My absence (Kleta/Tarrel)

Always admire folks who have the patience for sims, although SIMS does look the most fun of them. I feel lucky my partner will call attention to the funniest or weirdest moments of his play, while I mostly play games that involve me running around smashing things. :p

Glad to hear you've been back a little! 😀

Reading glasses make the world fuzzy, but they make an amazing difference up close!

Also, I wrote an epilogue for 'Confrontations and Revelations' (from issue 11), from Tarrel's point of view. Spoiler warning, of course!
forums.thesecretworld.com/showthread.php?94388-%28Spoilers%29-Confrontations-and-Revelations-epilogue

Slight necrothreading to keep the basic 'How is Tarrel/Kleta' info all in one thread and not scattered across the forum.

I've been sick this last week or so - however long it's been - but this is partly sick-because-I'm-pushing-myself. So this post is about ACHIEVEMENTS. Positive stuff!!! 😀 😀 😀

We've been monitoring the research about my major health issues (fibromyalgia and depression/anxiety) for - well, for as long as I've had them. A quarter century or so.
I've been working on 'mindfulness' for the depression, and neuroplasticity in general for the fibro. Ultra-short descriptions of both: the brain is a bit like soil in rain. If the water (thoughts) flows along the same path, it erodes (learns) specific gullys (thought patterns).
The mindfulness is passive: trying to watch the way the thoughts go, and being prepared to deliberately make changes if changing is helpful.
The neuroplasticity is more active; it's like trying to change the flow of the thoughts by 'digging trenches' where you want the thought patterns to be.

I've achieved successes in both.

I've noticed tiny, tiny places where I feel tiny bursts of 'happiness' - where I get 'reward' neurochemicals. It's places like making a good shot in TSW or Skyrim, or connecting pieces together in a jigsaw, or solving a logic problem correctly. It's tiny doses of the reward neurochemical, but I'm slowly training my mind to notice them, and my brain is reacting to that by increasing the dose.
With time, this will correct the anhedonic part of my depression. Slowly, sure, but any progress is progress!

The neuroplasticity is working even better. My right calf muscle was incredibly, impossibly cramped up almost all the time. If you're a runner, think of shin splints, only all day, every day. (And yes, all night as well.)
I decided to perform a neuroplasticity experiment on it, since hey, could I make it worse? Probably not. And if I made it better, I'd be able to limp around the house much more easily and in less pain.
So I decided that my conscious thought pattern would be "notice the tension/pain in the leg ---->>>> consciously instruct the leg to relax". It took weeks to 'dig the trench' deeply enough that my unconscious mind started following that pattern, instead of the pattern "notice the pain ---->>>> OW!"

Whatever is causing the leg to tense up is still happening - today the leg is really tensing, quite a lot. But I no longer have to consciously instruct it to relax. I just have to periodically monitor it, and sometimes 'divert the water'.
I'm trying to figure out how to 'fill in the gully', but at least my leg is now relaxing subconsciously, instead of me having to put conscious effort into it.

I'm now working on neuroplasticity to improve the small of my back; and we've increased the amount of housework (exercise) I do now that my leg is no longer so much of a handicap. We're also tweaking what I eat.

All of this is affecting my body and my subconscious mind, of course. Which is resulting in me feeling a bit sick this past week or so. 🙁

Best of luck! And really interesting read, thanks for shearing 🙂

Thank you! Um, and yes, I did shear - my hair is all shorn off. Or almost all, less then an inch long. 😝

😝

We're starting to get summer temperatures - 34, 35oC days. 36oC high yesterday in Perth, so the south of Aussieland is starting to really feel summer already. (for reference, oh Farenheit people, 37oC is human blood temperature.)

Fibro messes up the body's ability at temperature regulation, so cutting my hair this short is one of the ways I handle it. Winter has hats and coats and scarves and gloves. When I'm gaming on winter nights, I'm a bundle of fabric with a woman somewhere inside.

I got myself shorn to practically bald. We've been higher than 40 Celcius (Google tells me that's 104F). I'm on a higher dose of Lyrica, which is controlling the pain better - but Anna's observed that I'm sleepier and having some of the other side effects.

So it's going to be a choice between more pain but more alertness and fewer side effects, or less pain but more sleepiness. We're going to see how well I adapt to the sleepiness, and if I don't, we'll be going back one tablet on the dosage.

Bah. I want my GAMES to be a series of interesting choices. I don't want my LIFE to be a series of painful choices!

40 sounds uncomfortable, I'd probably melt away. Hope you find a balance which will allow you enjoy life with minimum pain.

40 is incredibly uncomfortable. The ambient air is hotter than your internal temperature.

Add that fibro means your ability to regulate your internal temperature is screwed up... 🙁

During summer the room where my PC is (in the attic) sometimes reaches 45ºC it's REALLY uncomfortable! It's like a sauna.

Ouch, Kemo. That sounds horrid. If you look at the history of Melbourne Airport's high temperatures over the last few years, you'll find that we've had outdoor ambient temps of that general range most summers.
(And when it gets that bad, there's usually a bushfire somewhere, with smoke coming over Melbourne. Of course, the poor folk in the bushfire zone have it worse than we city folk, but the smoke does make life harder.)
bom.gov.au/

We have no air conditioning in this house, but thankfully it's got fairly good insulation. We've been learning tricks like mopping the floor at night to evaporatively cool the floor tiles and thus kind of 'store up' cold in the ceramic. We open the solid doors and the windows at night and close them at sunrise, to maximise the amount of 'coolth' in the house for the oncoming day.

And we freeze damp teatowels and handtowels. We wrap the frozen towel around my neck (and sometimes Dancer's or Anna's) until it's no longer wet, then replace it with a new one. The evaporative cooling right where I have surface blood vessels ... helps. It's not perfect, but it helps.

We also turn our machines off when we're not using them, during the hottest days of summer.

And we all monitor the quantity and colour of our pee. Dehydration is WAY too easy to get, in that kind of temperature. And it's way too easy to fail to notice all the other symptoms. Especially if you're also starting to heatstroke.

(And yes, I often get the first symptoms of heatstroke. But my loves are excellent at catching it, and cooling me down.)

Got some blood test and other test results today. Almost everything is improved. (Liver function is slightly worse. Bah.) But everything from cholesterol to insulin resistance to fasting glucose is just that teensy bit better.

Of course, it took five attempts and four staff to actually suck blood from me: my doctor and her nurse each had a go and failed. So we waited a few days and did another fast and filled me up with water and went to specialist phlebotomists, and it took two of them and three attempts to vampire me.

Bah. Stupid body. Stupid veins.

yay for improvements!!