I'm A Meat Popsicle.

I prefer to shower at night, or in the afternoon. That way I can put off sitting around with my head damp and freezing for as long as possible. During the winter, in this little house we've moved into, I have found that showering at night is a problem. The fan in our bathroom that's activated by our light switch is a conduit directly to outside, so turning the switch on means I am pumping fast moving sub-arctic air into a room where a fine mist of water is supposed to be warming me up (and cleaning me, yadda yadda). So until I get fed up and buy a lamp for the bathroom, my solution currently is just showering in the dark. My husband thought I did this because I'm a goth or something. I really have no idea what he thinks I'm doing half the time because he never asks, really, he just dutifully turns off the light for me and goes away, probably wondering why the hell he married such a weirdo.

And, in other news, the brand new computer I bought... it died... two weeks after getting it. The hard drive has been replaced after much complaining and flailing. They kindly sent out an awesome nerd tech named Nic who talked to me about fun nerd topics while we waited for it to actually install.

And I am working hard on a new novel, writing at least an hour every day. It deals with current affairs and is an R rated vigilante thriller. Becoming a patron on patreon with the button below can get you access to excerpts weekly with a pledge of just 3 dollars a post (with no more than 4 posts a month- so a minimum of 12 bucks a month maximum! Wait, that was confusing. it could be 3-12 bucks for access to good stuff). There are also art bonuses for higher levels of patronage.

Safety Net, More Like Safety NOT.

I have been contacted by at least 4 of my 5 current medical providers in the past week chastising me for being an irresponsible jerk. The problem is, I am totally responsible and also, that kind of judgment is super bad for my health, guys, stop it.

As I've said before, I'm poor. Yes, we have the sweet sweet financial aid currently, that makes life so much more enjoyable, but since that is a gift from the government (that they expect to get back someday), and it only goes for basic living stuff, we still receive bare minimum safety net services, like Medicaid (Thanks, Obama), and when you have social services, there is a whole lot of hoop jumping that comes along with it.

And I'm not even complaining. I'm getting something incredibly valuable for free, basically. I mean, I paid into the system for a decade before coming to need these services, but I am almost entirely fine with having to fill out endless paperwork and report my every change to these agencies, because basically they are keeping me alive, and for that, I would do an assload of paperwork, man.

The problem is, I did my paperwork. A week after I moved. I went onto their website like their paperwork instructed me to, and I changed my Primary Care Provider, like they told me to, and I waited a month until my new coverage kicked in to make any doctor's appointments, like a super responsible girl, even though I desperately needed to see those doctors then, only to find out that the website we were all told to use, doesn't seem to be attached to anything!

Even worse, after getting the situation squared away by calling their hotline, I asked to make a complaint about the website not working and here's what I was told:

We know that there's a problem. We are working diligently to fix the issue that is making it so that the website collects data, tells you it registered you, but then spits the information out into the ether. It's a particular problem with the medical center that serves your area. Unfortunately, we can't tell those providers that this is an issue we're having so they stop chastising you because we have no way of knowing that you actually tried to sign up, you could be making it up and this whole problem could just be that you people are liars. This problem... that we've been trying to deal with for at least 3 months now... that countless people have complained about. Have you tried not being poor?

I might be paraphrasing slightly. Anyway, it's frustrating enough that I've written this novella about it. There's the whole myth of the Welfare Queen living high on benefits from the government, but being humiliated on a regular basis because technology is hard for the government doesn't feel very royal to me. All I'd really like is for Montana Medicaid's IT department to contact my providers and tell them there's an issue with the website and that their clients aren't just sitting around eating bonbons and laughing in the face of responsibility. Okay, maybe I would like some bonbons too, but I would really like them to take responsibility for their errors, instead of putting it all on the poor people who are trying to do the right thing on a broken system.

buy me bonbons!

Dead, dead, deadski.

My best friend of 14 years died in November. She was hilarious and smart and beautiful and a fantastic writer and it's really hard living without her. It's probably harder for her eight year old daughter who she left behind while she lingered in a coma for 6 months, while we all waited, some with more hope than others, to see if she would finally wake up. But damn it, it's hard for me.

When I think of her being gone, I think, "my Tracey is dead," but when I mention it elsewhere in the world, I change it to, "she passed away," or she "succumbed to her illness" or some other euphemism, not because I need to say it, but because I think people will somehow think I'm a jerk for plainly stating she is no longer alive.

I never hear anyone else using dead in conjunction with the death of a loved one. Does everyone else want to use it, but feel the same as I do? Like they have to make it into a poem to talk about it? Like other people might break, or think you just don't care if you plainly say, "Tracey died"?

Is it the proximity of the death? My previous best friend, Aimee, died 10 years ago, (I might add at this point, I'm a little afraid to claim another best friend as this seems to be a trend), and saying, "My friend died 10 years ago" doesn't feel quite as jarring. Does the fact that Tracey just fell through the veil (to borrow from the imagery of Harry Potter, which we both loved), make it seem that she could be right back if only I don't make it plain to others where she is? Is saying "she's dead" like a lock that keeps her trapped in the next world, where as "she passed away" allows for her to change her mind and pop back in, like she went out to smoke a cigarette with Jesus and changed her mind?

My Tracey is dead. She died because of the weird autoimmune disease we both have (had?) and I miss her every day. I miss her when I watch Seinfeld and when I read Stephen King books, and when I see the previews for the new Harry Potter movie that she'll never see unless a next world actually exists and has the same entertainment offerings as ours. I love her, and I always will, and I hate feeling that I have to compose a poem to lessen the sorrow of her loss for other people every time I want to mention that I had a friend and I don't any more.

Read Only

I think I am just going to spend all of 2015 reading. I am doing this challenge from PopSugar:

Of course, I intend to cheat. I just don't have the drive to read 52 books in a year, mostly because I read really slowly and the whole reading-induced narcolepsy. So, again, with the resolve to cheat, I started before 2015, and I read "The Scarlet Letter," which covers like 5-8 of the checkboxes above. It was one of the books I was supposed to read in high school but never actually read. No, not true... I started reading it my 9th grade year and got to the description of the roses beside the jail's door and stopped. Having finished it, I am not terribly forlorn that I didn't read this book sooner. It wasn't nearly as awful as I had assumed but it certainly wouldn't have enriched my teenaged life.

With this challenge, I am taking this opportunity to read books I have meant to read for a long time. Right now, I am reading "In Cold Blood" by Truman Capote, and I have "To Kill a Mockingbird" on my list, and "You" by Caroline Kepnes, and of course all the books Stephen King will have written by the time I get to them. You are more than welcome to follow my progress on Goodreads if you'd like. 

Last year was a terrible year for reading. I read 4 books. FOUR WHOLE BOOKS (not counting The Scarlet Letter... which doesn't count because I said so). It was "Game of Thrones" that killed my usually much higher average. Between finishing writing the first in a series of a kickass science fiction mystery thriller novels in 3 months and editing it, then trying to get an agent to represent that novel (still looking!), and having my body totally freak out where my hands didn't work for a few months (which seriously makes typing a novel difficult, let me tell you), and my liver and pancreas freaking out from all my horrible medications trying to fix my hands (most of which I am no longer on for the sake of not dying), and having my gallbladder removed, it took me SEVEN months to read the damned book. Just the first book. And it only translates into like the first 10 episodes of the series. I can't read them all. I just can't... until I run out of other things to read and write. I loved it. It was great... but holy crap. It's like the black hole of series. That's not an insult, I promise. It is just SO dense with information. It is wonderful, and I loved it... I really did, but, yeah, I'm abstaining from reading more of the series for the time being as long as I want to do other things in my life.

Thankfully now, my hands are working with just one medication and they no longer feel like they have been beaten with a hammer (as long as I remember to take my meds on time) so I can easily hold a kindle or an actual book (since Klout sent me an hard copy of "You" to read) without crying or whining or needing to train Stevie to press the side buttons on my Kindle to change the page for me.

So, if you need me, I'll be reading. 

If you want to join in on this reading challenge, I would totally be interested in hearing about the books you're reading, too!

A Tale of IC

So, awhile ago, I wrote about my jerk faced bladder. After all kinds of horrific bladder-related tests, including the one where they put me under general anesthetic to fill up my bladder like a big festive balloon until it cracked, I was diagnosed with Interstitial Cystitis.

Interstitial Cystitis or IC, is basically punishment from Satan in the form of the feelings of a UTI (urinary tract infection) because your bladder lining is faulty, with none of the therapeutic possibilities of things like antibiotics or cranberry juice.  In fact, cranberry juice is one of the things that makes it worse.

When I first started feeling the effects of IC, I was guzzling cranberry juice like a person desperate not to have yet another UTI, which only made my bladder angrier and angrier.

And then, like a misunderstood teenager, it began to self-injure

Once I figured out that I probably had IC, two years before it was finally diagnosed, I immediately started an IC diet to try to appease the angsty beast that was living in my groin, and it worked pretty okay, though it was (and is) inconvenient.

Basically nothing with acid, sourness, caffeine or deliciousness.

But, I also found that certain medicines that I had been prescribed for other issues also tore the hell out of my bladder. At 4:45 on a Friday about a year ago, I found myself on the phone, pleading with my urologist's office to give me something to stop the bladder pain before I found a bridge to jump off during the weekend.

What I got worked well enough that I did not have to go out searching for appropriately tall bridges. It is a handy dandy pill that I dissolve under my tongue made from the root of the mandrake. Mandrake or mandragora, if you remember from Harry Potter, is a powerful restorative.  It is used to return people who have been transfigured or cursed, to their original state.

 Actually, wait, no, it is an antispasmodic drug that soothes the muscles, so, I guess it would work to unpetrify someone who had been petrified by a basilisk (spoilers, sorry), as well as someone who has ridiculous cramps in their bladder that makes them feel like they have to pee every 2 seconds.

I was also introduced to the "Bladder Cocktail" which is likely not as fancy as it sounds at all.

Basically, it is the most wonderful thing ever invented, surely sent from any god that might exist who doesn't like punishing people for having a bladder. It's a mixture of lidocaine and heparin that coats your bladder and numbs the crap out of your bladder wall.

Now, you are likely wondering, like I was when this was first described to me... so... you just pee on yourself? Somehow, this magical concoction from heaven doesn't affect your ability to feel a full bladder, it just stops all the pain associated with having pee in your bladder, which is part of the actual problem with Interstitial Cystitis.

Now, there is a drug to coat your bladder with magic that is on the market called Elmiron, and it works pretty nicely, but it does have side effects.  In my case, along with a bunch of other drugs, it beat the hell out of my liver and I ended up in the ER thinking I was dying of liver failure where I was advised to maybe stop taking pills that were killing my liver. It also beats up your stomach really badly because it is housed in a capsule made of pure evil, but switching it into a generic gelatin pill capsule is enough to combat that... but not if your liver isn't working.

So... I have a crappy bladder disease, and I am managing it with mandrake pills and emergency bladder cocktails when the disease flares beyond what I can control with diet, because I can't handle the pill that would make my life normal, which is part of why I decided to write this post; because right this very moment, my disease is flaring and my mandrake doesn't seem to be working so I called my doctor's office for my "you can come in any time, immediately, no problem, emergency bladder cocktail" and immediately, in this case, translates to "in 11 days." ELEVEN DAYS!!!!

So, I figured you should know what happened, just in case I can't find relief and need to find a suitably tall bridge before I can make it to next Thursday.