Tag: health

Ow

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

In retrospect, I should have kept the tooth, or at least gotten a picture of it. I did ask to see it, and I was surprised at how small it was for some reason. One would think I would know how big my own teeth are! I do not.

That said, despite finding out that I was also scheduled for a filling on a tooth that I had thought the doc said we were just going to keep an eye on, the procedure was quick and more or less completely painless. I want to say something like “the shots were the worst part,” but the shots weren’t even enough to qualify as bad, since they start with numbing gel anyway, so I barely felt them. The drilling for the filling (heh) seemed like it took less than a minute. There’s been no pain post-removal, at least not yet. I’m supposed to be super religious about soft foods for at least another couple of days, so hopefully nothing dumb is going to happen between now and then.

One weird thing: we very nearly had to cancel the extraction because of my blood pressure. I also had a doctor’s appointment this morning, and my blood pressure was a reasonable 120/83. The first two readings in the dentist’s chair, despite me not feeling either especially nervous or, really, any emotional or physical symptoms at all, were an absolutely insane 173/120 and 171/123, both of which are alarmingly close to get to the hospital right now levels of hypertension. They did the filling and tested me again and it was down to 136/87, still high, but not what the fuck high. It’s crazy to me that my blood pressure can get that high without me feeling any particular sort of way while it’s going on, but had it hit that a third time they’d have had to reschedule me with an oral surgeon who could put me completely under instead of doing the extraction in-office.

Weird.

I’ve spent the majority of the day since getting home blasting through Dungeon Crawler Carl VI: The Eye of the Bedlam Bride on my Kindle; I’ve probably read over half of it today and I’m getting progressively more and more angry about how fucking good this series is. It’s absolutely unfair that something this ridiculous has this much emotional heft to it. Somebody should be in jail. It doesn’t have to be anyone affiliated with the book, as I doubt Matt Dinniman could finish the series from behind bars, so we may have to pick someone else. The President, maybe.

GUESS WHAT HAPPENS TOMORROW

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Music, Politics1 Comment

I have been a huge fan of “Weird Al” Yankovic for my entire Goddamned life, and I will be seeing him in concert in Indianapolis tomorrow night, at the same venue I saw the Counting Crows at a couple of weeks ago. I would really appreciate it if the world would stop getting worse until the show is over. If the asteroid is coming, that’s fine, but don’t hit us until, like, 11:00 PM. The show should be over by then.

In other news, I’m really glad I’m going to be out of town tomorrow, because I keep getting into deeply stupid little spats online with deeply stupid people, and I need a fucking cleanse badly. I’m driving to Indy and back– my wife has the newer, nicer car at the moment, and so she has inherited long-distance driving responsibilities along with it– but I need to not be on my phone in the car, so I’m going to do the driving.

I was about to explain one of the spats, but Christ, you don’t need it. I was hoping to share some of the stupid with you so you could appreciate it from afar, but instead, I’m not going to make your world dumber. I’m a Goddamned saint.

In other other news, IU just cut my major, because the governor told them to, and I’ve spent a significant amount of my non-online time in the last 48 hours trying to decide how I’m going to handle it when they announce they’re building an ICE concentration camp in Elkhart. There was talk of one going in during the last time this pigfucker was in office, and it ended up not happening, but I’m pretty sure it’s inevitable now. This is gonna be the start of my supervillain arc, or at least my “tries to sabotage something, fails, and is arrested immediately” arc.

Mental note: delete that paragraph before doing anything.

So yeah. I hate it here. How are you?

When the thing that fixes you breaks

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

I’ve complained about this a couple of times, but my CPAP has been making this godawful whining noise every time I inhale lately, and over the course of the night it gets louder and louder until I unplug the hose from the back of the thing and plug it back in, at which point the process repeats itself. I thought I had come up with a way to minimize if not fix it, but I’m fairly certain I got no more than half an hour of sleep last night, including when I gave up on sleeping in bed and went into the living room to my Comfy Chair to try and follow my body into taking a nap. Which didn’t work.

I don’t remember how I slept before I had this thing; it is entirely possible that I never actually did, but one way or another I can’t sleep without it now. So I finally gave up this morning and, after burning in my very last sick day for the year, because no one deserves me on half an hour of sleep, I figured out who I was supposed to call to talk about warranties and replacements and repairs and a bunch of other shit I didn’t really know anything about.

Turns out a “lightly used” reconditioned CPAP was only $150 and will be here tomorrow, so I went with that option. “Lightly used” means under a thousand hours; mine has nearly seven thousand hours of use, and it comes with a year warranty, so … yeah. I’m tasking my wife with waking me up in the morning, putting in earplugs, and taking a couple of Tylenol PM before going to bed tonight, so hopefully I can get enough sleep that I’m at least able to function tomorrow.

And if I can’t? Oh well. I’m going in anyway. There’s twelve days of school left. It’ll be fine.

Well that was fun

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

Jesus Christ, look at all the white people.

This is, technically, the last day of my Spring Break, as I’m not supposed to go to work on Saturday or Sunday anyway. So of course I have shit I need to do in the next couple of days to get ready for next week. I said before the week started that I didn’t want to do anything over my break, and holy shit did I succeed at that, as I didn’t even really succeed in doing the bits of nothing I wanted to do.

Which, whatever. It is quite obviously the height of privilege to get a week off and complain about it, so I’m at least going to have the dignity to not do it much. I did finish Hild last night, and I don’t really have anything to say about it that I didn’t say already– you want to read it if you have enough ability to concentrate to be able to read it, and I don’t, and as a result I can say that I appreciated the book but I didn’t enjoy it. I will not be bothering with the sequel, I think. I have a handful of other books I want to finish in the next couple of days before we go back to work; we’ll see how that goes. And since my wife is going to be back tomorrow I should probably spend some time cleaning.

(This is not to say that we lived like animals while she was gone; we didn’t, but still. I don’t want her to come home from a two-day drive and look around and think she needs to clean something.)

I was going to do all that today, but today was the Day of Unintentional Naps. My caffeine immunity is starting to become an actual joke; most people after two large cups of coffee in the morning are wide awake if not actively jittery; I woke up at 8, drank two large cups of coffee, and went back to bed. Then, after getting out of bed, I took a shower and fell asleep on the couch. I dunno what the hell my deal is lately.

Tomorrow, I will try to have something interesting to talk about.

I’m just declaring myself alive

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

…that’s how it works, right? I’m still sick, by any reasonable standard, although I think the fever has gone away– it helps if you don’t take your temperature!– and the Weird Ear Thing has gotten better enough that I didn’t actually go back into urgent care this morning. I’ve started my antibiotics, finally, although this is still probably a virus.

One way or another, Goddammit, I’m going to work tomorrow, and I’m gonna make some kids know some math whether they like it or not, because I’m tired of this, and if there’s one thing America has taught me over the last eight years it’s that the best way to fix being sick is to pretend you’re not sick any more and then bad things never, ever happen as a result. So Goddammit, that’s the plan.

(I may still go back to urgent care if this ear thing isn’t fully fixed tomorrow. I’m hoping that the antibiotics take it out as a side effect, since it really doesn’t seem to be wax-related. We’ll see.)

Anyway. That problem’s solved. How’re you?

The goal next week

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

Everybody is healthy for four days.

Why four days? Because both the boy and I have Friday off(*), so either of us can be sick that day. I was a mess yesterday and last night, and lazed around all day, and am going to attempt to have a useful and productive Saturday leading in to four days of productive teaching and learning. We will see if I can pull that off.

Spent most of the non-lazing parts of the day assisting the boy with a D&D campaign he’s planning that is loosely based on Elden Ring, only to discover afterward that there are a ton of people out there who have already done a lot of the legwork necessary for that project. Unsurprisingly, when I mentioned it to him he said he wanted to do things his way, which scans with my role in the “assisting” project, which was to propose ideas for him to shoot down. I’ve told him that he can actually have people over next weekend to put characters together if he– you guessed it– attends school all four days this week, after attending school for a total of five days in January and February thus far.

2025 has sucked, y’all, even by the insanely low standards I had for it going in. We will see if this low bar for next week can be climbed over or not. Cross your fingers for me.

(*) Thank the Lord Jesu for this, because Valentine’s Day is reliably the worst day of the year to be a middle school teacher.

In which being sick has its advantages

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

Two facts, both of which are true: First, I have lost eight pounds since September 6th, which I recognize is neither healthy nor, most likely, sustainable, but it’s still super fun, and second, this is the first time my weight has been under 300 pounds in at least three years and very likely more like four or five. It’s just that I’ve only had the electronic scale since April of 2021.

Some of that is gonna come back. Hopefully I’ll stay under 300, though. I’ve come super close a couple of times and it was a hell of a relief to break that barrier even if it took several days of being sick to achieve it.

Still gonna review the Willow book. Maybe not until tomorrow or Wednesday, though.

Yay, nuts!

On By Luther M. SilerIn ParentingLeave a comment

It’s official: as of today, my son is no longer allergic to tree nuts or coconuts. Peanuts, unfortunately, are still on the no-go list, and are likely to remain there for the rest of his life, but he’s gone from a kid with a laundry list of allergies as a baby to just peanuts as a nearly-teenager and, even better, he’s managed to do it without ever having any reactions to anything stronger than a mild rash. Every other person I know with a peanut allergy has had to reach for an epipen at least once.

I probably have a similar post back in the archives from the Egg Challenge and the Strawberry Challenge, but the way this works is that they do a skin test first. He passed the skin test for everything but peanuts. So they pick one tree nut– apparently the allergen is common to all of them so it doesn’t really matter what kind you get– and they bring you into the doctor’s office, and they feed you a tiny sliver of the thing, then wait half an hour, then a little more, then half an hour, then a little more, then half an hour, and then a nice mouthful and this time they wait an hour. It takes forever and most of it is spent sitting around hoping to continue to be bored, because if something interesting happens it will be something terrible.

I forgot to bring a book, so I spent the whole morning holding forth on BlueSky. You should join me over there!

Also, speaking of joining me, I’m two minutes away from the White Dudes for Harris kickoff. Are you a white dude? Come on over. I don’t really plan on being there for much more than half an hour or so– from the list of Names they’re expecting, this is going to go on for hours, and I don’t have the stamina– but I’ll show up at the start and donate money again to pump up the numbers.

Tomorrow, Deadpool & Wolverine. For reals this time.