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Yesterday I went into hospital to get a biopsy done on the Thing In My Lung. It didn't go well.
( Content warning for blood, needles. Both of them But More So Than Normal. )
The nurses complimented for being a "total trooper" and "possibly the least distressed person in the room". I explained to Emily that from my perspective, while it was a really, really unpleasant experience, it didn't really feel all that distressing. Like, medically and legally, they were the ones who were responsible for figuring out what to do about it.
Emily acknowledged that that was really true in a way that suggested she might try that as a way of reassuring future patients who are anxious about stuff.
As far as I was concerned, my job was to do what they told me to do - like rolling over even though it hurt a lot, for example, and not sitting up until they said I could - and wait for it to be over. There were no decisions I had to make.
After he finished his office hours my oncologist came up to talk about it. He was a bit distressed, because they don't like they don't have an absolutely definite confirmed diagnosis of the lump to go on, and the next step is a lobectomy. They'll discuss it at their multidisciplinary meeting, but it's nearly certain now I'm going to be losing the middle lobe of my right lung.
(Good news: it's the smallest, apparently.)
(Also: my left lung only has two lobes to work with TOTAL and it was doing a pretty good job! 80% is a good effort! With twice as many lobes I'm sure I'll do okay!)
I pointed out to him that since it's growing it'll quite possibly cause me problems eventually even if it's benign, and a full best effort had been made in good faith to get all the information we could. It's just that the lump in my lung is in a really, really unfortunate location, and pretty much unreachable without doing me Significant Harm.
I am good at reassuring my medical people, I guess. The nurses in the lab seemed to get a lot calmer when they realised I wasn't panicking, which makes sense, because if I'd been panicky and, say, hyperventilating that situation would have been a LOT worse... and still their responsibility to handle.
Anyway. Today I am still somewhat sore and absolutely exhausted. My body does not seem to have appreciated that experience. In fairness, it had to grow some new blood as well and that's probably quite tiring to do all in a rush.
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So it turns out the reason why I've been having an ongoing problem with my lower back and hips (which I have, it's been awful) is that my transverse abdominal muscles responded to two rounds of abdominal surgery (that, admittedly, went straight through them) with "fuck this shit I'm out" and haven't worked in the best part of two years.
I saw a women's health physiotherapist who, with the help of an ultrasound, checked out my muscles and helped me find an exercise that activated them, and two gentle flexes made my transverse abdominal muscles feel all tired.
And I mean gentle. Like, if this was an arm exercise we'd be talking "raise your hand two inches" kind of gentle.
So I get to add a new exercise to my rehab list! It is quite a long list.
My dad finally gave me a copy of his collection of digitised family photos.
Obviously looking through such things can give you many emotions. I include among the list: puzzlement, because for some reason my parents had taken, and had developed, and kept for the next approximately forty years, a photograph of a breaded ham.
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ugh
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Feb. 9th, 2023 @ 09:37 am
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So last time I posted I was like "wow I lost my password"
I also mentioned "so I have a concussion"
GUESS WHO HAD NO IDEA WHAT SHE CHANGED HER PASSWORD TO AND JUST HAD TO CHANGE IT AGAIN
Concussion recovery continues. I'm seeing the guy. It's currently bad again because the weekend was too draining for my bruised brain - five hour drives each way to go to a funeral, crying for four hours straight, that kinda thing, very hard on brains.
I have a vague recollection that I used to want to use this journal more just so, like, I'd forget things less? But the last few years have been hard. I don't know. I think I've been running from the self-reflection involved, also every time I go to my reading page I'm horribly confused because people are casually referring to things I now don't know about and then I feel terrible and overwhelmed.
Right now I am still being an asshole who isn't reading my reading page because, as mentioned, concussion, I have a lot of trouble with reading things.
Anyway, in re: not wanting to forget things:
I noticed L (age 3 and a half) kept looking at me during the funeral. Afterwards, his mother told me that he could see I was crying and kept wanting to bring me tissues, but she didn't let him because she knew if she let go of him she'd have to chase him to stop him just running around in a way that would be quite inappropriate at his grandfather's funeral.
I still think that was just so sweet, though.
Later that evening we all went to have fish and chips at Emu Point and I was feeling a bit rubbish (the wake got very loud and my brain kinda shut down, concussion sucks) so I lay down on J&T's tarp blanket thing and L hurled himself onto my tummy, oof. (His dad called him back after he ran off again immediately so he could apologise, while his aghast mother checked I was okay and was like "if it makes you feel better he only does that with people he really likes and feels comfortable with! We're so sorry!" Apparently he usually only does it with them and she had not anticipated it at all and I have never seen someone radiate so much I know you had surgery not that long ago I really hope you're better oh my god did my son just kill you energy.)
I am not upset and L is still one of my favourite humans in the world, I adore him so much. He's just such a delight.
I also met ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png) velithya's brother's kids for the first time in their lives and they're great. Also got to hang out with her brother himself - we've met before a few times but hadn't really had a chance to hang out, that was nice.
One of C's brothers sang a song at the funeral and it was so affecting I currently can't listen to songs that have vaguely similar themes without crying.
I took this picture that evening:
Description: Foreground: white beach sand and some long grasses. Beyond water of a bay, and beyond that hills below a near-sunset sky, the almost-full moon visible.
(I had to edit this post because I'd left the image way too big.)Current Mood:  listless
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For a while I even lost my password!
But also for the last few months I have been recovering from a quite severe concussion, so that doesn't help with text-based anything.
I now have a scar across the bridge of my nose like some kind of fantasy character.
Until the concussion derailed it I was writing an original work of fiction - I'm over 300k words in, but I'm struggling a little with it post-concussion, which sucks. We found a guy who specialises in concussion treatment (there are actually treatments, it's a whole thing) and it's helping a lot but I'm still having trouble with memory - short term especially, but longer-term is pretty erratic too.
I'm starting to be able to read things a little bit but not if it's too complicated or requires too much thought or mental engagement. I do better with things I've read before.
Nonetheless I came across some "writing advice" that was so bad it made me angry.
The initial advice comes from Chuck Palahniuk, and he advises that people avoid using "thinking" words - knew, realised, thought, etc. It had example passages of detailed descriptions of characters' body language and movements, and he was all "you'll hate me for this, but" and yes, Chuck, I do, but not because it's hard but because it's shit advice.
If you're stripping all of those things out of your writing, you're making it your deliberate intent to write every character as a thoughtless, reaction-only template with no interior life or cognitive processing. Which, sure, for some characters, but it shouldn't be your default.
(Honestly I think this advice says a lot about Chuck Palahniuk and what a soulless, tepid void of a human he must be.)
Because look at it from the perspective of a real person.
Say the person is me, and the other person in the "scene" is velithya.
I don't think: "V's shoulders are slumped and her mouth has something of a downward slant about it. Her movements are sharp and crisp, something jagged about the way she unzips her boots."
I think: "I think V has had a bad day."
Because people form conclusions! People think about things!
And if you strip that out, not only do you portray your character as a very specific type of void, but you lose the ability to do some of the most interesting (imo) character work out there: the unreliable narrator.
Now, I don't doubt it is far beyond Chuck Palahniuk's skill or capacity to write a character in such a way that the reader can see that the character's perception of events isn't wholly accurate, but that's fantastic in the hands of someone who has the ability to do it. Because that's a thing! People interpret what's going on all the time but sometimes they get it wrong.
I wrote a fic set called triptych that presents the same set of events from three different perspectives because perspective is interesting, and if you strip out all of that perception stuff? All the thought?
You've stripped out the perspective entirely.
Chuck Palahniuk's advice is shit advice that will only work for cishet white men with excesses of privilege.Current Music: cricket commentary
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I live
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Jan. 7th, 2022 @ 04:02 pm
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It seems like for years now I occasionally post to indicate that I'm alive and then disappear again to resume never, ever keeping up with reading anything.
Apparently I last posted last March.
In April I had more surgery, and it turns out recovery from the second major surgery in six months is harder.
I blew through the Medicare threshold two years in a row! This year with several months remaining, so that tells you what a great year I had.
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Swiped from velithya
Rules: List the first lines of your last 20 stories (if you have less than 20, just list them all!). See if there are any patterns. Choose your favourite opening line.
( Working backwards from most recent stories: )
Hmm, patterns.
9/20 start with the viewpoint character's name.
What's somewhat notable to me is that there is some difference between how I start fics that are continuations of a series relative to ones that aren't. Series continuations are a lot more likely to run with the expectation that the reader will understand something of the framework/setting specifics, unless you're looking at ridiculous future bullshit entries, which are usually outsider POV and are going hard for characterisation of the viewpoint character.
It also seems to run a little bit in waves, because often it seems like a few stories in succession will have a similar opening style - but the stories aren't posted in exactly the order they were written, in places, so I don't even know if that's anything but coincidence.
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We've moved house!
Also since my last post I've had abdominal surgery to remove a 10x10cm paratubal cyst, come off opiates, gone through withdrawal, and made substantial progress on the process of actual grief it turns out you go through when you find out that you're never ever going to have kids because you need a hysterectomy to remove your pre-cancerous uterus.
In the course of the last surgery they took a bunch of samples of my uterus and uncovered the early stages of a plot to murder me. Murder-uterus has been served with an eviction notice, surgery date is still unscheduled.
I'm anticipating it being in the next few months, but it's not hyper-urgent enough for it to be happening just yet. Probably going to be delayed a little further by the UK variant breaking loose in Perth.
The new house is really nice. We liked our old house, we lived there for twelve years, and now it seems so awful. (Doesn't help that multiple things just... went wrong, recently. Like the range hood broke down and the ancient wall unit for the aircon was going critical (so fucking loud, oh my god) while this place is newly-built and just... so nice.)
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I got given fentanyl this morning
and all I can say is
holy shit, no-one should have access to this outside of hospitals
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Jun. 3rd, 2020 @ 08:01 pm
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Still limited in my reading, because I'm living on the edge of a panic attack half the time, and everything about the world is anxiety-inducing.
Found out yesterday that Guido - who has been like an uncle to me for as long as I remember, far more than my actual, biological uncles (one of whom I am not remotely certain could even tell you my name), and who is the son of the adoptive grandmother who died in December (whose husband died earlier this year) - is now in hospital.
He had a stroke a year or two back, and apparently it was then discovered that he has leukaemia.
For reasons that have not been explained, the doctors decided not to treat it, and now it has "spiked". He's in hospital.
I am puzzled as to why this has just been... left.
Hopefully Western Australia's success in the fight against covid19 will mean that if he's dying, I will have the chance to see him.
Family is so 2019.
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I haven't been reading or posting lately because... I want to say "I suck" but more accurately it's because I haven't had the spoons and everything remains terrible and I've been a mix of doing things and grieving people and that's already too much.
Back in March I found out Ring Fit Adventure exists and ordered a copy, which I just got, because they were sold out.
Current state of my fitness: frankly I was nearly done in by the warmup part, but I got a start on the actual adventure part, too.
Today's Results:
Ring Press: 36
Jogging: 98m
Dash: 43m
Walking: 0m
And what Ring Fit Adventure says is:
"You worked hard! These are great results for your first day!"
(Before the start it asks you your age, weight, and how much you exercise, and my answers were 39, fat, and not at all.)
So what we have so far is that Ring Fit Adventure isn't judgey, which is nice, and I am so hideously out of shape it's appalling, which I knew. I was still working on recovering from the broken leg when I had that really vicious bout of flu, and everything kind of went downhill from there.
And now my new plan to try and get in better shape is a Nintendo game, and I'm okay with that!
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Mar. 21st, 2020 @ 10:25 am
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Fallen behind on reading because I fell into a deep depression. Deaths in the family, etc. I can't handle anything.
But I'm up to having written about 180k words of fic this year which is kind of cool, started posting the main fic a couple of weeks ago now it's finished.
Here
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Jan. 13th, 2020 @ 06:22 pm
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me: crawls into a hole, loses contact with everyone, doesn't write anything for ten years
also me: almost 17,000 words into a fic and still really, really early in the plot
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1. What did you do in 2019 that you'd never done before?
Picked a lock.
2. Did you keep your new years' resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
Didn't make any and won't.
3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
Not super-close.
4. Did anyone close to you die?
Yes.
5. What countries did you visit?
I didn't.
6. What would you like to have in 2020 that you lacked in 2019?
Social contact with people who don't live in my house other than my mother.
7. What dates from 2019 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
25th of November. 5th of December. In a better way, the 19th of October and 30th of November.
8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
Still being here at the end of it, I think.
9. What was your biggest failure?
Not seeing Mitzy sooner.
10. Did you suffer illness or injury?
Of course.
11. What was the best thing you bought?
A ring.
12. Whose behaviour merited celebration?
velithya. myfyr. Steve Smith.
13. Whose behaviour made you appalled and depressed?
Most politicians.
14. Where did most of your money go?
Outside of, like, basic living expenses? Ring.
15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
A video game wedding.
16. What song will always remind you of 2020?
Ride of the Valkyries.
17. Compared to this time last year, are you:
i. happier or sadder? Both, in different ways. I'm still grieving, but a couple of sources of deep sadness have been converted to happiness.
ii. thinner or fatter? About the same. Maybe slightly thinner.
iii. richer or poorer? About the same.
18. What do you wish you'd done more of?
Visiting Mitzy.
19. What do you wish you'd done less of?
Being sick. Not visiting Mitzy. Being anxious. Grieving.
20. How will you spend Christmas?
See previous post.
21. What LJ users did you meet for the first time?
"LJ"
22. Did you fall in love in 2020?
I did not.
23. How many one-night stands?
Ha.
24. What was your favourite TV program?
I don't watch a lot of TV. The Untamed, probably.
25. Do you hate anyone now that you didn't hate this time last year?
Hate is such a strong word.
26. What was the best book you read?
A book of collected texts of WW2-era radio broadcasts by the RAF.
27. What was your greatest musical discovery?
Nothing comes to mind.
28. What did you want and get?
Relationship commitment.
29. What did you want and not get?
To talk to Mitzy again. Ever.
30. What was your favourite film of this year?
I don't watch a lot of movies.
31. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
I was 39. I spent the day at home, not doing much. Tried not to feel shit about how few people sent me birthday wishes of any kind.
32. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
Talking to Mitzy.
33. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2019?
"These are clothes."
34. What kept you sane?
velithya and myfyr.
35. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
n/a
36. What political issue stirred you the most?
"Why is my country keeping refugees in concentration camps?"
37. Who did you miss?
Mitzy.
38. Who was the best new person you met?
Lucas (age 8 months).
39. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2019:
Loving someone and being loved makes painful things more bearable. The flip side is that if forced to endure those things alone, the absence feels like an open wound.
40. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year:
I got through all of last year, and I'm here
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Went down to the farm for Christmas. It was good.
I got baby cuddles, got to feed baby L. a few times (fun when you do it rarely, feeding babies), helped young J. with his Lego, saw many wonderful people.
Got a lesson in the power of detachment, in a way.
The family sprung Grandma from the home to come for Christmas lunch. She can barely raise her voice above a whisper and she's physically weak and easily exhausted.
The thing is, it was obviously a little distressing for her daughter and grandchildren to try to help her so much, when she'd cared for them their whole lives. And it seemed distressing to her to need them to help her - when they asked her, she'd generally tell them she was fine, every time.
But when I asked, she could say she needed things more easily, it seemed.
I helped her with her lunch and fed her cheesecake when lifting utensils had become too hard. She fell asleep holding my hand.
And the thing is? For me, doing that didn't hurt. She was elderly when I met her for the first time a couple of years ago, and I never knew her well at all. I am not grieving for her decline. I might feel more strongly if I weren't three weeks out from a very painful funeral, but since I am in fact three weeks out from a painful funeral, someone else's grandma doesn't really leave a mark right now.
And I think that worked out for the best for everyone.
Grandma seemed to find it easier to accept help from someone who was just "warmly friendly" and not "visibly putting a brave face on pain" when interacting with her. Everyone else got to have a family Christmas lunch like it was normal. I had a lovely Christmas lunch, too, with people I love, but also got to feel useful and helpful which is very positive for me.
And I'm really impressed with myself that I ate my entire lunch one-handed (one hand was steadying Grandma's tray and staying in range so she could touch my hand if she needed my attention - the room was noisy) without making a mess or dropping anything.
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So I'm kinda bad at remembering faces and putting names to them. I suspect aphantasia is involved. Not having a visual memory makes it hard to remember visual things without additional information/context.
The characters on the Untamed are mostly a group of young men, roughly the same age, wearing identical or near-identical clothing, with identical hairstyles, speaking a language I don't understand, and they're all Chinese.
It gets worse: they all have 3-4 names. I don't mean long names, I mean different names. Which were used variably according to a system I did not initially understand at all.
Here's the process I went through:
Episodes 1-3: Wei WuXian is the smiley one who's often wearing a different outfit. He is also the YiLing Patriarch, and I think he is Wei Ying because there's no other Weis, I THINK? Lan Wangji or Lan Zhan - not sure which? - is the one who is deadpan at all times, even when somehow also conveying "barely-contained homicidal rage" and "I want to stab you in your stupid, attractive face" and "your unseemly display of emotion causes me physical pain". Jiang Cheng is the one with the Hapsburg chin. The Lan minions are Sweet Soft Boy and Sassy Boy. I can't tell the rest apart.
At this point, velithya had a long and busy working week, and we took a break from watching. In the interim, I read a guide on how the names work and also read a number of translated chapters of the book the series is based on.
Which means that between episodes 3 and 4, I learned how the names work/in what situation each name is applied, which group of names attaches to which character, and who the other characters are, and some sense of the role the play in the story.
Episodes 4-6: None of these people look remotely similar. I know exactly who everyone is, and can remember all their names. These are very different individuals who happen to be wearing similar clothing and matching hairstyles. Lan SiZhui remains delightful, and Lan JinYing remains sassy.
Mostly what it's brought home to me is the level to which I rely on *really broad* distinguishing features like hair colour/style to tell people apart.
There'd been indicators before this, I did kinda know it, but until I watched a group of people who matched in age, ethnicity, hairstyle, and dress, I didn't realise that I wouldn't be able to tell them apart.
Like, if there were two characters on screen, obviously they looked different from each other? But unless they were using names in that scene, I was struggling to identify who they were and place them relative to the story. And names were only so helpful because the names weren't consistent so if they were using a completely different name from prior appearances, I was like, "I am sure this guy has appeared previously but I am not completely certain where."
The moral of this story is, for people who know me personally:
If you change your hairstyle I will hate it for a while even if it looks good, because even if I know you well and love you, when I see you, it will take me a moment to verify to myself who the hell you are.
Maybe that's why in fiction I tend to like the shows where characters wear uniforms or something that means their outfits are thoroughly consistent. Because even if the outfits match each other, then that becomes background information I can ignore when identifying people.
And so they're some of the most recognisable people I've ever seen on TV. Like, there's a brief shot in the closing credits of a guy with a goatee and I'm pretty sure I can actually tell which character that's the older version of, despite makeup differences and facial hair, and usually I am terrible at that. But because all the broader categories of distinguishing features have been eliminated - hair style, hair colour, dress styles, age, ethnicity, even build (they're all slender-but-fit) - I have never identified faces so well in my life.
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Dec. 4th, 2019 @ 05:56 pm
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Tomorrow is shaping up to be a clusterfuck beyond belief, some of that is preventable, but the people who could do something towards that prevention are refusing to listen. And the best part is, I am going to get to deal with it all by myself because certain people involved are being completely ridiculous in really offensive ways!
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Greyscale and bruise purple.
It just screams: "This flag is for the boring, vaguely repellent asexuals, who are clearly not interesting enough for anything approaching pretty colours."
Ugh.
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Nov. 26th, 2019 @ 09:49 am
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She died yesterday afternoon.
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Nov. 25th, 2019 @ 09:35 am
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The specialist has said that M. won't recover.
Going to the hospital to say goodbye today.
Not sure I'm going to be able to get all this out without crying too much.
I hope you know how much you meant to me. I wish I'd showed you more, told you more.
I missed you so much. It's been so long. I was so sick, for so long, and I couldn't dare to see you in case it was catching. I wanted to see you. I love you.
I was going to come see you next month. I had plans. I wanted you to meet my family. I wanted them to meet you.
You'll always be in my heart.
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South Africa won the World Cup.
Kiya Solisi became the first black captain to lift the Webb Ellis Cup.
No, seriously, this is actually a big deal.
South Africa is a rugby nation, but the composition of the Springboks, for a long time, very white. (Soccer was for black people, and yes, frankly, the fact that under Apartheid, black people got soccer and white people got rugby should be taken as an accurate summary of the relative merits of those two sports.)
Despite the ridiculousness of the notion that all the best players could be drawn from a minority of the population, the Bokke were still a good team.
This is their third World Cup win.
But it's the first - by any nation - in which the winning captain was a black man.
It's also the first time South Africa actually scored tries in the World Cup Final, and the man who scored was Makoze Mapimpi.
Sport *is* real life.
I cried this morning because South Africa has two new heroes who can and will be heroes to *all South Africans*.
There is hope yet for healing in the Rainbow Nation.
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