I had once mentioned that if he could get me a job working with him, that’d be cool. So, when he called me a couple weeks ago and told me he had done just that, I was a bit surprised. I had about two weeks to decide whether or not to move. Well, I did.
I start work tomorrow, with the whole background check and paperwork and such going forward. I’m currently in residence with Steve on his living room floor. That’ll probably be slightly less than a month, hopefully. My girlfriend and I are hopeful for a certain apartment that’s available in mid-to-late September. That would be a nice birthday present.
This was supposed to be a nice, long thoughtful entry, but, that’s pretty much it.
]]>So I went in and gave him a brief history, but he could tell by the size of my file that I had been going at this for some time. We went through everything I’ve tried and done and tests I’ve had, etc. We touched on Marfan’s, and made an appointment for a specialist (which isn’t until October). Then, something happened. For the first time in the couple years I’ve been dealing with this, he said “we need to find some form of pain control.” He gave me tramadol. I could have wept.
Unfortunately, the tramadol wasn’t strong enough to do much for the pain. So I used it for a week, then called, and he added diclofenac to the tramadol. I did this for about a week, and it wasn’t working either, so I called again, and he asked me to come in.
I went in Friday, and we went over the stuff again, and he agreed to treat me with stronger medicine until my appointment, and we’ll figure out what we need to do long-term from there (hopefully). So now I’m on a daily regimen of Tylenol #3 (co-codamol), meloxicam, and cyclobenzaprine. I’ve only been on it for a few days, but so far it seems to be doing more than anything else in recent memory.
I hope.
]]>A week or so ago my laptop’s hard drive died. I am currently poor, so that means my laptop is out of commission. This also means the only computer I have available to me is running Windows XP. And I am sad.
Since I was stuck with using Windows, I was left without my beloved Apple Mail. Since Dreamhost’s server-side mail filters catch next to nothing, I was relying on Mail’s client-side filter, which itself isn’t that great. Without even that, though, it was impossible to wade through my inbox. I’ll not shame Outlook’s spam filter with a mention.
So, I decided to move my mail from Dreamhost to “Google Apps.” I figured I’d move it over, use gmail’s web interface until I got my laptop back up, then enable IMAP within gmail and use Mail as normal, with the added benefit of Google’s spam filter, which is excellent. This in itself was not difficult.
The difficultly lies in the fact that I have around 10,000 emails, and I wanted to keep them. Not as easy.
]]>First attempt: Use Outlook Express to IMAP to my current mail, sync to the server that has all my mail, change the account settings to the new mail, then sync back to the server. This was made impossible by the fact that somehow, OE was already resolving the new gmail records in DNS, but Outlook wasn’t. Okay, so…
Second attempt: Try the above with Outlook instead of OE. Well, for some reason, Outlook refused to download all the mail. Every time it tried to sync it failed miserably, usually freezing. Why? Because Windows software sucks.
Third attempt: Use Google’s own free thingy to upload my mail from OE to Google. This took an amazing six fucking hours and still only managed to upload a fraction of what it said it did, so I had to discard it all and try again.
Fourth attempt: Okay, fine. I have a copy of my mail already stored locally, because I have backups of Mail’s directory. Mail stores all of this bullshit in some .emlx format, which nothing reads, but is apparently the same as .eml for some reason, but not really, because after I spent two hours importing them into OE after renaming them (at least not by hand, thankfully) only about half made it, and only a fraction of those were readable.
Fifth attempt: All of my mail was stored in Maildir format on a Unix host. Okay, so I should be able to just download that directory to Windows, and import it into Outlook, then sync up to the Google servers. Whoops, not only do neither OE nor Outlook import Maildir, but I can’t even copy the directory to Windows because the file names in that format have colons and commas, and Windows doesn’t like that one bit.
Sixth attempt: Okay, so now I need to find some free Unix tool that converts Maildir to mbox. That sounds simple enough, but none of the ones I found in the first decade came close to working properly. This took almost three hours to find, and another hour to convert all my mail. So now I wait for the 200mb to download to Windows, and try importing mbox into Outlook. Wait, Outlook can’t import mbox, but OE can. Seriously? Okay, import mbox into OE, then import from OE into Outlook. Hey, it worked! Wait, why do I have like ten of every message? Because Windows software sucks. So I figure there must be some Outlook plugin that can delete duplicate messages. As it turns out, there’s a thousand of them, and they all cost $40. Why? I seriously searched for a few hours for these things, and they all cost money. The two free ones I found didn’t actually work. I briefly considered writing some Windows-bastard script to do it, but then I remembered—oh wait—I’d rather die. Eventually I found a free one that actually worked. Then I told Outlook to sync, and after an hour or so, all of my mail was finally at Google.
This took almost six or seven collective hours to accomplish. This would have taken ten minutes with Apple Mail. I would have sync’d, waited for the DNS to update, then sync’d again. Boom, done. Windows is the woman of operating systems: always doing things the hard way.
]]>I am still unemployed.
Also on Thursday, I had an appointment with my usual clinic doctor. Apparently, the clinic was taken over by some other “network” or whatever the organizations are, and there was a new doctor. And he was awesome. I ran through my history, and mentioned the possibility of dural ecstasia due to Marfan’s syndrome, and he ran out and got like three textbooks and ran back in and sat down and talked to me like I was his best friend. He made an appointment for me with a cardiologist (though it’s quite far away; October 22nd) and gave me a prescription for tramadol and told me to call back in a week to see if it was working. Unfortunately it’s not, so I guess I’ll try to find some way to say that without appearing ungrateful for the medicine. Maybe this guy will actually figure things out. It sure would be nice.
I miss Kori.
]]>I am also currently unemployed. Someone give me a job.
]]>I got there and did the usual questions and they took me straight to the back. Walking was painful. As soon as I got back there a doctor came in and I gave him the symptoms and a brief history and the first thing he said is “it’s weird that your ESR and CRP are normal… but have you heard of ankylosing spondylitis?” That makes like four or five people that have suggested it. He told me to forget my regular doctors and go see a rheumatologist. He asked me what medicine I had and was appalled that all I take is naproxen. He gave me a shot of hydromorphone (Dilaudid) which totally took the pain away, and he gave me a script for a handful of Vicodin. I was almost in tears I was so relieved.
I tried to call my PCP to make an appointment with a rheumatologist but apparently there aren’t any at my hospital. That means I’d have to pay upfront for one. I really don’t know what I’m supposed to do about this. I’m now accepting PayPal donations (only partly joking I’m afraid).
I’m unsure what to do. Fingers crossed I guess.
]]>So why do I feel so crappy? I feel as if I’m just that much further from an answer. Without inflammation, what can it even be? Now my PCP doesn’t really believe me, and won’t give me any more medicine. What should I do? I can’t work without the medicine, and I can’t afford to lose my job. I don’t know what I can do.
I feel hopeless.
]]>]]>The quake measured 5.2 on the Richter scale and occurred at 4:37 a.m. CDT. It was centered in southeastern Illinois, five miles from the town of Bellmont, according to Timothy M. Kusky, director of the Center for Environmental Sciences at St. Louis University.
I’ll call today to see if those tests results are in. I’m almost out of drugs.
Update: The asswipes are closed until Monday. I’ll probably have to go to the ER if the pain continues as it has today.
]]>I’ll have the results by next week hopefully. I’ll update then.
]]>I’m not sure what, if any, moral to the story there is. Sure the guy’s an entertaining writer and I guess it was kind of funny at points, but is there something else there? The world sucks and found his escapism; sucks for his wife. Next week on Jenny Jones: I messed up my marriage by fucking a horse!
Obviously the guy’s an idiot. He has a drug problem. I posted the article because of the relation to pain medicine. It’s interesting that he could do all of this over eBay, and it’s in sort of a legal grey area. It’s legal to grow and use opium somniferum for art. The grey area comes when defining what constitutes “art.” (Update: I was wrong. It’s legal to do anything with the seeds, but it’s illegal to grow the plants themselves. This seems odd, inducing a chicken-egg situation vis á vis seeds and flowers. This is technically manufacturing a class two narcotic, but it’s enforced in the same way as ripping the tag off your mattress is enforced.) It’s certainly art to grow them because they’re pretty flowers, but is it art to use the dried pods in floral crafts? That was the whole premise of them being available on eBay. It’s apparently innocuous in one light (pretty flowers in floral crafts), but obviously absurd in the other (“Fortunately, for crafting projects requiring so many poppy plants, financing was available for $17 per month. For all of us hard-core flower arrangers, of course”). How many people really know that “poppy” flowers are even what opium comes from? How many people get the whole “poppies put us to sleep” in the Wizard of Oz? How many people even know what “somniferous” even means, and how many people make the connection to the floral name?
Unfortunately, this blog entry was a little short to get your read on the situation: Is he a tragic hero, championing the cause of those who just want life to stop hurting? Is he a lame jackass who can’t seem to get over his addiction in order to live real life? Or is he just a good storyteller whose prose lets us know that while we’re suffering there’s someone out there who does as well and we’re all just coping the best we can?
As far as I can tell, his use of drugs had nothing to do with the treatment of pain. I found the article interesting because maybe, if in a desperate circumstance where I find myself unable to ever be relieved of pain, buying poppies on eBay is better than going to South county and scoring an eight ball. He’s an addict. He needs to be in rehab. He’s also a good storyteller.
All this is ignoring that, aside from the poppies, I don’t see how the two articles relate. Plus, the slideshow doesn’t seem to work in Firefox 3 Beta 5. Sucks.
That is how they relate. This old couple with the poppies in the backyard are going to be charged with manufacturing heroin and other stupid shit. Even if they were growing them for something other than the fact that they’re pretty flowers, then they were probably using them to make tea to help with their arthritis or something. Do we really think these people are flooding the streets with heroin?
]]>Also, see here.
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