Day 114: Flu Shots are a Bad Idea for Me

Lesson 114: The first time you get a flu shot, your body reacts more severely to it than any time afterwards.

Some people react to vaccines as though they've gotten sick with the disease being vaccinated against.

I am one of those people.

Apparently with the flu shot, it can be really bad the first time you ever get it, but will be better any other time you do. I certainly hope that's the case, because this business is only supposed to last 1-2 days.

I'm on day 3 since my shot, and I'm actually having mild hallucinations. Words are dancing on their pages. It's kind of sickening to watch.

I am unimpressed.

Those viruses were dead, body! You don't need to kill them deader!

Ow....

Day 94: Of Wedding Dresses and Possibilities

I worked yesterday's full day shift at the library and it was not nearly as quiet as it should have been. We had quite the patron encounter. But after the shift, Kristie and I went to get La Banquise poutine for dinner before dropping her off at the bus station. It was such a great cherry on the icing of a regular cupcake of a weekend! I may have spent a great deal more of the weekend working on my various projects that were due today than I had wanted, but it was still fantastic to hang out with Kristie so much!

To make matters even better, we walked past a vintage boutique with the most absolutely perfect dress in the window! I'm going to go try it on, but I emailed the owner of the store and she says it's a size 2, and it doesn't appear to be made of the most forgiving fabric.

I somehow doubt I'll be able to squeeze my debatably size 6 frame into a solid 2...

Lesson 93:  Don't try to do everything.

I've been pretty good at keeping on top of everything this year. Honestly, much to my own surprise. But after our collection development paper was postponed by a week, all of a sudden, my leisurely visit with Kristie wasn't quite as unencumbered as it had been when we planned it.

Despite that, my groups and I managed to get the assorted projects that were due today done and to celebrate, I really wanted to go to trivia as I normally do on Mondays and unwind.

However, after class and going to see Rick Mercer on campus, I decided I'd have a nap before trivia. Trivia's at 8 and it wasn't even 4 yet, so I had lots of time.

And yet, I slept right through till 11pm. So here we are. I have another practicum placement interview in the morning, but I'm awake. At 11pm.

Really, I should have stayed awake till 8 and just gone to bed instead of trying to do trivia in addition to my awesome weekend of chilling with one of my best friends and a ridiculous amount of projects. But now I've messed up my sleep schedule. I just hope I can make it right...

Day 78: What do celery, passion fruit and latex all have in common?

I know those things don't seem to go together, but I'm serious. Celery, passion fruit and latex are all connected! And they aren't alone...

Lesson 74: Bananas, passion fruits, kiwis, melons, chestnuts, avocados, celery, tomato and latex all have cross-reacting proteins, meaning (as I understand it) that if you're allergic to one, you could have a reaction to any of the others.

One of my previous lessons established my apparently severe chestnut allergy, I have an avocado allergy I managed to pass to my mother in-utero and I have an irrational hatred of kiwis, melons and tomatoes, so what does this mean for me? I really hope I'm not going to wind up eventually unable to eat bananas and celery... I love bananas and celery!

Well... separately.

Not together.

That would be a very odd combination.... Crunchy, mushy banana flavoured waterstuff.

Day Whoa: Hospitals and Interprovincial Healthcare

Sorry I haven't been on top of updating, I've had a rather complicated past week.

After taking a soccer ball and later an oblivious and unintentional fist to the nose within a week, the resulting headache got abruptly and exponentially more intense without reason or warning on Wednesday afternoon. That is generally not a good thing.

So I went to see a doctor here in Montreal (and worried him quite a bit), who sent me to the ER here in Montreal, where an even more concerned triage nurse allowed me to take my 9pm bus on Thursday night in order to get home to Ontario as long as I promised to go to the ER again when I got there.

Upon arriving in Toronto at 3am, a very close friend of mine, Hoben, picked me up from the bus station, drove me to Guelph and even stayed with me in the waiting room of the Guelph ER for a bit. The doctor there saw me after a much longer wait than in Montreal, and despite the headache being so bad that tears had started to flow, proclaimed that there was probably nothing wrong with me, otherwise I'd be dead already.

Regardless, he gave me an IV of drugs that were "gang-busters for headaches" as he said but that "wouldn't make you loopy", so that I could make a decision about whether or not I should get the CT scan he was willing to give me, but really didn't want to. Turns out those IV drugs shouldn't have been given to someone in my situation at all; lets just say that a drug with known interactions with breathing and intracranial pressure don't pan out well for asthmatics with headtrauma... But it still helped a lot!

Jon showed up during the IV drip and came home with me when I was ultimately released with hardly a glance after the drip was done.

Luckily, my friend Dev lived nearby and was willing to give us a ride home when I asked, because she's absolutely amazing and such a sweetheart.

I got home, and after well over 24hrs without sleep, Jon and I were finally able to get some rest.

When my family came home, I was able to scare each and every single one of them because no one was expecting me. I even managed to sneak up on my grandpa when Kristie, Hoben and I stopped by the LCBO on our way out of town.

The weekend in Barrie that followed was (nearly) as amazing as I hoped it would be! The mild-concussion and hospital drugs put a few unfortunate kinks in my weekend, but ultimately, I got to see a lot of marvellous friends I've had trouble seeing for the past few years because of my own personal problems despite still living so close, and spent a weekend chilling with them.

I'm even finally more or less caught up with where I wanted to be homework-wise before the whole concussion/ER/medication combo knocked me for a loop.

So we now return to your regularly scheduled programming thanks to the combined efforts of medical personel across 2 provinces and 3 institutions, Hoben, Dev, Kristie, Bree, Matt, Tommy, Hayley, Hindle and, of course, Jon.

Come back tomorrow for a brand new lesson!

Day 48: Death? Yeah, sounds about right...

Lesson 45: Nut allergies are not to be trifled with.

Lesson 46: While a peanut is actually a legume, tree nuts are actually split into 6 or 7 different families. So, allergy wise, you can have reactions to one family, multiple families or all of them, but if you're allergic to one nut in a family, you will be allergic to all the other nuts in that family. Or be similarly un-reactive to all of them.

Which is why it was a bad idea of me to test out whether I have an allergy to chestnuts by eating a (absolutely delicious) chocolate-chestnut cupcake at the ACA bake sale (which was a huge success, btw). You see, I haven't had chestnuts at all really, and certainly not in any volume, or since I discovered my peanut allergy and started reacting to nuts.

I didn't even know I was actually allergic to peanuts until high school, after a ridiculous few weeks of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for every lunch. That incident culminated in me having 3 such sandwiches in one day, and reacting terribly (itching, hives, breathing issues... everything). I haven't eaten peanuts since. At least not intentionally, and I don't really react to small amounts.

But I've eaten walnuts, pecans and almonds and have no reaction to any of them. Which makes sense to me now, as most people who are allergic to nuts aren't actually allergic to almonds, and walnuts and pecans are both from the same family. I've been noticing a small reaction to cashews, which are with pistachios in the mango family. And my mouth itches a bit if I eat nutella or kitkat bars, which means I'm probably allergic to hazelnuts, filberts and hickory nuts, but like I'm about to stop eating kitkat bars and nutella! I've never noticed a reaction to macadamia nuts, which are apparently a family of their own, or brazil nuts, from the family legythis, that I'm aware of.

But really, I always thought a "nut allergy" was more of an all or nothing thing. Not a you might be allergic to these ones over here, but have no reaction to those ones over there kind of deal.

And now I know, nuts from the beech family, such as beechnuts and chestnuts, are 100% painfully off the table.

All it took was a numb mouth transitioning to tingling and onto painful, watering eyes, itchy throat, headache, exhaustion, nausea, and finally itching from the inside out.

...

Worth it. If only for that cupcake.

Day 39: Stressed? Maybe?

I've had a revelation a long time coming. Kind of a slow boil, and now that I really understand it, I'm surprised it took me so long to fully comprehend.

Lesson 39: Being busy is not the same as being stressed.

In undergrad, looking back, I wasn't particularly busy. In fact, I was less and less busy the closer to the end I got. But I was perpetually stressed. My living arrangements, food quality, work or lack thereof and resulting money difficulty, school, lack of exercise, the very real worry that York would pull something on me and I wouldn't graduate, constantly being on edge for the next thing to go wrong, having no social life to speak of and being too far from any possibility of activities (6-10$ and an hour by transit as a minimum), it all meant that I was just a big, painful ball of stress. I felt like if I took anything extra on, the stress would kill me.

Compare that with now. I'm living within walking distance of nearly everything I want to do, in a good, un-infested apartment that I'm paying reasonable rent for. I'm eating in an appropriate and satisfying manner. I have work, it's not much, but it's something. School is intense, but things going wrong now feels like a rarity instead of an inevitability, and I feel like I'm working with a much more supportive administration. I play Quidditch, which takes up a lot of time, but it's physical and provides a fantastic social aspect. I really feel connected to, and involved with my classmates; I feel included. I get invited to events, and I actually feel like I can attend them. Even on a whim. Even as a split-second decision. And now, I'm even writing NaNoWriMo (there's an excerpt if you follow that link).

I am so very busy! I don't know that I could take on anything extra right now. But I don't feel stressed. I feel stressed only when things go wrong, like my database of doom debacle.

Stress is a sign that things are going wrong, I think, at least for me. Stress and anxiety go hand in hand and they feed on one another and spiral you down.

But I'm not actually stressed. I'm busy.

And busy makes me happy.

*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*

Something I couldn't find anywhere to fit in, here's a quote from my Information and Society class where we were discussing Information and Communication Technologies:

"Cloud computing sounds lovely, doesn't it? Care Bears live on clouds!" - Carolyn Hank

Day 36: Exhaustion

I set a ridiculous number of alarms to make sure I wake up in the morning. I set two on my iPad, 3 on my computer, and at least 2 on my cellphone, all to make sure that when the time comes that I wanted to wake up at the night before, I have no choice but to wake up.

The different alarms coming from different sources all sound at different times and must be found and shut off separately. That makes one so awake, there's no sleeping past your alarm. And that is what I count on.

Lesson 36: Sometimes, no matter how many alarms you set, exhaustion will win out and you will sleep through every one of them without even realizing it.

After the past three days of stress and minimal, low-quality sleep, that is just what happened to me this morning.

So now, I'll study the slides from the class I missed until I have to go to work.

But for the first time this week, I'm starting to feel human again.

Day 20: Doctors are fail

I missed part of my class today in order to go to the doctor. He claims I'm fine, as though being violently ill three times in as many weeks is totes normal. So I feel like it was a bit of a waste of time, though no more of a waste of time than being in class would have been. Looked over a friend's notes and they were almost identical to the ones I took in class last week. Oh well!

Also had work and Quidditch practice. Sounds like stuff is going to be heating up in a major way on the pitch! Lets just hope my poor, rickety body held together with hopes, dreams and duct tape can keep up...

Lesson 20: The Library and Archives of Canada has a sweet catalogue that is very much worth checking out. I had never given it much thought, but now that I've gotten a glimpse, I really want to just browse through it. Seriously, take a look!