Anghraine

I've talked a bit on Tumblr about it, but my mother has been struggling with her health for several years. She was doing better for about... I don't know, six months, after I bullied her into getting a referral from her distracted rural doctor who mostly just cared about the possibility of her a) abusing her psych meds and b) losing weight, and even when her oxygen levels were hovering around 91% in his own office would just prescribe prednisone at best. She was already disabled when she was hit by a car several years ago (she was driving her mobility scooter through a crosswalk at the time) and she has fairly severe asthma (she didn't even own a nebulizer and I'd also bully her into using mine when possible).

We're pretty sure she had a bad case of long COVID at one point, but anyway, I did insist on her seeing an asthma specialist in the city and that led to seeing other specialists and generally she was doing quite a bit better. But her lungs have been in pretty bad shape for a long time and it was a slow recovery from months on end when she was coughing up phlegm, choking on it when she tried to sleep, and coughing so much that she could barely carry on a conversation until a few weeks ago.

Then she picked up what everyone assumed to be the flu. She was apparently doing pretty badly; we came by to drop off some equipment (including my nebulizer!!), but she didn't want me getting too close because I'm also immunocompromised and she didn't want me catching her miserable flu that was aggravating her asthma. She seemed to recover from that and then got much worse—I later found out that her pulse oxygen crashed to 71% a couple of nights ago, she'd been taken to the local hospital, given treatment that brought her up to 86% while they did some tests to figure out what was actually going on. They sent her back home, determined she in fact has pneumonia, but she crashed another time and my father correctly called the ambulance immediately and she was ultimately taken to a hospital 100 miles away.

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Had my follow-up appointment with the psychiatrist, admitted that things are not great, and while not much got resolved beyond “trying to be physically healthier, have been dealing with hypomania, depression, and anxiety,” she wants to see me in two weeks again.

While I’m still ambivalent about her, it’s nice to be taken seriously, at least.

Tagged: #i also tried to explain that the anxiety is deeply tied up in autistic stuff but not sure i was clear about that

I reblogged this post and added:

oh, and also, health insurance

unnamedelement responded:

This is so real

I replied:

glad it's relatable, lol

wildarthings said:

I left my phd program after a year (it wasn't working) and I still feel flashes of guilt and shame that I wasn't willing to stick it out. Academia is so guilt inducing and I'm just waiting for the year when it no longer has its shame tendrils in my life.

I replied:

It really is! I hope you feel better.

wildarthings responded:

Thank you!!! I really hope you get what you want out of your path thru academia, whatever you decide to do with it. :) :) :)

primeideal said:

relatable hahahhaha sorry. i survived though!!

colorwheels14 said:

My advice to you is if you go the academic job route, choose the one that actuallly fits your interests. I wanted to teach, and so I'm at a teaching university, vs. a research university. I may want to do something else in the future that may or may not be related to that anymore, but there are lots of paths that don't involve TT research university jobs.

I have really complicated feelings about being autistic and bipolar, but my feelings are NOT complicated about anxiety. It’s awful and I hate it and would do a lot to make it go away but nothing works!! So I just live in dread of about ten million different things all the time.

Meanwhile, my psychiatrist is like “I’m concerned about you oversleeping” when literally everyone has thought it’s a sort of anxiety burnout that causes the oversleeping anyway, but she wants to run tests that I’ve already had many times before, and has apparently no interest in dealing with the anxiety and AGHHHHH

Tagged: #things i'm regularly anxious about: #checking my email. bugs getting on my skin. showers. car accidents. falling down stairs. choking on food. #starting things in general #eye contact #anger #also when i was like 'i think i'm having a hypomanic episode' she was sure i was just stressed #and oversleeping #a week later: all is futile and hopeless. why bother with anything. i'm profoundly mediocre and will never succeed at anything #now i've sort of evened out but i KNEW i was cycling and she wouldn't listen >:(

I reblogged a meme-ish post about different users' possible causes of death if not for modern medicine and added:

The doctor had to break my collarbones to get me out in time to save me (I was basically considered dead at birth because I had a tumor in my throat that kept me from breathing). Also, asthma nearly killed me multiple times until my mid-20s! Fun times.

Tagged: #it's like... okay #i was born a) not breathing b) because of a tumor c) with severe asthma and d) also with autism #let's say that nature did not mean me to thrive #tbh it's why i'm '......' at 'we need to go back to nature!!!!' people

I've done most of my whining about being sick on Tumblr, but I'm on day 5 of this bout with The Infection (not COVID, just some different recurring respiratory thing) and still miserable :(

I mean, it's better than it was. But coughing up yellow phlegm is gross, the coughing is painful, and I have barely slept for days because it's hard to breathe unless I sit up. I can think more or less clearly again, though I'm unsurprisingly tired, but /mutter mutter, gripe gripe

Talking about medical+weight stuff under the cut:

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