender, lovely, mini-movie bookended by Joel and Ellie and centering survivalist Bill, played by Offerman, and nice gay guy Frank, played by Murray Bartlett, that's what. They fuckin' made me cry, and I don't cry over TV shows hardly ever! A lot of people keep talking about it being sad, and yes, it's sad in that the characters make the choice to die, but it's also one of the most hopeful and beautiful and just...triumphant endings I've ever seen in a post-apocalypse show--they chose to go out together, they chose their ending, and they made a wonderful life together in the midst of a nightmare and found each other in the most extraordinary circumstances and just...ugh, god it was so incredible. These two queer men found each other, and found love, and one of them was closeted and closed off and misanthropic and yet he opened himself up to another one, and they built a beautiful life and they died at an old age together.
Anyway, there's not a lot of zombie crap in the episode and if you're worried about watching it, and jump scares, etc., I would happily tell you when to FF or look away if you are curious to watch it. If for nothing else, the line "Not today, you New World Order jackboot fucks" is worth it alone. Ugh, Bill + Frank 4ever
And then there was Station Eleven, which is the eerily prescient story of a pandemic that starts in 2020 and kills billions of people. I didn't read the book (I don't really get to read much of anything that isn't work related anymore), and I understand it has some differences, of course, but I would actually love to talk about it (book or show, I do not care about "spoilers" with the book) with anyone else. No one I know has watched it, and I was super dubious about it--I promised my BFF I'd watch it because he adored both the show and the book, but when I talked to him earlier this week, I was...not sure I wanted to stick with it. I was super confused by the different characters and couldn't see how they were going to relate to one another, I found the modern-day parts after the apocalypse annoying and I didn't especially like grown-up Kirsten or really any of the characters, and the pandemic setting was my favorite part but some of it was devoted to characters I kind of couldn't stand, plus my favorite character, Jeevan, literally disappeared partway through and I didn't know if he was coming back.
But wow, I have to give them credit, they pulled all the different threads together and you see the whole tapestry and it's beautiful. When we see what happened to Jeevan and why he disappeared, it's so moving and lovely and heartaching, and then when he and Kirsten are reunited, OMG the feels. I wish more than anything Jeevan's brother Frank could have survived, too, but just knowing that he had found a calling as a doctor and found love and then found Kirsten again, so he knew he hadn't failed her, was just...wow. I'm still a bit unhappy about creepy fucker Tyler getting a free pass after kidnapping children and blowing some of them up, but I guess I'll just have to live with that. Miranda was a bit of a cipher to me, but Danielle Deadwyler is such a good actress that I was willing to see where she went despite the inscrutability, and then that ending, where we find out she was responsible for keeping all those infected people on the plane...that's the kind of amazing storytelling I love.
Anyway, it's been nice to have stuff to watch, because life is pretty scary right now.
I mentioned way back that I was having really terrible pain (like 8 or 9 on the pain scale) in my shoulder and sometimes my neck. I started going to physical therapy a couple times a week and that has helped, but my PT really wanted to have me see someone like a spine specialist or something, and everything was complicated by the fact that my provider left the practice in November, and most of the PAs or MDs I was interested in weren't taking new patients, and their one spine doctor there didn't do anything for me when I saw her years ago for my lower spine. Also, it was Christmas, but there was one day where things were so bad I was like "I need to see someone, anyone." I did finally get an appointment with a DO, and she was okay, but she really wanted me to get an x-ray and then see a sports medicine doctor.
I saw him in early January and he was talking to me about the x-rays looking like "cervical facet arthropathy" which I guess is basically arthritis in the facet joints on the right side of my neck. But he wanted a detailed bone scan to see what was happening in the actual vertebrae, and I had that on Wednesday. It's not the bone scan they give you when you're a menopausal old lady--this one (bone scintigraphy) involves an injection of radioactive stuff and then you go kill time for three hours and then you lie motionless on a flatbed scanner for an hour. It's not...fun, but at least the person who does the scans was super nice and it was on Capitol Hill, so I got to wander around one of my fave areas I haven't been to in years, and I met up with my friend and we went to IHOP (you can eat or drink whatever, you just have to let the radioactive material have enough time to get into your bones).
On Thursday afternoon I got a message saying there was a new test result in MyChart, and it was pretty terrifying. I don't even know what kind of a sociopath dumps something like that in someone's mailbox, essentially, without contextualizing it or explaining the medical jargon, and without letting the medical provider talk to you first. It was just insanely cruel. The report essentially said something I didn't understand and "metasteses" and "myeloma." So I know enough to know that was very double plus ungood, and googled the rest, and it was basically saying that my neck was lit up with potential multiple myeloma, which I guess is bone marrow cancer. There is no cure--there's treatment, but no cure.
Since it was the end of the day, I figured no one was going to be contacting me to discuss this, so I basically wandered around the house being kind of dumbstruck, and my phone was charging in the office while I was lying on the couch, trying to take this in, and I missed the call from Dr. Chung, the rehabilitative medicine guy who ordered the scan. He left a message--I guess he was on vacation this week, poor guy, so I'm sure he was feeling pretty awful about having to talk to me about this. I spent most of the night thinking about all the shit I'd been reading about multiple myeloma, plus I popped my jaw out of alignment and that hurt a fucking lot, and I still can't get it to go back in, which gave me an even worse headache.
I connected with Dr. Chung in the morning, fortunately--his voicemail mentioned seeing a hematology oncologist, and he said he was going to have his office set up an appointment for that and one for an MRI so they can see what the soft tissues look like. He said that the bone scans are not a good tool for diagnosing that kind of illness, and that it might mean that's typical of what you'd see in a scan for someone who does have multiple myeloma but you have to use other means to actually diagnose that. (All of which sound painful.) He was telling me that it's not a definitive statement that I have cancer, just that the technician who reads the bone scans is indicating that's what it could potentially be and why I'm having this pain. He stressed that it could still mean something else along the lines of damage to the joints.
So I have an appointment with a hematology oncologist on the 15th, and am waiting to hear from the MRI people, and that's where I am right now, I guess. This is all really frightening and upsetting--I am not afraid to die, I am perfectly ready to go and the only thing that really keeps me here is mostly my kitty--but I've seen what treatment is like, and I know what this sort of thing can do, and I just don't want to go through the horror that my mom and sister and Sandy went through. I'm sure it's a painful and debilitating cancer if it's in your fucking bones, and when you live alone and far away from friends, dealing with all of that looks pretty fucking bleak.
None of which is helped by that fact that I have fast-growing cataracts and I can't see anything! I got a new glasses prescription in April and by end of July, I already couldn't see super well with them. Even my new computer glasses were losing some of their utility, and my eye doc was like "welp, those beginnings of cataracts I mentioned three months ago are now bad enough that you can't see the top line on the chart, where before you could see the second from the bottom." So I have to get cataract surgery, which terrifies me beyond words, and I was starting to save up and I got a different health plan so that maybe I could have some of it paid for, but then this whole shoulder/neck thing started and all my money started vanishing to PT. (I will spare you the nightmare story about a neat device I was getting for cervical traction and the unexpected ridiculous expense of that.) I'm deeply afraid of anything involving my vision, despite knowing that millions of people do this all the time and my doc having some places he has great faith in, etc.
Plus I'm really overwhelmed by the logistics (I live alone, I have an arthritic old cat I have to feed and clean a box for but you're not supposed to bend, how will I drive with one eye still needing a horrendously bad glasses prescription, etc.) but then this whole bone scan thing above has sent me into a tailspin. If I'm going to do some kind of treatment, assuming I get the bad diagnosis, I would like to at least maybe be able to see while I'm in the death process? But I don't know how something like that could even work--chemo and surgery and all that shit. So obviously the vision would take a back seat. But it's such a drag--I want to be able to go to movies with
minim_calibre, but I have such trouble driving in the wet darkness that is Seattle. I can't stop thinking about it and churning everything over in my mind, even though I know it does no good. Man, wan't it enough to have colon cancer and my face getting carved up with skin cancers and just having a bad shoulder and generally exceeding my design parameters by being tall?All of this feels way too flaily. I suppose that's why I'm so caught up in gay middle-age men romancing each other in the zombie apocalypse.
