Keeping my grip

My ankles are still very bad. I'm disheartened and scared. I am not set up to not be able to walk at *all*. I need to be able to drive! What if I get worse? How long is this going to continue? How will I live? Is work going to fire me? How can I take care of Moomin? My project was just about to launch and I was not quite able to get it done before the break. Now it's delayed again.

Woke up at 3am, and couldn't go back to sleep. I got a little more dozing in this morning on and off. Dreaming of sleeping in weird corners of libraries and across three chairs and actually *in* bookshelves, all very uncomfortable.

The UCSF Rheum. clinic is taking "up to 7 business days" to process my referral and then I'm supposed to call them if they don't call me. I guess they don't make an appointment till they know if the insurance company is going to approve.

I will take a shower.... will tidy up the stacks of things at my bedside... maybe draw a little.... will take pain meds in an hour or so to help me fall asleep again, and will try to sit on the front stoop in the sun for a little bit when the sun gets into the right position for it, on the theory that sun is good and will help my mood improve in some magic body chemistry way.

Normally I fidget constantly. It feels like horrible torture to hold my feet and lower legs perfectly still, on top of the pain, but it's worse if I don't. I wish this doctor had given me prednisone. I am impatient and frustrated and often not dealing with this increased level of pain very well. I cry a lot and feel like I just can't stand it. some of that is fear and helplessness and exhaustion I guess, not directly from the pain.

Things that would make good embroidered badges

Insides of a cell, various organelles, protozoans and other microbes, actually old video games, little circuit boards like arduinos, geometric things like bits of the Mandelbrot set, fibonacci spirals, Sierpinski triangles, a brain, and your own custom made fingerprint.

lies my fitbit told me

My fitbit claims I went 988 steps today, which made me bristle in outrage. There's no way! But it turns out that when I walk across this one small room to the bathroom, it counted around 50 steps and that is because I'm shuffling in tiny increments. Yesterday I shuffled with even tinier steps, so it still looks like a lot of walking. Not true though.

Today I did get up to sit in the sun, took a shower, and went to the kitchen, and I walked around looking for my glasses.

I read Up Against It today and liked it mildly. And some free ebooks of WPA oral histories from the 1930s of people's memories of living under slavery. I am not looking forward to: either trying to work while in pain and bedridden, or writing off the entire week (and next week? how long?) going on medical leave for 10 days. I wonder if i should be in the hands of the rheumatology people only, or orthopedic too? Or will one just send me to the other?