Looking up, and looking around
On the personal front, I have progress to report! And some challenges remaining, too.
October was grim, health-wise. The major problem was sleep. At my follow-up appointment, the doctor adjusted the CPAP's pressure some, and things never worked right after that. The mask would wobble and leak and carry on in distressing ways, and trying to sleep while repeatedly pushing the ramp-down button to knock the supplied pressure down wasn't working out. It took weeks of observation to figure this out. Then it took a while more to sort through some other things, and for me to contact the sleep lab again, and to get a technician to reset the machine to a threshold like what I started off with.
But all these things got done, and last night I had the best sleep in something like six weeks. This morning my blood pressure was back down drastically, and I see that I've resumed taking weight off. As I've said a few times lately, my body seems much more eager to heal itself, and just needs a bit of the right support.
The other problem seems not so amenable to a clearcut solution. Something in the air - maybe several things in combination - makes me horribly sick. Depending on the concentration(s) of the moment, I can get zonked and incapacitated in a minute or few, or I can get only mildly impaired with a half hour's walk, but there's always trouble out there. I've been nearly housebound. My doctor tells me that a lot of their allergy-prone patients are having a bad time of it, so it's not specific to my condition, and that's good to know. Nonetheless, being so cut off from things I'd otherwise be doing on so many lovely fall days has been a drag.
Meanwhile, American politics is hugely depressing. I've decided to pretty well lay off talking about it as much as I can, and focus on simply doing stuff to support people working on causes that matter to me. I may have the occasional comment, but as I've often said to others, a crucial step in managing depression is getting out of the appealing ruts into endlessly cycling misery.
I look forward to writing regularly now that my sleep's getting back in order, and hope that I'll be able to see my way to better topics on other fronts, too.
October was grim, health-wise. The major problem was sleep. At my follow-up appointment, the doctor adjusted the CPAP's pressure some, and things never worked right after that. The mask would wobble and leak and carry on in distressing ways, and trying to sleep while repeatedly pushing the ramp-down button to knock the supplied pressure down wasn't working out. It took weeks of observation to figure this out. Then it took a while more to sort through some other things, and for me to contact the sleep lab again, and to get a technician to reset the machine to a threshold like what I started off with.
But all these things got done, and last night I had the best sleep in something like six weeks. This morning my blood pressure was back down drastically, and I see that I've resumed taking weight off. As I've said a few times lately, my body seems much more eager to heal itself, and just needs a bit of the right support.
The other problem seems not so amenable to a clearcut solution. Something in the air - maybe several things in combination - makes me horribly sick. Depending on the concentration(s) of the moment, I can get zonked and incapacitated in a minute or few, or I can get only mildly impaired with a half hour's walk, but there's always trouble out there. I've been nearly housebound. My doctor tells me that a lot of their allergy-prone patients are having a bad time of it, so it's not specific to my condition, and that's good to know. Nonetheless, being so cut off from things I'd otherwise be doing on so many lovely fall days has been a drag.
Meanwhile, American politics is hugely depressing. I've decided to pretty well lay off talking about it as much as I can, and focus on simply doing stuff to support people working on causes that matter to me. I may have the occasional comment, but as I've often said to others, a crucial step in managing depression is getting out of the appealing ruts into endlessly cycling misery.
I look forward to writing regularly now that my sleep's getting back in order, and hope that I'll be able to see my way to better topics on other fronts, too.