Spike

Teen's fever is going higher and higher. She's not sick. In fact, she's off with friends as I type and sending me screenshots of the thermometer. She could tell it was coming on and took the thermometer with her to document it as we're doing another fever diary.

We're not crazy, we're doing a fever diary.

My inner momma bear is agitated but there's nothing for me to fight. I would if I could. I'm ready to take whatever this is down. Put me in, Coach.

But how do you throat punch air and heat? How do you beat biochemistry into submission?

I emailed Infectious Disease. Maybe they know.

Ahhhh. I'm here to distract myself from fretting. I don't like the fever. I especially don't like that it's going higher. What the fuck do we do now????

Let's see. What can I natter on about?

The asthma is still contained. I do still have asthma, but I don't appear to need daily meds right now. If this holds, it'll be really cool. It'll take me at least a year to confirm it. I need to get some respiratory illnesses, go through some seasons etc... And insurance has to keep covering Ozempic.

Oh! I think I finally figured out what was different now vs. last summer. I'm finally at the full dose of Ozempic. I was still working my way up to the full dose last year. And there's apparently some research showing these GLP-1 meds help with autoimmune conditions so maybe it is all connected. Exciting stuff!

Foot/Hip/Grapefruit...all about the same and slightly flared since whatever bug went through the household. PT left me limping after every session, it ended up being a trigger for stiffness and pain. My foot has regressed quite a bit...it's gotta be Covid. Only Covid fucks my nerves like this.

And they're finding that the vaccines can cause long covid. Did you see that? I am one of those who had issues with the vaccine (although not quite the same ones as they're finding in their research, but I'd bet I'm a very small % of everyone so probably no one will look my way). I got so much blow back for talking about how the vaccine caused a lot of problems for me. People have no nuance. Having a vaccine reaction is not the same thing as being anti vax.

I don't know yet what I'm going to do about the next boosters. I don't think it's a good idea to get more vaccines but I also don't want to be unprotected, but I also can't tell that I get any protection from the vaccines anyway and whether whatever protection I may get is worth it...does the benefit outweigh the cost if the vaccines are incapacitating me for weeks or months?????? 

Some doctors have told me no, it's not worth it. But I'm going to get covid again, it's unavoidable and the risk of more severe covid worries me. I'm supposedly keeping the worst at bay with the vaccines and that's not been great. I don't want to deal with something worse!

Maybe the Novovax vaccine? Maybe that'll hit different?

Weight: My body decided to drop some weight...even before this latest bug. Why? Who the hell knows. We could say it's that I'm more active now that I'm up and about since the foot surgery, but I have all this past history of exercising like crazy and eating right that both did and did not generate weight loss. And then the history of eating like crap and doing jack shit and both losing and gaining weight. So fuck if I know!

 

I keep having this perfectionistic urge to double down on doing all the things you're 'supposed' to do to lose weight so I can crank it out and get 'r done, but then I remember that often has no ROI for me so why am I trying to kill myself again???? 

I...don't know what to do to facilitate further loss. I'm close to my initial goal and now I'm trying to figure out how much further I want to take it and if I can even make it stop. How do you control weight that's so far removed from cause and effect? When illness interrupts you constantly?

I'm just eating whatever and am active however right now, and that's kind of how I've played it the last few months. With all the family chaos on top of surgery recovery plus the hip and this last bug (which I still have some pretty bad nausea from at times and can't eat) there's just been no other option but to ride whatever wave I can catch. There is no diet, there is only survival. That, apparently, has been a brilliant diet plan but it's quite junky. It's not really how I aspire to eat.

One unanticipated problem...my clothes are getting big faster than I can wear them. I bought a swimsuit and some other new clothes for summer and stuff is already getting loose. I have a dress I wanted to wear dammit...

Gardening: I harvested peas! Yay! They were an experiment and they grew so slowly I wasn't sure anything would happen. But we had exactly 15 peas in our stir fry (before I got sick and stopped being able to eat). I only planted 6 plants so it won't yield a lot. I should get one good batch of peas shortly (around a 1/2 cup) and then they'll be done. 

I got 1/2 cup of garlic scapes from the 80% failed garlic crop. I threw them into the stir fry with my fifteen peas. Meager gardening hauls over here lol. 

My three-year-old broccoli seeds are happy af. OMG. I might grow broccoli from old ass seed! Holy shit!

And I have two heads of lettuce that look amazing and two that would rather skip school and smoke pot and never grow up. The slackers will go into a shade garden for a fall harvest (if I can keep them from bolting).

Strawberries...doing good. Got a few quarts from them which was a surprise. I really like strawberries because it's impossible for birds and rodents to clean out your whole crop. We got some, nature got some, everyone was happy. <-- That's the sweet spot of gardening, the spot where there's no stress and little disappointment. You need to plant enough for attrition in order to lower the stakes so you're not having to micromanage things to preserve a yield. But the scale that takes is a lot to manage for most things so...

Black raspberries. OMG. These are AMAZING. We've picked two quarts so far and will likely get another two. They are INCREDIBLE. Gardening is hella expensive, but this is why it's worth it. The flavors you can get from homegrown produce are breathtaking. They're so sweet, they taste like black raspberry jam. Beyond delicious. We're going to make a low sugar freezer jam and probably some muffins this week. And we'll freeze some for crepes or muffins during the winter.

Asparagus is all ferned out and looking like it had a glam up Brazilian blow out. Harvest was small this year, but I'm hoping I fixed that so next year will be better. At least I have a good system for managing the asparagus beetles now. 

Dwarf tomatoes and green beans are sprouting. Cukes are growing. The poblanos look like crap...tried transplanting them to see if that would help. Some of the flower and herb seeds are coming up finally. The potatoes and onions look good...at least the ones that decided to grow. Fruit trees are hanging in...only one bush struggling so far, that one may not make it. 

We'll get a quart or so of blueberries. The blueberries are slow growing bushes (for us at least) so while they're bursting with fruit, it's all on very tiny bushes, no big crop possible. 

Peaches are coming along. I'll get maybe 10 apples from one tree...the other had it's blossoms picked off by deer and never fruited. We'll have exactly three pears as the animals ate all the tiny baby fruit...we literally went from dozens to three. 

I've got net bags on everything now to protect it and we've added deer net fencing around the metal fencing because to keep out rabbits and other problems you need deer fencing. The metal panels we have work fine for the deer--ironically we don't need deer fencing for the deer lol. (They got the apples because the tree is outgrowing the fence...once it's taller this won't be such an issue, right now the branches are the exact right height for fuckery.)

My one tiny apple tree baby is recovering from attempted murder. This fucking asshole rabbit kept eating it every time it tried to grow and I finally put it in a five gallon bucket that takes it out of the rabbit's eye line. It's kind of interesting how height impacts risk of damage from different pests. I noticed it with the Japanese beetles too...they like taller plants and ones lower to the ground don't get infested as much. 

We got a raised bed set up that has a greenhouse cover so I can try to do more winter growing. (You actually sow the seeds for winter growing in the summer still so we needed to get that moving.) Maybe this winter I'll actually get somewhere with that lol. My attempts at cold weather gardening have all been dismal failures so far.

We're slowly getting an irrigation system set up. It's nothing professional. Probably the pros would point and laugh at us. But we've got a complicated system of garden hoses, soaker hoses, connectors, and on/off valves to water a lot of shit with less effort on our end. Maybe a total of a 1/4 acre of hoses and connectors so a decent chunk of space. 

I'm excited because it was taking us hours to water everything manually. Now we just turn on whichever sprinkler, set a timer on our phones, go out switch valves on and off and repeat. We can water everything except the orchard...that still requires us to carry buckets, which mostly hubby does that, I pinch hit when necessary.

And that's it. I'm out of steam. 

God damn fever. Fuck.