Stretched, Medicated, Enlightened

As if the world were normal right now ( … as if it ever were, but especially now), I will give you all manner of personal updates, and I’ll try to make them diverting.

Enlightened

For starters, this is my view right now. It’s the most amazing place.

It’s amazing because it’s a 1-minute walk from the apartment.

It’s the apartment clubhouse, which I never gave a moment’s notice to until today. It’s actually a giant, sun-filled great room with a full kitchen and games tables and, probably, that gas fireplace lights up and everything.

I found it because something clicked in my soul this morning when I was told I shouldn’t walk outside for a good long while. I freaked out and went straight to the clubhouse to check out the indoor gym.

It’s got that, too!

I walked for only about a mile before some dude came in and started coughing, but still, just being in work-out clothes, seeing in a mirror my body not swathed in layers of pajamas; it all was entirely enlightening. I have been indoors for way too long.

(The image way above is the clubhouse pool covered in snow. Turns out it’s true: we’ve had snow on the ground nearly all winter, and it hasn’t gotten above 10 degrees F and won’t until, like, spring.)

My point is that I have a plan. I’m going to walk on the treadmill, then sit in the sun of the clubhouse as if it were a library, for at least an hour a day. (Or vice versa, not sure the socially acceptable order of the two. Depends on sweat, I guess.)

Truth be told, Tracy and I are going insane in that apartment, without any direct sunshine, without any views of the sunrise or the sunset. I’m not gonna say it’s like a prison cell, but it does feel damned confining. I could handle it when I could walk outside each day in the snow, but it’s so cold that I’ve been told not to.

Stretched

Here’s the thyroid surgery update, and I’ll spare you details. I am well, in no pain, and healing fine. There was one complication wherein a vocal cord got stretched (or was found to be stretched), and I don’t know the repercussions, yet.

Right now, when I try to say a word that starts with a vowel (and, it, a, enchanted, hour, ate, you get the drift), nothing but air comes out of my throat, and not great sounding air, either. I’m being told to hang tight, continue resting, not walk outside in the cold, not do stretchy yoga, and otherwise take it easy until next week’s follow-up appointment, when the labs will be back explaining the stretchy and all manner of expectations.

Again, I feel fine, or I did until I was told not to go outside or do yoga, which led to the freakout and the clubhouse find.

Medicated

Here’s the Shelly-shattering news (or, it would be if the rest of the world weren’t falling apart and if I hadn’t just had surgery with a silencing complication).

That last-minute appointment with a sleep medicine doctor was MIRACULOUS.

Remember Dr. Nazi Khan? Turns out she’s the head of the Sleep Medicine Department at University of Wisconsin Health, which is a big deal and means she knows her stuff. She walked in with my file in her hand and a motherly, caring expression on her lovey face and she told me:

You’ve got a bad case of a bad syndrome, and you’ve had it for a long time.

But, I am going to fix this for you.

I’m not kidding. I cried several times out of relief, and she hugged me, twice.

The bad news: She said that, of the various types of restless legs syndrome, my type (genetic) is the worst, and I am a classic case of having it augmented by the dopamine agonist I used to be taking. She said that me not having had targeted health care for this for the past six years made things even worse.

The good news: She’s been treating patients like me for ten years successfully with ::drumroll::

methadone.

Now, I know this is controversial, and I’m not gonna get into the weeds about why it helps better than anything else, but she says it does, that it is 0% addictive among RLS patients, and that my life will be given back to me with it. She said it hits the exact spot needed, unlike every other drug everyone else touts on the internet.

I have to wait a certain time after surgery to start it, and it’ll take a while to kick in, but once it does I can stop taking two of the other meds I’ve been taking for RLS. And, I’ll just pick it up in pills from from my drugstore and take it once a day, and she swears I will feel so much better I won’t recognize myself.

I’m going to leave all this here. Stretched, enlightened, medicated. That’s my update.

Oh, and it turns out that the apartment square footage and layout, and the downstairs of the house square footage and renovation-planned layout are both almost identical. The saving grace will be (future pluperfect tense? If we renovate) windows along one side of the house.

That’s a freebie weirdness factoid thrown in, as if there weren’t enough weirdness in the world as is.