postings of a professional redhead

I was supposed to help my good friend Laura move on Saturday, but in the wee hours of the morning I woke up coughing up all kinds of disgusting things. A quick trip to the Saturday clinic revealed bronchitis (I swear I’m going to be the youngest person diagnosed with COPD one of these days), and I’m now on doxy (my least favorite antibiotic as it rips your stomach up if you aren’t vigilant about taking it with food) and back on Advair, my least favorite drug because I don’t want to get <a href=” http://www.webmd.com/oral-health/tc/thrush-topic-overview“>thrush</a> and so compulsively swish/gargle for five minutes after each dose.

So instead of helping her move, I stayed at home all day Saturday and played video games. Specifically, I tooled around Nagrand and at about 8pm (after playing at level 69 for almost 8 hours), hit 70. It was kind of anti-climactic, but I bought a green put-put flying mount, and finally got to put on all the frozen shadoweave clothes I had made for myself.

If you have no idea what I just said, congratulations – you’re not a dork.

Now it’s Monday morning, and I’m sitting at work drinking tons of water wishing I could leave early (to go home and nap), except I have two meetings this afternoon that I am running, so won’t be able to leave until at least 4. I actually follow the “good meeting guidelines” and prepare an agenda beforehand so I can insist we stay on topic during my meetings. I hate it when people want to go on stream-of-consciousness tangents in my meetings – if it’s a totally different topic, call your own damn meeting, and don’t waste my time!

Of my four subscribers (hi, mom), one sent me an email asking me to post more about work-related stuff. I tend to talk to friends about funny work stories, but I have yet to figure out how to translate that to a blog. Most of the stuff I deal with at work is either export controlled or proprietary information, and even if it wasn’t, the technical stuff has major snooze factor. So I need to figure out how to describe things in a fun/exciting way – and I bet you’ve never heard the words “fun/exciting” used in conjunction with engineering!

Yesterday, approximately 5am, I gave up trying to use my home nebulizer and drove myself to the hospital. My lungs were so full of fluid, and I had been struggling to breathe for so long, that my lips were blue from hypoxemia by the time I arrived.  Asthma is no joke - and I am tired of having asthma.  I’m going to start looking for a different pulminologist, since the one I’ve been going to for the past three years has done nothing for my lung function (which is 77%) and is out of town/unavailable 90% of the time I call to get an appointment.

I spent most of my vacation last week trying to ignore the fact that I was, indeed, quite sick. I finally got my aunt to call in a scrip for me - she’s a doctor, and decided I had a sinus infection (I thought so too, though I mentioned I thought it was bronchitis seeing as I was coughing quite often). Turns out I’m really not feeling better after five days on antibiotics, so today after repeated coughing (and being told by the nurse in my friend’s dr’s office after driving her for a biopsy this morning, I should go to the doc as my cough sounded “very suspicious”).

I ended up at Manchester Memorial getting a chest x-ray. Long story short, I have pneumonia, and am really worried that I won’t be well enough to work my shifts at the kids hut at SolarFest this weekend (I’m on heavy-duty antibiotics, and am not contagious any more). I also won’t be able to enjoy any hiking or swimming or really, any physical activity, nor will I be able to be around any kind of second-hand smoke without puking up a lung.

On the bright side, I took 10 minutes for every hour I was awake today to do some house cleaning, laundry, and other fun chores I could do around the house - like finally find a new vet for the kitties closer to East Hartford since Mischief seems to still have the upper respitory infection I took him to the old vet two seperate times now. I also managed to clear most of the floor in the computer room - which is the last bastion of boxes that are still being sorted after my big move.  Somehow there were two bags worth of trash hiding in various places around the house, and I washed the litter boxes in the shower, refilled the bird feeder, and watered the little garden on my balcony.  This all in between massive, painful coughing fits.  Which are slowly getting better, so I’m hoping those horse pill antibiotics (and 40mg of prednisone daily for my asthma-exacerbated wheeze) are kicking in and I won’t have to be lame and cancel on this weekend’s trip - Dar Williams is playing SolarFest, and I can’t wait to see her live again!