Tag Archives: Health

I’m on the Mend!

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I am finally on the mend. It’s a long slog back to what passes for healthy for me, though. Staying awake long enough to read anything has been a challenge, and books are coming due at the library before I’ve even been able to start them. I’m particularly sad about Naomi Klein’s No Is Not Enough – it’s due today, someone else has a hold on it, and I’ve only managed to read the first 20 or so pages. Enough to know I REALLY want to read the entire thing. I am trying to resist the temptation to buy my own copy.

IMG_20171011_180750.jpgI received my copy of Femme Magnifique in the mail this week! FM is a feminist graphic novel made through Kickstarter – the tagline is “A comic book anthology salute to 50 magnificent women who take names, crack ceilings and change the game in pop, politics, art & science.” There are 50 different comics, by different artists, about pioneering women. It’s a fantastic book, and I will take some pictures and put up a full review as soon as I can. My copy, unfortunately, arrived with some damage to the spine, but the group behind it had already sent out an e-mail saying their shipper had used the wrong packaging for the first wave of books, and to contact them if your book arrived damaged. So I’ve done that, and they’re figuring out how to replace copies.

I finally got around to reading Six of Crows as I was getting sick, before I got truly ill. It was fantastic, and I have the sequel, Crooked Kingdom, which I’ll be reading very soon. I’ll put up a joint review of the two books when I’m done.

I also bought a novel, because my library doesn’t have it, about a couple opening up their relationship. Next Year, For Sure is by a Canadian author, as well, so that’s another for my Read Canadian Challenge.

I’m hoping to get back to two reviews a week as soon as I finish kicking this lung/ear/throat crap to the curb. I miss blogging, and more than that, I miss reading!

Oh boy, Tonsillitis.

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Might be taking a week or two hiatus from blogging as I recover from being pretty ill. I’ve mentioned in the past that I have some chronic illnesses, but I have been pretty steadily gaining new readers here and there, so I’ll update.

My main issues are migraines and Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis. Hashimoto’s is an autoimmune disease where the immune system gets confused and attacks the thyroid gland. This eventually destroys enough of the thyroid gland that it can’t produce enough thyroid hormone, and a supplement needs to be taken. That’s where I’m at now – I have a daily thyroid pill. On occasion, usually when I’m sick with something else, my immune system will flare up and attack my thyroid again, causing it to swell up, get inflamed, and deteriorate further.

So my chronic cough, that I’ve had for a couple of years now (Bronchitis a few years ago plus my migraine maintenance med has a side effect of chronic cough) turned into Tonsillitis and an ear infection this week. Which triggered the Hashimoto’s. So after an urgent care visit Thursday night, I’m on an antibiotic, a steroid/anti-inflammatory, and some prescription cough syrup with a pain med in it. My voice is almost entirely gone (I typed up my symptoms and history to hand to all my doctors at the Urgent Care instead of having to talk so much!), I’m still coughing though not NEARLY as bad as I was Thursday, and I’m having trouble staying awake. (All three meds cause drowsiness, yay!)

All three meds also have a side effect of headache, which is not playing well with my predilection towards migraines anyway. So as you can imagine, the last several days have not been the most fun.

I did manage to finish American War by Omar El Akkad (an Egyptian-Canadian author, so it qualifies for my Read Canadian challenge), and I have a LOT to say about it. It’ll be getting a review soon, but for now I’ll just say it’s one of my favorites of 2017. I also have No is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need, which is on the National Book Foundation’s longlist for their Nonfiction award this year. The same author has written a few other anti-capitalism books (Shock Doctrine, No Logo, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate) so if I like her style in No is Not Enough, I might have to pick up some of her other work.

I tried reading Demon Hunting in Dixie, because I won book 6 through Goodreads, and wanted to start from the beginning of the series. I almost threw it across the room less than a hundred pages in, but that reason deserves its own post.

I have several other books from the library I’m still trying to work on – Dark Money, Hitlerland (which is really interesting, I just keep getting distracted), The Tigress of Forli, and The Daughter of Sherlock Holmes, among others.

I’m really sad because I had planned to go to the Baltimore Book Festival today – I’d been looking forward to it for months – and now I’m too sick to leave the house. Especially when it’s so hot outside, which I don’t deal with very well even when I’m not actively sick. So that’s REALLY disappointing.

#90sinJuly – July 4 – No Rain

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“And I don’t understand why I sleep all day
And I start to complain that there’s no rain
And all I can do is read a book to stay awake
And it rips my life away but it’s a great escape
Escape, escape, escape”

Oooo I identify with this. I’m hypothyroid, and despite being medicated, I still have bad fatigue days sometimes. Sometimes that means I can’t pull myself out of bed to go do things I’d planned to do. I tend to write and schedule a bunch of blog posts on my good days, so even if I have a bad fatigue day, something still posts on the blog here. So this is my book today – it’s taught me a lot about my condition and what I can do to mitigate it.20170626_134908