Brain fog, experts and good neighbours

Third heat wave of the summer, although it being late August the nights are a bit cooler so it is not quite so debilitating.

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A while ago I quit Facebook, but then re-upped in order to join a couple of groups related to Long Covid and ME/CFS. There have been some very helpful, to me, discussions there about these disease syndromes, their symptoms, and the various drugs, supplements and remedies people have tried. Also a lot of comments on how helpful or unhelpful various healthcare professionals have been.

Recently there was a discussion of "brain fog", a symptom of both LC and ME/CFS. If you consult Dr. Google it is generally described as mental confusion, cognitive and memory deficits. These are all true, but that doesn't nearly describe what it actually feels like. So in this discussion, one fellow described it as like a concussion on a bad day and a hangover on a good day. A woman described it as like having a concrete block in her head and another like someone has poured concrete into her skull and it has set solid. I especially like that last description but they are all pretty good. I often have to lie down just because my head feels so heavy… like a concrete block. I have never heard a healthcare professional describe it as anything other than cognitive and memory deficits (in other words, dementia).

I have had no luck getting anyone to understand what I mean when I say I feel dizzy, and I am thinking maybe I should use the concrete metaphor instead. More and more I agree with Michael J Fox when he says that the true experts are those with the condition themselves.

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I set off a bit of a firestorm in town this week. Over the weekend I had a rather unpleasant encounter with a local landlord who accused me of driving away all his tenants by my constant complaining about noise. Funnily enough, I had given up complaining and his tenants were going elsewhere to party after 10pm which suited me fine. Anyway the encounter was very upsetting, so I wrote an email to the Town Council about it and I told a friend who writes a weekly newsletter for the Good Neighbours Association (a group of residents living in the student part of town who are having to put up with a lot of student and landlord bad behaviour).

A whole lot of people are horrified by my experience, including the Mayor. I am going to be interviewed this afternoon by a town employee looking into town/gown issues. A lawyer in the Association wants to know who the landlord is. He is not above pursuing such matters within legal limits.  

I am not interested in going after this guy, he's unlikely to change his opinion and not being friends with him is not a huge loss. He is just an ignorant bully with no power. What I do want is for the Town to wake up to the bad behaviours of landlords, not only in how they treat the neighbours but also in how they treat their tenants (some student houses are very badly maintained and packed to the gills with young people who don't know any better).

What the Good Neighbours Association wants (among other things) is for the town to keep a registry of all landlords and require them to have business licences. I would hope that being registered would hold them accountable for complaints about how they run their businesses.

Sunny days, the birds and the bees

Finished varnishing the kayak, have moved it back to under the house since it is unlikely I'll be kayaking in the near future. But it does look good now. Had to take a few photos because otherwise I won't be seeing it again for another year. Sigh.

Dances with Whales

Traditionally one carves a fish or sea-going mammal into the bulkhead of a wooden kayak to help it stay afloat.

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The solar panels are now installed and running, but of course there's been a major weather change to rain and cloud for the foreseeable future. On a solar energy discussion group I saw that people with already up-and-running solar panels are ecstatic about all the sun they got in May and July. I missed out entirely. Might get a bit of sun in the fall, but by that time the sun will be much lower in the sky and sunlight will be shorter in duration. This year is a write-off. 

A little stress around my heat pump. Turns out the heat pump company installed it in the wrong place, and as a result the power company failed my solar installation. The solar guys told me if I could get it moved in the next few days there was still hope, and if needs be they would move it for me. But the heat pump people said that would void my warranty, and lucky me, they had a cancellation so they could slot me in the same day the solar guys put up the panels. 

Two guys came to move the heat pump, after a half hour of standing around waiting for head office to get back to them about what exactly was the problem and where they were supposed to move the it to. A couple of days later I got the bill, $200 for two guys to stand around waiting for a callback and then maybe twenty minutes moving the heat pump.

Not supposed to block access to power meter

I called the company and said, look, this is your fault not mine, you installed it in the wrong place as per the Electrical Code of Canada, you should have known better and there was plenty of space to install it elsewhere. They said they'd call me back, and an hour and a half later they did call to apologize and tell me the bill was being reversed. 

I don't believe for one second that this was news to them, they just tried to see if they could get away with it. But according to my new Fitbit, the stress of waiting those ninety minutes was equivalent to a half hour jog with respect to my heart rate. Got all my cardiac exercise for a couple of days in one shot.

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As I mentioned earlier I may have given myself a concussion and was slow to realize it because the symptoms are so close to what I have with long Covid. However, I've been looking into things people are doing for concussion, besides the usual stuff that doctors tell you. One of the things I happened on is creatine (not to be confused with creatinine). Body builders and athletes love the stuff, it helps them to build muscle fast. But more recently there has been some research into using it to treat concussion. 

I started thinking, if my symptoms overlap concussion symptoms, maybe this stuff will help me? Because the local university is big on athletics, there's a lot of athletes in town and guess what, a shop called Supplement King that caters to them. So I went there to enquire about creatine. 

The very buff owner was happy to tell me what he knew. Yes, he's been using it for a couple of years, no side effects but it's not recommended to people with kidney or liver problems. I told him why I wanted to try it and he was very supportive, even telling me that there's a prof at our university researching creatine for concussion. So I bought 300gms of the stuff and have started taking it. So far, no side effects, but no positive effects either. Not that I am expecting instant results, the research I have read suggests that it might take a couple of months.

If I could rid myself of only one symptom, it would definitely be the dizziness. Two years of it is depressing, and it has totally wrecked my social life. If it weren't for my garden and the birds, well, let's just leave it at that.

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In yet more boring health news, my doctor is on about my blood pressure again. When I measure at home it is fine, but when she measures at her office it is through the roof. Why am I not surprised. Anyway, she wants me to take a bunch of readings over the next couple of weeks or so, and gave me an instruction sheet and form to fill in. Problem is, I have a chronic cough, have had it from the get-go, and now it is much worse. I suspect allergies have kicked in. Well it turns out that when I am having a coughing fit my blood pressure rises into the hypertension zone, not as high as when I am in her office, but high enough to make a liar of me. 

I've started doing various things to get the cough under control, which sort of help, and I am dispensing with her instructions. I am supposed to sit up straight in a chair but that's the perfect position for a coughing fit too. So, I take the reading lying down. 

It's all very annoying having to do this. I feel like the pharmaceutical companies are pushing hard to get all old people on medication one way or another, and lowering the threshold for what is considered hypertension is one good way to do that. When I read all the potential side effects I just want to stay away from such meds if at all possible. Even if it means acquiescing to the prescription and dumping the pills down the toilet.

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Okay enough about that. In other news my onion crop is a bit of a failure, I am going to end up with bags of onion sets but not much else, maybe enough onion greens to make another batch of onion greens pesto. Tomatoes are coming along like gangbusters, I am freezing all the ones I don't eat; I have no energy for canning. Lettuce greens are a bust, and the broccoli did not do well, too dry in July. But still holding out hope for the brussels sprouts. Potato plants are dying so soon I will be digging them up, I think they will do okay. 

I got a few blueberries but the two resident song sparrows got most of them. It wasn't nearly as good a crop as last summer anyway. Green beans did great, froze most of them. I've left the bean plants in place because sometimes I get a second crop in the fall. I already notice new flowers on the bean plants. Green peppers are doing well but the peppers, although prolific, are just long skinny things which I don't like.

I planted a few scarlet runner beans, not knowing that that's what they were. Hastily set up poles for them to climb and they produced a profusion of bright red flowers that the hummingbirds love. One day while picking green beans I heard a familiar whirring sound just behind my head. I turned to see a hummingbird hovering not five feet from me, trying to decide if he was safe to feed on the flowers. In the end he decided not, but I have since seen a hummingbird (maybe the same one?) at those flowers and then later perching on my laundry line to scan the garden. Wow! Definitely will plant those again.

I was picking tomatoes the other day and unfortunately a bumblebee crawled up under my shirt. I was not aware of it until I got indoors, a kind of creepy-crawly sensation that caused me to try to shake it out of my shirt. Bad idea, the bee stung me. Bumblebees can sting multiple times, they don't have barbs on their stingers like honey bees do, so they can withdraw the stinger without injury to themselves. However, this bee was definitely injured and died soon after I shook it out of my shirt, I must have hit it. Poor bee. But now I have a very large angry red sore under my armpit, swollen up to egg-size. Have to be more careful next time I'm in the garden.

And that's all for now…