Tired of being tired all the time

I’m almost certain I’ve written a somewhat similar title, probably within the last year or so. In the last three years? Who knows. Time is WHACK right now, y’all.

I’m not just talking about the emotional drain and tiredness from the deaths that have peppered my life the last five years. This time I’m specifically talking about last year, when I had Septicemia in May, and Covid in August. I was really, really lucky that I didn’t lose an organ when I had Septicemia. And I was really, really lucky that I was traveling with all of my asthma medicine when I got Covid in England/Scotland, and could get what I didn’t have at Boots.

In retrospect about those two illnesses, I probably should have read more about recovering from Septicemia (in addition to just what it is in general). And I probably should have gone to the hospital when I got Covid. At the very least, if I didn’t go to the hospital, I should have cut the rest of my Scotland vacation short, and come home.

But I didn’t, and I kept pushing myself and pushing myself because up until the Septicemia I’d never had anything I hadn’t bounced back from within a week or two. When Robyn and I were hanging out with Lesley in Hospice, and I was telling her how tired I was, she was like “well, it’s not been quite a year since you had Septicemia and it can take that long to bounce back from it.”

LOL WHUT

A year? It can take upwards of a YEAR to recover from Septicemia? Plus I had a very bad case of first-time Covid, that’s resulted in Long Covid? WELL NO WONDER I’M SO FUCKING TIRED ALL THE TIME. Because here I’ve been pushing myself as if I should have been fully recovered from both after about late August of last year, which means that my body has never fully gotten enough time to recover.

Just thinking about it makes me want to go to sleep for a week.

Well, my doctor and I have been talking about it. She’s had me get a few CT scans and an MRI in the last year, to see how my lungs are progressing after being so sick, and she’s not happy with how slowly my lungs are recovering. She’s found me a lung specialist, who can’t see me until the end of December, and she’s trying to find me a kidney specialist as well (even though Lefty is doing as well as she usually is, that champ!). She’s more worried about my lungs than my kidney, but she does want me to have a kidney specialist just in case – she does a lot, but she’s not a lung or a kidney specialist and she wants me to have access to those. She also wants me to get lung scans about every three or four months instead of once or twice a year, just to keep tabs on…. hmm. I call my one kidney “Lefty”… what should I call two sickly lungs? Beth (Little Women) and Colin (The Secret Garden)?

Anyway, all of these new specialists and future scans wouldn’t be so worrisome except that the Affordable Care Act – how I get my health insurance – is about to get gutted, with what I have to pay monthly going up exponentially. Yes, anything could happen between now and December 31st, but you have to be signed up for next year by December 15th, and Congress isn’t going to start talking about changes/extending the subsidies until the middle of December. AWESOME.

My doctor has given me a few leads on different kinds of insurance – more of a Cost Sharing thing – but I’m too tired to get into all that tonight and the info I’ve found just in the little time I’ve looked into it …. that could be a whole blog post by itself! I will probably stick with traditional insurance, even though it’s a racket, unless my premium gets upwards of $1000/month. But that, also, is a different blog post. I can barely keep my eyes open now, and I have a busy day ahead of me tomorrow.

Thanks for reading, y’all! I really need to get back to blogging more regularly. I work things out in my head through writing, and I have a lot of things to work out!