urocyon

OK, ugly as they are--especially with one, brown, color available--I think I'm going to go ahead and look for a pair of Karrimor Shuttle shoes. Hopefully, they'll work.

A little while ago, thanks to the lousy depth perception, I dropped a glass full of iced tonic water (for leg cramps) straight into the floor, trying to set it on the edge of the desk here. Most of it went directly into one of my fuzzy slippers, so I opted for thick socks and walking sandals. (The floor is cold.)

My back had been acting up, and it improved almost immediately. The difference was amazing. By now, my calves are happier too.

Now, I know I've got the "Morton's Toe" variation, and that the instability from walking around balanced on your second metatarsal and your heel like a skate blade can lead to some problems, including lots of hip and back pain and sciatica. (Actually, I've run into pretty much the whole pattern described here--lots of ankle sprains, "plantar fasciitis" which was really from knotted-up calf muscles, knee pain, and all. I'm guessing it's trickier if you've got hypermobility anyway.) I tried the "little pad of Molefoam" workaround, which didn't want to stay put, tried some alternate materials (didn't stay put any better), then gave it up as a bad job. Even though that's probably helping perpetuate a number of musculoskeletal problems, I've mostly just been ignoring it.

The summer before last, I picked up a pair of Karrimor Grenada sandals, because I wanted a pair of walking sandals, and they were on sale at Millet's. I've basically been wearing them ever since, any time it's even vaguely warm enough outside (possibly with socks for insulation, dorky look be damned!). They are probably the most comfortable shoes I have ever bought, and I can stay on my feet much longer without getting knee and back pain. I was wearing them around the house most of the time, too, even though we usually operate a "no outdoor shoes" policy. (Maybe I just need to get a house pair.) I noticed again today that they act like a Morton's orthotic, shifting the weight onto the first metatarsal; it felt kind of weird at first, not having worn them in months.

When fall set in, I switched over to fuzzy slippers, because these floors get cold. Now, I think I'll pick up some insulated hiking socks if necessary, to wear the sandals without getting toecicles!

Sandals are a really bad idea for outdoor wear with the wet winters here, but looking at Karrimor's site before, I ran across the Shuttles, which are actually put on the same page as the sandals, and appear to be based on the same sole (and hopefully footbed) type. The ugly color put me off, but they definitely look worth a try. If those don't work, maybe some other Karrimor model will.

Another reason the sandals are so comfy, though, is most likely because they're adjustable in so many ways--unlike the closed version. (Though it does have a similarly flexible lots of eyelets reaching way down the shoe arrangement to Chucks, which fit me pretty well but are not much better in cold rain than sandals.)

My feet are consistently hard to fit. Most of my family's are "wrong-shaped" in the same ways, but I had no idea it might be a wider pattern until Nike launched their Air Native shoes a few years ago. (Hell, my mom looked for Central and South American-made shoes, so the trait lumping is maybe not as ridiculous as it sounds--sort of like the "Asian fit" glasses, I guess.) The ball is a lot wider than the heel, and the foot is thicker from top to bottom than most shoes want. My Nana used to wear almost exclusively Aigner loafers because she could (somewhat expensively) special-order different widths in the heel and ball, to the tune of AAA and C; looking at the ones available now, they also don't come up high enough on the foot to dig in and rub where the foot is higher than expected joining the ankle (another persistent problem).

So yeah, adjustable shoes are good.

It's Nike, FFS--I agree with most of Klee Benally's points in Nike Opportunism: Turning Native plight into profit?--and the "help these unhealthy fat slobs get some exercise" approach made me really angry. As did the still-limited availability; a lot of people who could benefit just can't buy them, not just me. (I did like the "fitting for special order" approach, though!) I was merely irritated by the fact that they're also ugly as sin. Still, I would be tempted to try some if I could.

As one commenter summed it up:

As soon as I heard this news I knew I want to try these shoes. I have spent a lifetime wearing ill fitting shoes. Speciality and orthotic shoe makers tell me there's nothing 'wrong' with my foot, it just doesn't conform to the standard shoe designs. My foot is exactly as they described the fit they are aiming for: short, very high, very narrow heel; a foot shaped like a v.

I don't care what they call it, No Name or Nike or N7. I'm just glad someone is making it. I have already called and asked to be put on a contact list for when this shoe is marketed here.

Shoes that don't cause and exascerbate pain? Priceless.

Yesterday was pretty rough, but I'm doing better today.

Sunday night, I got what would have to qualify as the opposite of a useful chiropractic adjustment, quite unintentionally. vatine was having a look at something on my shoulder blade, and leaned on his forearm in just the wrong way on my behind: CRUNK! goes my left sacroiliac joint.

I think he's been concerned about unintentionally hurting me anyway, and that didn't help. *wry smile* It wouldn't have been a problem, if not for the unlucky combination of hypermobility, previous injury, and a bunch of tight muscles already putting strain on the joint.

Good thing we had a new bag of frozen peas. I woke up in the morning with room temperature peas still there, which was a little disconcerting, but it brought a lot of the swelling down. :) I will probably lie down with an ice pack again later, since there's still active inflammation, and it really helped yesterday. Things are less stabby today, but that's probably a good idea anyway. For some reason, I tend to forget about icing things. Probably because it involves slowing down long enough to do it. :-| Resting things? Not so good at that.

One disconcerting thing about this, which I also noticed with the severely sprained ankle a while back? A sacroiliac injury like this is considered to cause severe pain, and after the first night, it's striking me as annoying but manageable. Even on top of the other chronic pain. A good demonstration that I'm scarily accustomed to dealing with pain by now. "Scarily" because that's exactly how my mom missed that she had bone cancer until it was way too late.

( Probably not endometriosis, after all. Yay! )

I mentioned a previous sacroiliac injury. That got me thinking again about the ballistics gel dummy model of anatomy: "It bears an eerie and unfortunate resemblance to the usual medical model, where pain is concerned: there's the skeleton and internal organs--where the Real Problems lie--and then there's this ill-defined fleshy mass encasing them." An excellent example? When I probably tore at least one ligament there (not just CRUNK!, but SNAP!), and the continuing pain was honest-to-goodness 'splained away as a special invisible bone abscess in my coccyx, which broke in the same fall. Never was soft tissue mentioned, at all.

( Bizarre medical logic )

I got a little more excitement than I was bargaining for, right after I woke up. (Thanks again, sleep drunkenness! Which can actually last for hours.) Disruptions to my morning--well, noonish, nocturnal as I tend to be--routine are not easy to deal with.

Bare description:

Wake up. Lurch into the kitchen to make coffee. Open patio door to let Max out. Go back into the other part of the house for my temporarily misplaced glasses. Hall door to the kitchen and TV room will not open. Jiggle at jammed latch, curse. Scan for shoes, settle on fuzzy bedroom slippers. Snag spare front door keys, shuffle around the outside of the house--through tall grass and a couple of overgrown elders (with bugs-crawling-on-me phobia)--muttering all the way. Stretch up in clumsy arabesque, reach arm through rose bush to unlatch back gate from the outside. Luckily, patio door is open.

Max gets excited, seeing me going in and out of the gate without him. Repeatedly. At least the gate opens inward, so he can jump up on the unlatched gate to his heart's delight without opening it.

Turn the kettle back on for coffee. Realize I need to go to the bathroom. Find sandals, go back around house. Get tripped by the Mirrors kitty on the way. Snag screwdriver to remove the door handles while I'm there.

Finally get water into the coffee press. Blink repeatedly while slurping the sweet, sweet nectar. Tackle door handle; some genius has painted over stripped screw heads. Naturally, most of the tools are in the other part of the house. Go around house again in search of the Dremel, which turns out to have been lurking in the TV room all along. Remove a couple of unstripped screws on the other side of the plate while I'm there. Back on the other side, try to cut stubborn screw heads off. Poor dog dashes outside in alarm. Fail miserably, because they're fairly flush to the plate. Get fleck of paint in eye. Break the one suitable cutting disk on that side of the house, give the Dremel attempt up as a bad job.

Go back around the house to fetch a small crowbar. Start on that side of the door. Indeed, a steel crowbar trumps a brittle wrought iron aluminum painted to look like wrought iron door plate. Hadn't intended to break it into pieces, but that freed it from the stuck screws! Go back around the house, and pry at the other plate, while Max watches dubiously through the patio door.

At some point in this whole process, strain my already tight iliopsoas, for that extra-fun "groin pull plus thrown-out back" effect.

Finally get the handles off, latch is still stuck. End up jimmying the door open with the crowbar, wishing I'd just tried that first. :/ Luckily, manage not to damage either the door or the doorframe beyond a few minor scratches. Finally finish my coffee.

We may have to keep that door shut with a doorstop temporarily, since we still need to keep Max and the cats separated so he doesn't chase them, but at least it is now open. That should work over the weekend, since vatine is heading off for a long weekend in Sweden tomorrow and I don't want to try to install a new door handle and latch. Since he's on call this week and needs to get home fairly directly, a stop for pain relief is looking more pressing ATM than obtaining a new door latch. :(

And this unexpected morning dance could have been a lot worse: we could be living upstairs. And we did have suitable tools around, where I could find them.

No wonder I was feeling grouchy, depressed, and a bit out of it last night and (especially) today: a migraine kicked in while I was out getting some Nurofen Plus for my back and antihistamines. The timing could have been worse, at least. ;)

The prodrome and aura were harder to spot because it was really easy to put feeling crappy off on a combination of allergies and my back acting up, which can be pretty overloading on its own--and it kept me from sleeping well, which also makes me feel generally crappy and prone to overload. (And then I didn't remember to eat lunch. Bleh.) Since the visual snow effect got a lot worse about an hour before the pain hit, and it's done that before, I'm wondering if that's an aura thing too. My visual processing goes screwy that way when I'm overloaded--and prone to straightforward tension headaches--so it's kind of hard to sort things out!

But, I was more than a little relieved when the headache started, and provided a pretty straightforward explanation for the way I'd been feeling. I may not like them, but migraines I can deal with. Disappointed as I was not to get to see people I haven't seen in a long while, it was probably a really excellent thing that I hadn't bulled through and headed for a night out at a pub in Central London after all!

We only live about a mile outside the town centre, but I was so not going to lurch down there today. So traffic heading that way was clogged almost to our bus stop. Stubbornly, I climbed on the bus anyway, and still ended up lurching farther than intended so that I had a hope of getting to Boots before it closed. It did get me at least three quarters of the way closer.

While I was out, I stopped by Sainsbury's in the same shopping centre, and got some easy food, including some frozen chicken and mushroom pies out of the Free From section--junky, but oddly satisfying when you're not feeling great. :) Also some GF bread and sandwich fixings.

By that point, my blood sugar was getting pretty low (stress didn't help!), so I also wolfed down a pretty tasty pseudo-Asian salad with black rice, veggies, edamame, shrimp, and ginger-lime dressing. Convenient, decently balanced, and GF except for the soy sauce in the dressing, which is usually OK--and I was past worrying about it. Sometimes I do get tired of having to think about what and when I eat. I used to be a bit self-conscious about perching on benches in busy areas to light into food like a ravening beast, but needs must. Finally getting some food in helped some.

I also picked up some ground cloves and allspice while I was there, for the Great Henna Experiment. I've been pretty much addicted to blatantly unnatural permanent hair dye for 20+ years, but went off it when I decided to try to let my hair grow out--trying to avoid the eventual "matting frizzy straw" effect--but lately I've been eyeballing the couple of boxes of (ruby) red and purple still in the house. ;) I was even becoming tempted to try really saturated shades of SFX or similar on unbleached hair; maybe Candy Apple Red or Deep Purple, which should still give a decent undertone. This has been on my mind even more lately, since I wasn't entirely pleased in spite of myself to find some silver starting to come in at the temples.

So, I was pleased to find out that henna does not necessarily give you Lucille Ball orangey-red, but it's very possible to get the kinds of colors I want anyway out of it with the right mix and base color. I've probably actually seen people with similar shades from henna, but assumed it was something else. Something that's actually good for your hair and can give you the colors you want? Sounds close to perfect.

I ordered some ostensibly body art quality henna and some indigo from an Indian grocery (could have made a trip into Ilford, but didn't feel like it), but neglected the spice additions--to help with more burgundy tones--while I was at it. So, instead of busing it into Ilford after all, I sucked it up and paid supermarket prices. Which still just about brings the ingredients per batch close to the price of the dye I'd been using, so it's not too bad. :) That will probably wait until tomorrow night.

The bus ride home was a bit surreal. There was the visual snow and sense that things were moving strangely. There was also another (Black) passenger about 20 who, judging from his mannerisms and pretty severe tardive dyskinesia, I'd guess was autistic and on neuroleptics. That made me more than a little sad and frustrated for him. Even the way I was feeling, I made sure to smile in his direction and basically try to acknowledge his humanity; the bus was pretty full, and other passengers were acting like they'd get ebola from sitting anywhere near him. That's gotta hurt. Grrr. Then there was a priest who looked like he felt sorry for me, with my cane and whatever expression was on my face right then. *shakes head* I was glad to get off before someone started into a bizarre monologue nobody else seemed to hear, and it really started to remind me of the kind of Italian film I avoid. It was that kind of bus trip.

Now I'm slurping a big cup of coffee and waiting for the pain relief to kick in. I'll probably stick my pies in the oven and lie down for a while.

I can't quite figure out how the tags are broken. This looks OK on full page view, displaying the cuts, but things are weirdly italicized otherwise. Trying to fix. Fixed. Apparently, DW objects to sticking a cut tag in the middle of a block of formatted text.

vatine is off gaming today, so I'm taking it easy and have mostly been camping in front of the keyboard. The poor dog claims he is being sorely neglected, but he does whenever at least one of us isn't petting him.

Update: It turns out that he's also afraid of heavy rain--not just thunder--so I'm going in there to sit with him after posting this!

Out of slightly morbid curiosity, I went and did the PsychCentral Sanity Score quiz phoneutria_fera mentioned yesterday. It requires a login, which irked me, but I went ahead and set up a throwaway account.

The results, pasted?


Your Sanity Score
54
( Score Breakdown )

Interesting, in a fairly typical psych assessment kind of way. For anyone who doesn't know, I spent a lot of time in the psych system over things which were neither psychiatric nor psychological. I am autistic with a lot of interesting neurological stuff going on, and ended up deemed bipolar with a clunky mess of other things tacked on to cover all the stuff the mood disorder didn't.

Bear in mind that, whether they should be or no now that they're accepted as neurological, ASDs (and Tourette's) are lumped into the DSM. You wouldn't know it from this assessment. Things may have changed in practice these days, though an awful lot of kids with ASDs are apparently getting pediatric bipolar labels.

The questions weren't quite as bizarre as a lot of the ones on the MMPI--which surely gives a lot of false positives for "Hypochondriasis"--but some of them came close. Just a small sample of ambiguous ones which caught my eye:

( Question quibbles )

I couldn't help but get the yes-or-no "Have you stopped beating your wife?" feeling a lot, with a lot of the phrasing.

Yeah, a good mental health professional will be able to sort out what might be contributing to a lot of these things. Some are excellent. Unfortunately, a lot are not so good, and many of those are inclined to view things through certain filters which presume a narrow range of mental illnesses above other explanations for the problems their clients are experiencing. That can work OK for some people's situations, but not so much for others. Some of the filters which pathologize people's behavior and communication--eliminating other possible explanations--are unlikely to help anyone.

Going back to the results, the breakdown was interesting--especially in light of the (inappropriate) diagnoses I picked up before. I can't say much about the anxiety and especially the PTSD, other than that a lot of what has been interpreted and treated as anxiety and phobia is actually coming from purely neurological sensory weirdness. The same with rarely going out of the house; management is very different, depending on whether this is due to real sensory overload (plus some built-up anxiety from that, and other people's distress over it), or whether it's based on some horrible trauma in your past (as was assumed). Apples and oranges.

I do have Complex PTSD, and 15+ years of largely getting treated like crap in the psych system did not help with that. On the depression front, the score seems to be so low not because I am not experiencing symptoms these days, but because I am used to dealing with it by now and it doesn't freak me out; the way I look at this has also changed, as reflected in some of the question quibbles. I've learned to do more emotional regulation, not having even known it was possible growing up. Also, some of the relevant questions do not seem to take into account that a person might have experienced chronic depression for long enough that there is not a sharp contrast between "now" and "before".

Some products of neurological things (executive function, inertia, etc.) were taken as symptoms of depression, and figuring out what's what to some extent has also helped; these things also require different strategies, depending on what's behind the difficulty. Are you having trouble getting in the shower because you're depressed, or does it have more in common with How to make a phone call, in 70 easy steps? Maybe it's a combination of the two (my, do I know that one), or something else entirely.


Video: Original Song about Executive Dysfunction "I Grinded the Coffee" by P. Lungstuffing. No spoons for a transcript right now, unfortunately.

The "Physical Issues" score does not reflect anywhere near the actual quantity (or quality) of physical problems I am having now. This is probably down to both question bias and similarly increased mindfulness helping me deal with it. On a related note, I had to get a chuckle out of the "Drugs: 0", the way a lot of people want to act about chronic pain treatment.

"Dissociation", "Borderline Traits" (ah, that old dumping ground!), and "Obsessions/Compulsions"? A combination of neurological stuff and PTSD. I was diagnosed with mild OCD because of tics which fit Tourette's criteria. One therapist suggested that I just didn't want to "improve" when I started ticcing even more under the scrutiny. Seriously.

The test was interesting to mess with, and I think it nicely illustrates a number of systemic problems. I didn't need this to tell me how sane I am now, and not surprisingly, think this assessment deeply underestimated my coping abilities in some ways while just not taking other areas into account at all. Can I clean my house? Rarely, for multiple reasons. And so on.

(Maybe I should throw in a link to my Psychiatry, freedom, and noninterference post here, for clarification. I am all for truly informed choice, and the last thing I'd want to do is tell people to buck up. Urgh.)