zeptember

Today is Day 2 of headache and 99.2F average temp… again.

Honestly I should say the temperature thing is a continuation of what has been going on since December 7, 2009, when I noticed I had a fever from the flu for the first time.

Since December, my temperature has returned to MY normal of 97.5F only once or twice. Since December, my temperature has gotten to 98.6F a handful of times. But the prevailing temperature has been in the 99F range.

This morning when I woke for work, my head hurt, my sinuses hurt, my eyes hurt, my joints ache and my upper back aches - but not in the flu sort of way. My head, sinuses and eyes are likely all tied with either a continuation of the last virus I had, or a new virus caught while back to work yesterday.
The joint pain is because I went dancing for two nights in a row this past weekend. The back pain is because george is due in 48 hours, and so my body is trying to fold in on itself from the top down as it usually does each month.

I have to leave for work in 10 minutes, and yet I feel like my head is going to explode and I feel like I could expel one of my sinus cavities right here on the keyboard. And just in time, the stabbing right side ovarian pain has awakened for its day at work on my body.

It’s 44°F outside, and we have one ambient heat lamp installed, which does absolutely nothing to warm the “outdoor classroom”. The teachers probably won’t want to send me any children when it’s below 55°F, which means I have to float around from classroom to classroom, assisting other teachers all morning. It’s awkward work.

But off I go.

By December 28, my sinus infection or whatever it was, had started to finally fade.

By December 31, my husband’s doctor cleared him to be able to go out in public again, though we’d been stepping out of the house for the past two days as it was, because of cabin fever. The doctor said that as long as one still has a cough, one is still contagious, at least when it comes to H1N1. My husband had a mild cough, and was told as long as he coughs into his inner elbow, and washes his hands frequently, the spread of the illness would be greatly minimised.

So on New Year’s Eve, we went to our friend’s house, and enjoyed a mellow evening just hanging out. Some of our friends have young children now, so the house was filled with infant and preschooler noises as well.
I had reminded my husband on the way to the party about how to cough into his elbow, since we employ this method in the Montessori school I work for.
Of course, within the first half hour, my dear husband jokingly shoved his face into a box of homemade cookies and made ‘nom nom nom’ noises.
I pulled him aside immediately and reminded him of his germs. He sheepishly said he was sorry, that he’d forgotten already.
*sigh*

On January 1st, we decided to go dancing, since we’d been screwed out of most of our vacation by being sick. We sweated and danced our asses off at Meat vs. Death Guild.

The next night, we returned to the same location for New Wave City, and danced some more. I began to get sad on the way to the club, because I realised it was our last night out together before having to return to work. We’d not been able to go to Michigan to see friends and family, and we’d not been able to go out into the world from Christmas Eve til New Year’s Eve in any capacity to hang with friends, much less go wining, dining and dancing.

Today is the end of our “vacation”. Tomorrow it’s back to work. I slept in til 11:30am, despite having told myself that would be a bad idea - that I’d have insomnia tonight. Ah well.

Throughout the past week and a half, I’ve checked flight status on the airline we were supposed to have flown. Our flight made it safely to Michigan on December 25, and safely back to San Francisco on January 2. The Cabal party we were supposed to attend still happened in our absense, and pictures and dialogue were posted. I kept tabs on the weather - snow fell regularly through Christmas into the New Year in Michigan.
It’s a bit surreal knowing all of this, and having reality be that I never got on the plane.

Meanwhile, back in California, it’s been a mix of rain and sun, and the temperature has been roughly in the 50°F range during the day, and in the 30-40°F range in the evenings.

Yesterday as we shopped for a dishwasher, I informed my husband that we’d boarded the plane in Michigan and were now on our way home.
This morning I had a nightmare that we’d overslept and likely missed our flight back to San Francisco. I spent a lot of time on my cell phone with a bad connection to Travelocity to try to pin down whether the plane had left already or not. The nightmare ended with me at my ma’s house, having gone into the kitchen and turned down the country music on an old small boombox radio, so I could hear the phone conversation about how to go about getting booked on another flight. My husband was in the living room, my brother had just walked in the front door, and the boy next door stood on his porch with his wife, who was there and then not there and then there again…like some sort of hologram. The two looked a bit Victorian.

My cough returned Wednesday or Thursday as I cleaned the house, because of the dust. The cough settled, then returned again by Saturday morning, along with phlegm, after my husband and I had gotten all kissy face for the first time in about two weeks. I was hesitant but gave in. We’ll see if I get sick again. I don’t have the best immune system…

Yesterday I was so tired all day long, despite having slept in, that I wanted to cry. I overcaffinated myself to no avail. Today I’m feeling pretty tired again, but not as worn out as I was on Saturday. I’m guessing I was just super dehydrated and worn out from all that dancing and sweating on Friday, since it is the first major activity in weeks on account that I’ve been sick. I first got the flu around December 5, and my husband’s doctor thinks it was a blend of H1N1 and the regular flu. She says it takes weeks to fully recover from it, and that relapses can happen.

So it’s back to wait and see, now that we’ve had a weekend of strenuous activity via the nightclubs.

I seem to have every symptom for flu except for fever at the moment. It started yesterday with a mild sore throat that persisted into today. Then, around 3pm today, everything else hit:

All types of flu can cause:

* Fever
* Coughing and/or sore throat
* Runny or stuffy nose
* Headaches and/or body aches
* Chills
* Fatigue
-courtesy flu.gov

In addition to the above, webmd.com lists “ill appearance with warm, flushed skin and red, watery eyes” as a common flu symptom. Well, I have that, too.

It all started yesterday, when I developed a mild sore throat sometime in the afternoon. I’d worked ‘holiday daycare’, which means I spent much of the day inside, rather than outside, in close quarters with preschoolers. Several of the little buggers have wet coughs and runny noses. Some have clear snot, some have yellow or green snot.

The day before that, on Tuesday, I’d opened a door to a teacher’s classroom, gone inside and asked her if she had any eyedroppers and bottles that my co-teacher and I could use for our seed propagation project. She’d said she did not have any. This conversation is relevant later.

By the time I got home from work yesterday afternoon, I was feeling run-down. I’d had a crappy dinner, and asked for Tuckers ice cream (thus violating my sugar ban on the fourth day). Tuckers uses cow’s milk, like every other ice creamery does. I’m not supposed to have cow’s milk. Hello cravings! Within a few minutes of beginning to eat the ice cream, my stomach began to gurgle wildly. Hello lactose intolerance!

An hour of eating the ice cream, I got sharp stabbing uterine pains. This is reproducible 100% of the time, and yet I keep going back to eating dairy foods. The reason I get the pain is that dairy, especially cow’s milk, contains inflammatory prostalandins. For more info on that, read here, here and here. This may be relevant later.

This morning, my joints were aching. My knees and lower back were bugging me, so I decided not to bicycle to work, and to drive, instead. It’s the first time since November 2nd that I drove my car instead of biking to work, so I felt like the break from biking was okay. Plus, there was a chance of rain today, and I didn’t want to get caught in it like I was last week.

The uterine pain continued intermittently throughout today. After the children went inside from lunch recess, I began sweeping up the yard. My co-worker brought out lemon-scented Clorox wipes and began wiping down the tables. I gagged, the bleach scent was so strong. I looked over to double-check the type of wipes she was using and it was indeed the yellow label - the only label I thought I was still okay with. Dammit. Stupid chemical sensitivities.

As I continued to sweep the yard, my eyes began to water with thick gooey fluid. That’s when I knew for sure that my recent bout of eye allergies are triggered by the workplace. This may be relevant later.

I was on my lunch break when I sat upright on the couch in the lounge and nearly yelped from the pelvic pain. It felt like my uterus had been locked in one place and I was moving against it. So having consumed ice cream still had its effects on me. This too may be relevant later.

Around 3pm, as I was closing up my classroom for the day, I went to the open children’s bathroom and emptied out a container of dirty water into a sink. The noise of the water emptying from the container made me nauseous. My mind flooded with images of me puking water non-stop. This imagery made me want to vomit of course. The last time I was this ill from hearing water or other fluids pouring was when I was on a mushroom trip. Immediately following this imagery, I wondered if I would be getting that sick in the near future, and this was my body’s way of giving me a head’s up.

I went back outside to my classroom and wrapped up the data for our daily record book. While doing that, I was seized with severe fatigue, low and mid back pain so strong I wanted to cry, and a general blurry feeling all over. It’s hard to explain, but it’s similar to how I feel when I’m in a lot of pain from endometriosis. The world around me looks different - not so bright, and kind of blurry - and my head feels like it’s stuffed with cotton.

By the time I got home from work, around 3:45pm, I had severe chills.
I turned on the heater fan, the house furnace and put a heating pad under the covers. I changed into pajamas and went to bed and napped for a bit. I was freezing under two blankets, with the heating pad set to medium, with the heater fan going, and the furnace set to 70°F.

The thing is, with all that I’ve listed, most of it fits the bill for the premenstrual pain and suffering that I routinely experience, up to two weeks before george.

However, I remembered the scene from early this morning when I got in to work - the office was scrambling to avoid having a teacher come in to work. She’d called to say she has the flu, but that she couldn’t afford for hers and her students’ sake to miss any class time, so she’d be coming in only for a little while. The office was trying to decide whether or not to go to her house to prevent her from leaving, or to meet her at the front door and shoo her away. As it was, I heard later, that teacher DID show up to work to deliver some classroom materials, and the office staff shooed her away.

This is the same teacher - I’d opened the door to her classroom and I spoke to her on Tuesday.

Could be that she’s the infection point. Could be the children with their wet coughs and runny noses every day. Hell, we’d had a case of swine flu a couple weeks ago, and the staff decided to suppress the news, saying the mother said the child developed symptoms at home, not at school, and she kept him home for days. I found out because his teacher spilled the beans to me. Good times, eh? Covering up swine flu, a teacher coming in despite knowing full well she has the flu. No wonder the world still gets epidemics and pandemics. Stupid people.

…When I woke from my nap this afternoon, I checked out flu symptoms at flu.gov and then called my doctor’s office. It was 20 minutes to closing time, but I asked if I could be seen. They’d just stopped taking patients 10 minutes before I called, but asked me what was going on, and then did a run-down of symptoms checking with me. I was told I’d get a call back.

The on-call nurse called me back, we went over the symptoms again, and she told me she was pretty sure I have the flu, and that the doctor herself would call me back. She asked if I have had the flu shot. I told her I’d refused it because I have egg allergy (many vaccines, including the flu shot, are made with egg protein). She replied, “Oh! No you can’t get the shot, then.” Glad she didn’t fight me on the decision.

A little while later, the doctor called, and we went through the symptoms one more time. By this time, I had facial flushing, headache growing worse, sensitivity to light getting worse (all the lights in the house were off). As I ticked off my symptoms, I mentioned the back pain which came on suddenly and so severe that I wanted to cry.

The doctor interrupted me and said, “yeah, ya know, I’m sorry, but you have the flu, and tomorrow you WILL have a fever. You can NOT go to work. I’m sorry.”

She faxed in a doctor’s note to cover me for tomorrow, and told me to call back if I need an extension for next week.

We discussed over-the-counter remedies to help me through the flu (Tylenol, Advil, Pseudoephedrine), and she mentioned Tamiflu. I told her I would not feel comfortable pursuing Tamiflu based upon the side effects I’d read about, the fact that I’m super sensitive to all medications (I’ve hallucinated on prescribed minimum dosages of Tagamet, for example) and well, the news reports in general over the years. The doctor did not argue with me - in fact she said that taking Tamiflu only reduces symptoms by 1-2 days, and there’s only a select group of people she’d be willing to press to take Tamiflu.

When I got off the phone with the doctor, I broke the news to my husband, and added “I don’t want to be sick. I want to think she’s got it wrong. Maybe it’s just early george symptoms.”

Maybe it’s allergies. Maybe it’s because of the cow’s milk. Maybe it’s all of the above, but still not the flu.

It’s taken me a couple of hours to chronicle everything. In that time, it’s gotten very dark outside and I’ve turned on the overhead light. The light in the room, as well as the monitor brightness (which I keep reducing) has not helped with the stinging eye pain. I’m sore behind the eyes as well as experiencing the stinging in the eyes.
Meh.

So there is my über detailed influenza report, should I need it for the doctor, and non-influenza report, should I need to refer back to it again in case of ingestion of cow’s milk.

Stupid cows.

On Saturday, October 24, 2009, I hurried to our storage unit in the backyard around 7am to grab some luggage for a weekend trip.

As soon as I opened the door, I saw a puddle of water in the center of the floor!

Just four days earlier, a storm had spent two days attacking my classroom. It hadn’t occurred to me to check the storage unit when I got home from work earlier in the week, because it had never taken damage before.

But there I stood on Saturday, staring down at a wet floor. I looked around for signs of leakage but did not find any. I guessed that perhaps the water had come from between the wall or had leaked somehow from the light fixture. I felt the boxes and luggage and other things near the puddle - they did not appear to be soaked.

But the problem here was that I did not have any time to begin cleanup of the storage unit; I was late for class.

I left a note for my husband, telling him what had happened. He had the day off work, so I figured he could spend some time assessing the damage.

That’s the second problem - I assumed he’d even give a damn about stuff in our storage unit getting water damaged.

It was more important to him to sleep in, take his time puttering about the house, and go to band practice, than to be arsed to start the cleanup process. I still don’t know how he accounted for all the hours in the day on Saturday. I was in class from 8am - 4:45pm that day. When I got home, I expected the bags to be in the car and for us to zoom off to Mendocino.

The bags were in the car but again, what the hell did he do all day? This made me so mad. I told him I am severely allergic to mold. I told him I assumed he would begin cleanup, that a flooding out of our storage unit is a bad thing.

He seriously thought I was overreacting.

I explained to him again, as I have numerous times in the past, that I grew up in a mold-ridden house and had bronchitis and sinus infections every year of my life until moving to California. I told him that I am seriously allergic to mold in any form - that washing out a moldy coffee pot one time, some of the water splashed onto my forearm and immediately I broke out in hives. Same thing if I get penicillin - full body hives. MOLD == BAD FOR THE ZEPT.
And while we’re on the topic, last winter, my husband’s car flooded out, because the moon roof leaked. He got the roof fixed and the car vacuumed and cleaned, but did so MONTHS after the damage.

The car still reeks of mold damage, and of course is the best working vehicle that we have, in which to drive long distances with. I expressed my disapproval at having to spend 3+ hours in a moldy, stinky car on top of having to come back and deal with a moldy storage unit.

My husband reacted by getting defensive. He’s SORRY, OKAY?

I dropped the subject so we could enjoy our first year wedding anniversary trip to Mendocino.

The very next day, an unexpected arrival of endometriosis pain pretty much ruined the trip for me, anyway, and I had a nightmarish, harrowing ride home Sunday night because of the pain and the pain meds.

I’ve been bedridden since yesterday, with no sign of the endometriosis pain and bleeding letting up in the next 24 hours.

We’d had a lengthy discussion last night about how overwhelmed we both feel about everything this year. He feels like he has to take on all of the housework, because I’m always so tired after work, or sick, or both. As a result, he lets the housework just sit there and accumulate. Then we both get depressed because the dishes, laundry and catbox are not taking care of themselves. The house looks like a sty.

It’s been since April - since I started the teaching job - that everything has fallen apart. We talked a lot about how we got to where we are emotionally and physically. I rehashed the MCS complications on top of the endo issues, and how I’m still struggling to accept this new problem, which has steadily gotten worse since September.

But neither of us had a solution.

I told him we BOTH have to step up to the plate and start ACCEPTING the reality of how sick I am with MCS and endometriosis.

I told him he has to start accepting his own severe allergy diagnoses and man up about housework to keep us BOTH healthy.

To this day, his nose will suddenly start pouring and he’ll sneeze so much I fear he’ll pass out, and when I ask what brought it on, he slumps his shoulders in resignation and says he’ll never know. And I look around the house and see acres of dust on shelves and ask if perhaps his severe dust mite allergy had just been stirred. He responds that there’s no way of knowing, that his nose just does that every now and then for no reason. Any factual logic I apply to the conversation is met with resistance and “but how do you know for sure.”

So last night I pointed to the three-year-old list of house rules that I had posted when we first moved in. I told him I had grown tired of being the only one to adhere to the strict housecleaning rules, so I had gone lax, too. I told him this was a mistake, and said we BOTH have to adhere from this point on. He was NOT happy about it.
The list of housecleaning rules comes from a pamphlet my doctor gave my mother when I was about six years old. It instructs one on how to clean a room top to bottom thoroughly for the person with severe dust allergy. My mother scrubbed my bedroom from ceiling to floor every week when I was a young child, because of how sick I always was. She became a housekeeper to learn how to do the job properly. Of course, since she had no husband to help her, and my brother and I were just tots, by the time we became adolescents she had all but abandoned the cleaning practice. Her grave mistake is that she did not teach us from an early age to do for ourselves. She figured we needed to be children and play, not work. Well the work is for our home, it is not child labour in the mines for cryin out loud. But I digress. I need to learn from my mother’s early perseverance. I have her strength in fits and starts. I need to not be disillusioned and bitter like she ended up. I need to constantly channel my disillusionment with my illness, and my bitterness of lack of help - channel it for more positive ends - and that means more time for creating and maintaining an allergen-resistant home, and less time for social outings and farting around on the Internet.

I have up to four days a month bedridden to do my farting around on the Internet.

As of this morning, my husband still had not called the landlord to inspect the damage to the storage unit, so I called her. As soon as I told the landlady about the discovery, she replied that she’s going on vacation, didn’t I get her email?

Nice way to shirk your duties as landlady!

I told her no, I hadn’t gotten her email. The landlady then proceeded to tell me that it was very strange that our storage unit flooded out, because none of the other units did, and hers at home didn’t.

How the hell is that even relevant to OUR unit?

She said she’d stop by to check out the storage unit.

After I hung up the phone, I checked my email. She had sent the email at 8am today, while I was still sleeping, and just an hour before my call to her. What a little shit.

She came by and checked out the unit, and proclaimed she could find no water damage to our belongings, and no drips or brown marks on the walls or ceiling, so the water must have blown in under the door.
She then asked if we have renter’s insurance. I said yes, of course. She smiled and bid me good day.

Well then! Written off! Take it elsewhere! Good day!

I got on Internet chat and told my husband what happened, and urged him to begin the cleaning process on the storage unit ASAP.

He can’t - he has band practice tonight - gotta practice cuz he has a show on Friday.

So I asked, “What about tomorrow?”

He replied, “[a friend] might be coming over tomorrow though”

This is where I put my foot down.

Me: “Dude. Mold. Mold trumps friends. My health trumps friends. Do you even CARE what is in the storage unit?”

Him: “Of course. I’ll reschedule.”

Me: “Thank you”.

Me: “or better yet, ask if he wants to come help. :p ”

Him: “There’s an idea. ”

To summarise my long-winded rant: My husband and I are a couple of princesses who have refused to accept that our housework will NOT get cleaned by itself. We have steadily refused to give up our playtime for creating and maintaining an allergen-resistant household, because it is a lot of work. We would rather spend hours on the Internet, watching TV, playing video games, doing homework, doing side projects, working full time jobs and socialising with friends than to take on the hard work of keeping our home healthy and safe. We have consistently chosen ill health over good health because we are lazy, selfish and hedonistic.

We are 38 years old but we act like we are 19 and living in a dormitory.

Even with me having laid it all out in a public forum, I wonder honestly whether I can change my ways, and I know for a fact that I will not be the one changing my husband’s ways - he has to do it himself, and that’s something else I have to learn to accept.