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Testing remedies for itching part 1

4 Sep

Yes, still itching. My arms and some other parts of my anatomy look as if I had goose bumps on them, and the itching is still bad enough that it wakes me occasionally.

 

So, antihistamines help, some. But not for long, you need to keep taking them and I don’t think that’s particularly healthy, not if it’s at a rate of a pill every second or third hour. I take them before going to bed, now.

 

Topical stuff: aloe vera is in some ways best of the things I have tried so far. It stops the itching only for a rather short while, but that is true with the rest of them too, and it dries fast and doesn’t stain or smell. I have tried some essential oils, and peppermint also works pretty well, but then you will smell rather strongly for a while. I have used jojoba, grapeseed and linseed oils for base oils, and linseed oil is supposed to offer some relief from itching too although I noticed no big differences when using it compared to the other two. Next I intend to try coconut oil, by itself and mixed with some essential oils.

 

Oh yes, linseed oil smells a bit funny too all by itself. Mixed with some essential oil it of course doesn’t matter much as all of them have strong enough smells to mask the smell of the base oil, but if tried by itself, well, I don’t think I’d recommend it to anybody who works in an office or some similar place.

 

OK, I’ll continue with this after a day or two, I have done some shopping and will be trying several new things in the coming days. 🙂

Nope

28 Aug

It’s not over yet. My arms and legs started itching again, and while there is not much red in evidence there are these small bumps all over the skin, you kind of need to look from the side in that kind of lighting where they can cast bit of a shadow, but when you do, yep, they are there.

 

I went to a doctor and according to him it’s the same hand, foot and mouth disease still. In fact, it’s quite possible this will take several weeks more, maybe even up to half a year, before all the symptoms will be permanently gone. Most likely there is no risk of it becoming any kind of severe again, but the itching may continue (at least it’s much less severe now) for a while yet, and there may be occasional episodes later.

 

And I may still lose some nails.

 

Nice.  😦

Status report :)

20 Aug

Itching has mostly stopped, and the rash/hives are mostly gone. A couple of fingernails feel kind of funny, but hopefully that’s just hypochondria (I rather hope I hadn’t been told about that losing your nails stuff…). I got a couple of fresh blisters inside my mouth during the last weekend, but nothing after that.

 

Okay, maybe it’s almost over, and I get to keep my fingernails.

 

There have been some promising developments in my private life too, so maybe I can finally get fully back into writing and other stuff – I’m no good when it comes to dealing with stress, I lose the ability to concentrate, or I can do that only sporadically so when there are extra stress factors in my life – and the ones during the last months have been pretty big, lots of old, decades old baggage has surfaced now – I can become rather useless for several other things. I’ll dither, start things, stop doing them, start again, lose focus again, dither around some more… Managing my day job (well, I work nights but anyway) has been about the only thing I have been able to do well enough for nearly four months now.

 

But as said, things are looking better now. Finally.

 

So as long as my fingernails stay where they are supposed to… 🙂

and the doctor –

14 Aug

– also thinks it’s hand, foot and mouth disease.

 

Itches like crazy. Seems this doesn’t cause the rash and hives for everybody, nor does it itch for everybody, but the itching, even severe itching, more often happens to adults. Plus it can be over in a week, or it can last several weeks, although a week is more common. And sometimes people lose at least some of their nails, which at some point just fall off… great. Just great.

 

There are several somewhat different viruses which cause this, and different people react differently, so no saying beforehand how it will go for you. Most times it’s a very mild disease, but occasionally it can become severe enough to require hospitalization, and it can come in kind of waves – you are sick for a few days, then it seems you are recovering, only to become even more sick after a few better days. And like several other kid diseases more often the worst cases happen when adults get it, kids usually can handle it better.

 

Okay, I think I will go back to lathering something on my arms. And maybe it’s time to take another antihistamine pill, those seem to help some too.

 

I could use an old fashioned big blackboard right now. If I was writing ‘I will not scratch my arms’ one thousand times I would not have the time to scratch them. 🙂

Remembered to take the camera

24 May

to work this morning. So, some photos from my paper route:

 

Untitled 1Untitled 2Untitled 5Untitled 7Untitled 9tie1

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

BTW, now that I have taken a better look at these, either there are a lot of ghosts on that lakefront, or a lot of dust. 🙂

 

(To those who do not know what I’m talking about – those orbs you sometimes see in photographs, the balls of faint light, are sometimes assumed to be ghosts, or some other kind of spirits, by the people who are interested of paranormal and study such phenomena. I think the assumption is that you see more of them in places which are supposed to have lots of spirit activity. The alternative explanation is that they are dust or insects caught by the camera – like that lake picture, I had the camera on automatic and it used the flash, and while there are not many insects around yet there is a lot of pollen now. And yes, I’m interested and have read a lot about ghosts, spirits, near death experiences etc, and I actually think there probably is something real behind at least some of that, and I have personally had a few experiences which would be hard to explain from a purely materialistic perspective. However if something can be explained that way I presume the most likely explanation, most times, is the mundane one)

Preoccupied with other stuff

5 May

I haven’t abandoned the blog and don’t intend to, but right now I have enough other things to worry about that I just am not in mood for any kind of regular posting. And this will probably go on for at least a month or two more.  There have been, and are probably going to be, a few rather significant changes in my life, and I need time to adjust my thinking. And get over this partial paralysis I seem to be suffering from right now. Right now doing one thing at a time is all I can manage, and moving from one thing to another takes way too much time. Mostly I would just want to escape, maybe by doing nothing but watching movies and reading novels, preferably very fluffy stuff like romantic comedies or something else I usually tend to avoid, and eat chocolates, and every time I relax a bit I seem to end up in this fugue state where I do nothing, just daydream. Or watch television. Or something.

 

I’m working on it. Once the practical stuff is over it will probably be easier to deal with the rest, I have always had this tendency to freeze when I’m waiting for something to happen.

 

So, until this situation is over I may occasionally post paintings or photos, but I intend to get into the habit of posting regularly sometime during this summer, probably after midsummer. Lets say not every day, but I am going to aim to at least two or three times each week.

 

Until then it’s going to be just when I am in the mood, and that may not be very often, I’m afraid. 🙂

Adult orphans

10 Mar

Still no finished paintings.

That family stuff was pretty serious. My father passed away a few weeks ago. It will be a few more before he is buried.

I’m middle-aged, but not that close to retirement age yet. My parents were both the youngest in their families, they married late, and got me what was pretty much the last possible moment then, before the age of test tube babies and other modern advances. And because of that I’m also an only child, as far as I know my mother did conceive once after me, but due to her age and some health issues which came up with that pregnancy the doctors talked her into having an abortion (at that time health issues were the only legal reason for abortions in this country).

And I have never married, nor had kids of my own. If I had met a suitable man I would have, but there are several reasons why that didn’t happen (a slightly overweight and painfully shy geek girl growing in a small town at an age when practically nobody of that age had weight issues in this country and there was no real geek culture here, high IQ and all the weirdness issues that can bring – yep, not that many guys were interested to start with, and I would have wanted somebody I could communicate with. Lots of them ran after I got over the shyness and started to talk. And finding other weirdoes was a lot harder before the age of internet, even in a bit larger population centers when I moved to one later. :D)

All that, and now I have no family left. My mother died young, I was in my 20’s, all my aunts and uncles are dead, my cousins were all so much older than I was that we never really got to know each other. Most people in my age group have siblings, at least one parent still alive, nieces and nephews if not children of their own.

Right now I’m feeling rather lonely. I do have friends, but that’s not the same as real family would be.

And the one thing I have been thinking about is this: being where I am is still a bit rare, but more and more people have been starting their families late, often have only one child, may very well be only children themselves… this is going to become a lot more common. Middle aged orphans with no families. What kind of impact will this have on the society as a whole? It will show in some ways, that is certain.

Braiins…

9 Feb

I could use some. SAD time. Usually seems to hit me hardest just when it finally starts to get a bit lighter. I haven’t managed to do anything during the last month. If you don’t count backing in ditch once (needed a tow truck to get out), and a week later into a mailbox (totaled it – the company car only got a small scratch) on the paper route. Bad weather contributed, both times, in the first case a nice, untouched snow cover on a narrow road I had to back into, indistinguishable from the snow bank in the ditch, and no way to tell where the road stopped and the ditch began, and I guessed wrong. And the second time, sheer ice on that road, I braked and the damn car keeps sliding for nearly couple of meters longer in spite of the fact that the speed was about what would be a very slow jog for a human at that point.

 

Sometimes I really hate driving in winter.

 

Also the anti-inflammatory pain meds I’ve been eating for a couple of weeks (an effort to deal with the inflamed Achilles tendon I have had problems with for several months) may have had an effect, one of the possible side effects seems to be ‘may cause drowsiness’, so perhaps my reaction speed and attention have been somewhat impaired lately. Embarrassing, anyway.

 

So, let’s just say I haven’t managed anything productive.

 

I should be back in a week or two. I hope.

Merry Christmas

23 Dec

With a Christmas tree. And again the problem with using that not very good scanner I have, this looks good enough as a small picture, and the original painting looks fairly decent, but if you enlarge this scanner image, well, some of the brush strokes can be seen in much sharper contrast than they seem to naked eye when you look at the actual painting, and the colors have changed a bit too, looking more murky in that image than they seem like in life.

EPSON scanner image

 

 

 

 

 

 

Even though I am not a Christian I prefer ‘Merry Christmas’ to happy holidays or whatever. I am not a Christian because I believe in some things which are not part of the Christian doctrine, any version. For example reincarnation. And then there are some things which are part of most Christian doctrines which I don’t believe in (with the caveat that whatever I believe I acknowledge the fact that my beliefs are no guarantee of anything). In my early twenties I called myself Wiccan, now I guess just neopagan is more fitting. But while I can’t quite go with any of the Christian doctrines, not fully, I still respect Christianity, and I do have mostly Christian values since those are what I was brought up with. And the western civilization has mostly been build on those same Christian values. And I do think those of us who have been born here as the descendants of the people who build this civilization – or all variations of it – should honor them, and also Christianity, no matter what our personal beliefs happen to be. This is ours. It’s good to be polite towards those who live elsewhere, or have come here later and may have different values, but not to the point of forsaking what is our own. So western civilization is not perfect. So what? There is no such thing as perfect, not in this world, and what we have inherited is pretty damn good – we should be proud of it even when we do acknowledge the warts or blemishes we see. Remember that old saying about not throwing the baby out with the bathwater…

 

So, Merry Christmas, from a witch. 🙂

A few days

10 Dec

I’m painting an angel. This might take a few more days, I’m trying to do something I haven’t tried before. It started as a cemetery angel, but looked a bit too ‘live’ for a statue, so I got the idea of going for a transformation: a cemetery statue in the process of turning into a real angel (well, ‘real’ as in the modern idea of angels as humans with bird wings, and mostly as pretty women with swan wings, while the biblical descriptions tend to be more varied). Or maybe an angel who had pretended to be a cemetery statue revealing herself.

So let’s see how well I’ll manage. If it works out I can probably post it in a few days.

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