Feeling a bit better today. Perhaps it is the sunny weather that is improving my mood.

I made some eBay purchases recently, and one of them is one of those full spectrum light therapy rigs. It basically looks like a very fancy makeup mirror. I am hoping that I can use it to set my sleep schedule to something more normal and healthy.

Maybe even sleep for eight hours… in a row! Imagine that.

Of course, if it turns out to make me happier as well, outside the better sleep, all the better. Admittedly, it will be a while before the local weather fails to provide sunlight on a regular basis anyhow, but what the heck.

It takes me so long to get around to doing things sometimes that I have learned to strike whether the iron is hot or not. My “doing things” window tends to be small and random, so I get things done whenever I can.

Depression is so inconvenient.

Still, the sun is shining, the birds are singing, I will be going out to eat and hanging out with my friends tonight, and tomorrow I get X-rays to fix this thing with my left knee, so things are looking pretty good from here, for now.

The knee still hurts, obviously. My theory (of course I have a theory) is that some vital bit of cartilage has somehow broken or worn away and that is letting my kneecap click against my femur in a way that Really Really Sucks.

See, there is normal pain. And there is pone pain.

I know bone pain well, because I broke my arm three times as a kid. It is a deep and very disturbing kind of pain, Your body knows something is terribly, terribly wrong. The vital framework that holds everything else together now has a discontinuity, and that totally weirds your body out.

Now luckily, whatever the fuck happened to my knee is no big deal, as these things go. I am not in a cast, nor am I likely to be (I hope). The leg is usable, so I am not stuck in a wheelchair or on crutches.

I have been on crutches before, and holy shit does it suck. Especially in a cramped apartment like ours. I mean, it’s actually quite a big apartment, but we have so many bookshelves lining the hallway that it is quite narrow now, and getting through THAT on crutches when I am not exactly nimble to start with would be a nightmare.

Plus, imagine having to support all my ponderous weight on my armpits. Not fun.

So it is not as bad as it could be. But that bone pain is a monster, y’all. It doesn’t just hurt, it makes me feel panicky and nauseous. And it is all about how many steps I have to take in a row, augmented by whether there are stairs involved.

As long as I can rest up, the first little while moving around will not hurt that much. I’ll still feel the pain, but it will be minor, not at the nausea and panic level at all.

But the more I use the injured leg, the more each step hurts and the more I feel that burning feeling of inflammation heating up my knee (actually, both of them, for some reason) and sending me powerful “STOP DOING THIS” signals.

And if I keep it up, the bone ache spreads into the marrow of my bones, and that is when I start feeling dizzy and anxious and like I wanna barf.

Just getting home from the Shopper’s Drug Mart next door was a long journey into pain. Luckily, I found that small pauses in my gait kept the pain down to a tolerable level. But that trip has never been more dauntingly, subjectively long before.

But I had no choice. I needed more insulin. Can’t exactly put that off until I get well. For all I know, it will take months before this thing is fully healed.

I mean, I hope not, but I try to be realistic about this sort of thing.

My main worry is that this is just the first acute symptom of something more broad-spread. My doctor mentioned osteo-arthritis and that sounded entirely plausible. Hence my sudden worry about the calcium levels in my diet.

They say that after 40, your bones start to decalcify on their own, and so you have to increase the amount of calcium in your diet in order to compensate. The only calcium I currently get is the cheese on burgers when I eat out once a week.

That is clearly nowhere near enough.

So I am not sure what form it will take, but I will definitely increase my calcium intake soon. I guess I will buy some supplements just to be sure. But I would really rather get it from food.

Even if that means wrangling the logistics of supplying myself with milk to drink on a daily basis. The problem is that I would have to get it in the right amount, so that I will drink it all before it goes bad.

My first instinct is always to buy in bulk, both to save money and keep from having to get more all the time. So I would want to buy one of those bigassed gallon jugs of moo juice.

But that would probably go bad before I drank it all.

Oh well, I am sure I will work it out somehow. I can see making milk a daily thing. It’s not that I don’t like the taste. Milk is great. I just got out of the habit of drinking it at some point.

A nice cold glass of milk with lunch every day sounds fine by me. Might even help with my chronic acid stomach issues.

I think I am going to be buying myself some milk tonight.

I guess that is all for me for today, folks! Talk to you tomorrow.