So the Occupational Therapist and her associate visited yesterday.
I was kind of nervous about it – meeting strangers and all – and had planned to take a Xanax an hour before they arrived.
But I forgot. And I was fine. No panic, no anxiety, no self-consciousness. The ladies and Julian and I had a nice chat. I walked out into the hallway outside our apartment door and back so they could see how I walk.
There was a minor kerfuffle about the appointment beforehand. Apparently my case supervisor Galina forgot to actually make the appointment. Oops!
But it turned out the OT and friend were available to make it at the appointed time anyway, so, no harm done.
Oh, and this isn’t really related, but in the morning, Julian had asked me if I was feeling up to going through with the appointment, and I cheerfully told him I felt fine and that I thought I was over whatever had been heating me up.
Not fifteen minutes later I felt much, much worse. Stomach in knots, sweating, feeling quite dizzy and faint. Figures, dunnit?
Luckily, taking a crap then taking a nap cleared all that up. After that, I felt even better than I had when I told Julian I was fine, and have felt great since.
It’s possible that it was something I ate that causes my feeling of overheating on Monday and Tuesday, and when it passed, so did the ailment.
Anyhow. Diversion over. Where was I?
Oh right, what the OT et al and I actually talked about.
They asked a lot of questions about what I can and cannot do, as well as checking out my two walkers, the indoor and the outdoor models.
The indoor one is the two wheel kind, which is a lot less dumb than I thought it would be way back in 2022.
I thought the non-wheeled back portion would just drag on the ground, but it doesn’t really. There’s a bit of friction, which is good because it adds stability, and I quickly got used to it.
I really should remember that I am quite adaptable more often.
They showed me some more advanced “rollator” walkers to maybe replace my four wheeler outdoor walker.
At first I didn’t think there was a point in replacing it, but the ones they showed me looked a lot sturdier than my current model and had a nice padded seat, too.
So I am not averse to an upgrade.
We also had a detailed discussion of landing me the ability to take a frigging shower. At first they wanted to install one of these shower bench things some people use where half of the bench is in the tub and the other half is outside the tub and you sit on the outside part then sort of scoot over to the inside part.
I don’t like that idea. It seems unsafe. I would worry that I would slip right off the bench and hurt myself. And I don’t really want to “scoot”.
But then I realized that the “outside the tub” portion of said bench would block access to my toilet, and that was the end of that.
We decided on a shower chair and some rails that I can grip to help get in and out of said chair, and that suits me fine.
Lord knows how long it will take before I actually get that stuff installed. First we have to get permission from the owner of our apartment, then we have to tell the ladies we got it, then they have to write a letter requesting the install, then that has to make it to Victoria then the government wheels have to churn out a response, then it will wait until the installer is free, and blah, blah, blah.
But the wheels are in motion and it’s out of my hands now anyhow.
More after the break.
Oh yeah, therapy
Today was Therapy Thursday.
Pretty average session. Doc Costin’s learned to mostly let me do the talking. It’s not that I don’t think he has anything worth saying, it’s just that I have such a strong need to express myself and so many words in my head that the best thing he can do for me is to listen with understanding and sympathy.
In that sense, talking to him is like blogging in fast-forward.
Which makes me wonder what the therapeutic effect of my becoming a YouTuber would be. On YouTube, I suppose I would have to limit myself by time not wordcount, but still, I could probably talk a lot faster than I blog, so… throughput would improve.
That reminds me of a question I have pondered many times : what if one day, I abandoned wordcount and just wrote and wrote and wrote until I couldn’t stand to type one more word?
Well, for once thing, nobody would read it because it would be huuuuuge.
But that aside, I think it might be quite good for me. I get the feeling that if I went on long enough I would start digging really deep for the next words and that could lead to all kinds of progress.
And maybe I will do that some day.
But I am still too depressed for open-ended investments of effort.
I told Doctor Costin about my breakthrough re : opening myself up to the world because I believe that everything I need to be happy is out there somewhere and the only way I am going to get it is if I go find it myself.
Not totally sure what that will involved, but finally getting off my ass and starting to crosspost this blog to Notd (subscription oriented writing host) would be a good start.
Or trying to make peace with Discord or VRchat again. In both cases, a combination of social anxiety and frustration at not being able to find anywhere where people are actually freaking talking have made me quit multiple times.
I tried to get back on to Facebook, but you need a working mobile device in order to do the stupid two factor authentication and I don’t have one right now.
Guess it will have to wait until I replace the battery on my tablet.
But I will find a way to be more social on the Internet, dammit!
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.