Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

I have barely been on the Internet all summer, so I apologize for the lack of posts here!!!

We’re having a wonderful summer so far, although wow, what a beating it is physically — my pain medication has been upped significantly but my pain level has been rising and rising, presumably due to all the activity. And I suppose that in some ways it’s exponential the way it gets worse because when it was mostly my legs that hurt, it was experiential just partial damage to my body, but now that my arms are totally affected as well, it feels much more complete. That and the fact that when I sleep my joints dislocate because they don’t have enough strength to hold together properly any more unless I’m actively using the muscles means that I wake up doubly sore, while also losing feeling in my arms because of the circulation being cut off for so long or the nerves being pinched — how can you be both numb and in pain at the same time? Seems unfair, haha. But nonetheless, a wonderful summer so far with lots of swimming and more. As I may have mentioned we saw Cavalia’s Odysseo, the horse theatre/circus show and it was quite amazing. Nefarious has also been helping me complete an old painting that’s been sitting here unfinished for a year, so that’s what these two quick shots are.

I had a doctor’s appointment today, and my ECG/EKG which I had done recently was normal, so nothing wrong with my heart as expected (it was purely precautionary to make sure my medicine wasn’t creating an issue), but it was a very weird visit because one of the nurses had a nervous breakdown or something and started screaming at all the patients to leave, that they shouldn’t be entering the hospital until the exact moment of their appointment. The guy next to me was like “but my appointment is in three minutes, why can’t I wait in the waiting room for my doctor?” and she screams back “can’t you see there’s no room for you?” — and there are three patients there total and like twenty empty chairs — and tells him he needs to leave the building and come back in three minutes. Meanwhile the other nurse (a trainee no less, as the one freaking out is the senior staff member) is trying to calm her down to no avail and eventually she storms out of the room. So then for the next hour when people would come by to make appointments and so on the trainee would have to apologize, “I’m sorry, my co-worker has disappeared, you are going to have to come back another time!” It was a pretty nutty morning.

But my heart being normal got me wondering about my apnea testing… My breathing was stopping for minutes at a time, and I was wondering how long they would have let me lie there not breathing… I would have thought five minutes or so is when you come in and make sure your patient isn’t about to die, but Caitlin’s theory was that since I was also hooked up to a heart monitor, they would have waited until I went into cardiac arrest to step in. I don’t know, but if I was a nurse there and a patient hadn’t breathed for five minutes I’d be starting to get a little freaked out. But I guess I know I can hold my breathe for over five minutes and be conscious and just fine, so maybe it’s not such a big deal…?

Other than that, I’ve been sharing mountains of mods on my Facebook wall.