Status update, morning of 2023-08-01
Aug. 1st, 2023 10:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brin_bellway[cw: illness, medical, food]
I remain asymptomatic.apart from the stress responses, anyway Surgery is in about two hours.
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Knowing that I'm about to have fewer body parts is kind of weirding me out, even if it's a body part that doesn't normally make itself known.
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Knock on wood, but I'm beginning to suspect Mom is one of those anti-superspreaders that just naturally isn't very contagious. So far, this is her third ILI in a row in which nobody else showed symptoms, not even Dad. We didn't even take any protective measures against the second one, having mistaken it for carbohydrate withdrawal: our only evidence that it *wasn't* is that "keto flu" doesn't have post-acute sequelae.
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For the first few days I was going into the bathroom a few minutes before teeth-brushing or showering or other such maskless things and turning on the ventilation fan, but I think it was drawing in pollen. I switched to plunking my air purifier down in there for a bit before each maskless bathroom trip instead, and my throat seems happier now.
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As of Sunday, one week in, she reports that she feels back to baseline. She volunteered to continue quarantining until my surgery is over. She's sufficiently mobility-disabled at this point that the main difference is in whether her bedroom door is open to encourage other household members to drop in on her: I am still unlikely to encounter her without deliberately seeking her out, and I will probably continue to avoid that for at least a couple days while my body's repair mechanisms are already busy.
I miss hugs.
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I bought a dozen bottles of liquid yogurt, some pudding cups, some ice cream, a box of oatmeal packets, and a litre of milk. I was originally planning to buy the jug of "berry smoothie", but then I checked the nutrition information and it's very high in vitamin C (read: acid), so I got a jug of apple cider instead. Brother has agreed to make a batch of mashed potatoes for me tomorrow, and Dad will share some of his Ensure supplies. I'll probably make hummus later in the week: I doubt the oatmeal will be enough fibre.
(I seriously considered psyllium, but it's such a large package size for a product I've never tested and would probably only want for a week or two even if it worked out well.)
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Wish me luck.
I remain asymptomatic.
---
Knowing that I'm about to have fewer body parts is kind of weirding me out, even if it's a body part that doesn't normally make itself known.
---
Knock on wood, but I'm beginning to suspect Mom is one of those anti-superspreaders that just naturally isn't very contagious. So far, this is her third ILI in a row in which nobody else showed symptoms, not even Dad. We didn't even take any protective measures against the second one, having mistaken it for carbohydrate withdrawal: our only evidence that it *wasn't* is that "keto flu" doesn't have post-acute sequelae.
---
For the first few days I was going into the bathroom a few minutes before teeth-brushing or showering or other such maskless things and turning on the ventilation fan, but I think it was drawing in pollen. I switched to plunking my air purifier down in there for a bit before each maskless bathroom trip instead, and my throat seems happier now.
---
As of Sunday, one week in, she reports that she feels back to baseline. She volunteered to continue quarantining until my surgery is over. She's sufficiently mobility-disabled at this point that the main difference is in whether her bedroom door is open to encourage other household members to drop in on her: I am still unlikely to encounter her without deliberately seeking her out, and I will probably continue to avoid that for at least a couple days while my body's repair mechanisms are already busy.
---
I bought a dozen bottles of liquid yogurt, some pudding cups, some ice cream, a box of oatmeal packets, and a litre of milk. I was originally planning to buy the jug of "berry smoothie", but then I checked the nutrition information and it's very high in vitamin C (read: acid), so I got a jug of apple cider instead. Brother has agreed to make a batch of mashed potatoes for me tomorrow, and Dad will share some of his Ensure supplies. I'll probably make hummus later in the week: I doubt the oatmeal will be enough fibre.
(I seriously considered psyllium, but it's such a large package size for a product I've never tested and would probably only want for a week or two even if it worked out well.)
---
Wish me luck.
no subject
Date: 2023-08-01 02:10 pm (UTC)Portable air filters seriously rock.
no subject
Date: 2023-08-01 10:21 pm (UTC)So much. I wish the education had been better circumstances, but a solid practical understanding of disease transmission really does make life so much better. And breathing in less smoke when somebody burns something in the kitchen (...or somebody burns a *lot* of somethings in Quebec) is good for one's health, too.
(Sure, air purification has limitations, but it's still extremely helpful.)
I'll actually be getting in a batch of three more air purifiers tonight: we're upgrading to a more efficient model, which should pay for itself in about a year from lower maintenance costs. In addition to replacing our current two purifiers (one that I keep in the living room when awake and my bedroom when asleep; one that is normally in the basement but which we've temporarily moved to the parental bedroom to help manage Mom's germs), I will be placing one temporarily in the bathroom and in the long term next to the stove.
no subject
Date: 2023-08-02 03:16 pm (UTC)Hear HEAR. Also hear hear on the smoke side - I made my first CR box for wildfire-smoke reasons, but it's been amazing for other purposes, too.
I've been slowly replacing my older, noisy air purifiers with the small, quiet, powerful HEPA units that got popular around 2021. One now lives by the stove, one in the bedroom, and I'll run the CR box on bad pollen days even if it is noisy, because it moves a HUGE amount of air.
I was bemused to note, the other day, that it is no longer as cost-effective to replace all four of the furnace filters for the CR box rather than just replacing it with a commercial unit, and buying the filters for that. Over the course of years, the commercial unit wins, and is quieter to boot.
no subject
Date: 2023-08-02 04:14 pm (UTC)(See also the way that the Korean KF94 mask design, which is pretty much a best-of-both-worlds cross between a surgical mask and an N95, is now widely available elsewhere at reasonable prices. I do love my elastomeric, but there's also very much a place in my life for KF94s, and if one needs to abide by an office dress code they have few equals.)
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I think the parts for a Corsi-Rosenthal box must be cheaper in America: the cost-benefit analysis never made sense here, and even less so now that IKEA has come out with their line of cheap, energy-efficient, relatively quiet purifiers. (I'm definitely noticing the noise difference versus my previous model.)
no subject
Date: 2023-08-02 05:13 pm (UTC)I really like my elastomeric too, but it is almost impossible to wear when the temperature is approaching 40C, because my face turns into a tropical microclimate. I've gotten perilously close to a dangerous level of overheating like that, and more than once. Even when the outside humidity is in single digits, it builds up FAST in there.
Edit: I don't much like falling back on less-effective masks, but if it's that or heatstroke, I'll use the less effective one and try to mitigate in other ways.
...can confirm, your furnace filters cost well more than the ones available locally. For a brief period, it was almost impossible to find commercial HEPA filters, and they were astronomically expensive when available at all. At that point, the CR box was the right choice.
Not so much, any more.
no subject
Date: 2023-08-05 01:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-08-07 01:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-08-01 03:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-08-01 03:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-08-01 04:30 pm (UTC)A mood. My lower wisdom teeth absolutely had to go (they were well past starting to cause problems), but I still had weird stress dreams on that theme during the run-up. I don't think I'd handle any larger amputation well.
Hopefully everything goes smoothly for you! From my own experience and other reports, the pain and much of the hassle usually subsides after the first three days (counting the extraction as day one). It sounds like you're very well prepared as usual.
no subject
Date: 2023-08-01 10:36 pm (UTC)---
>>It sounds like you're very well prepared as usual.
<3
I was torn about whether to get plain milk or chocolate milk, but I'm glad I went with plain: turns out that chocolate Ensure tastes like chocolate milk. I was basically just hoping for "tolerable" out of the Ensure, and was surprised to find that it's actually good. Maybe I won't need the ice cream after all; well, I can always let Dad have it.