Weekend snaps

Summer, for all intents and purposes, is here (I live in the South, we have no time for your transitional seasons). The weather is perfect, if stormy, from now until about June, and then things turn disgusting and my hair grows three sizes in the manner of the Grinch's heart, and I make Brandon sit at least a foot away from me at all times because it's too hot for touching, and it is a struggle to leave the bliss of air-conditioned indoor spaces.
But for now, it's lovely; 70-80 degrees and low humidity and I don't want to die every time I go outside, so we have been taking advantage of living on the coast before the tourists arrive en masse. This weekend we rented a paddleboat and toured Greenfield Lake for an hour, visiting with turtles and fish and one very slow-moving alligator, and we also spent a wonderful afternoon at the beach, playing cards and reading and quickly moving our stuff away from the shifting high-tide line. It was a very good weekend. And now...Monday.

 

 

 

  

Like they do on the Discovery Channel

I took my bunny to the vet on Monday to get a hormone-regulating chip implanted between his shoulder blades. It’s like Implanon for rabbits. Implanbun, if you will. Birth buntrol.

Mr. Henry James Bunman is a very adorable, stuffed-animal-looking 4-pound lionhead rabbit. He is a rescue – an Easter gift someone got bored with and dumped outside an animal shelter in D.C. – so I’m not sure how old he is, but I am sure that he’s neutered, and that he has been since I brought him home in 2008. In those six years, he’s never behaved badly beyond chewing some of my belongings that I would rather he not chew, so you can imagine my surprise when he spent last weekend trying to mount my cat.

Horny rabbits are a funny thing. Boys do this weird mating dance, where they hop in circles around their object of affection while making a soft, strange "honking" noise. After effectively communicating his desire, Henry gets up behind Sophie and starts sniffing her back, starting at the base of her tail and working his way up. And then he, you know, tries to get down. Sophie – also spayed! Are you reading, Bob Barker? – is decidedly Not Into This. I am also Not Into This, and spend most of it awkwardly walking around, flapping my hands and yelling, “NO ONE IS INTERESTED IN YOUR MAN LOVE, HENRY!” Sophie deals more productively, mostly by bopping him on the head and walking away, and as the rejections pile up, Henry gets more frustrated and thus more aggressive. The whole thing usually ends with me giving up and putting him in his cage, where he chews the bars in a way that reminds me of prisoners in jail scraping their tin cups back and forth against the walls of their cells.

It’s actually normal for neutered rabbits to behave like this occasionally, but since Henry never had in our six years together, I figured it wasn’t “normal” in our case. So I called the vet. And y’all, I can’t. I am a grown-up, everyone at the vet’s office is a grown-up, but I had to tell this story to three people and I could not get through it once without snorting. Only one of those three people – and not, it should be noted, the vet – managed to listen to the whole thing without laughing. ADULTHOOD: WE HAVE IT.

It turns out that this sort of sudden reversion to hormonal behavior is almost always caused by an adrenal gland problem, usually brought on by tumors (typically benign). The vet could have operated to remove the adrenal glands completely, but because it’s not a surefire solution, and because Henners is in the last few years of his life and is not in any pain, I don’t see the point in putting him through that long and difficult recovery process. So we opted for the implant. After giving Henry an awkward groin-region rub-down to make sure he didn’t have any “testicular remnants” (Y’ALL), they took him into a back room to insert the implant. Apparently it involves a very large needle, and apparently he was Very Brave. Four pounds of steel, my bunny is.

Oh yes, that's blood on his nose. His own blood, from burying himself inside the towel when the vet was trying to check his teeth and ripping out his own thumbnail. He's fine. NERVES OF STEEL, THAT ONE.

Three full days later, I can’t really tell if it’s making a difference. He’s still honking and trying to get all up on Sophie, and she is still Not Having It. He seems maybe slightly less aggressive about it (?), but still gets, shall we say, extremely amorous at night. My vet said it’ll take a week or two to kick in, so I guess it’s just a waiting game at this point. (An awkward, horny waiting game that nobody is enjoying.) If the implant doesn’t end up working, I will remain convinced this whole thing is a government ploy to keep tabs on the extremely important happenings around my house.

Joke’s on you, NSA. All that happens around here is a lot of snacks, books and ridiculous group text messages.

A good use of taxpayer money, to be sure.

For people like me who are interested in animal care costs - as vet trips go, this wasn’t too expensive. Total bill: $197 - $47 for the exam and $150 for the implant. I have pet insurance for Henry through VPI*, so pending approval of my claim, I should end up having to pay around $60 of that. Cheapest turning-my-bunny-into-a-cyborg trip ever.

*VPI paid me zilch to disclose that. I doubt VPI even knows I exist, minus the money I send them every month. Sup VPI.

some notes on my butt

I am ONCE AGAIN sidelined with a random running injury.  Let us list my athletic medical history!

1. Runner's knee. They crackle to this day. Impressively.
2. Achilles tendonitis. I had to wear running shoes to and from the statehouse in Maryland and then stand in the lobby and awkwardly put heels on while trying not to make eye contact with any of the politicians. It was fashionable and not awesome.
3. BENIGN LEG TUMOR (my personal favorite). That shit is still in there, being benign and never ever hurting, except for that one time when I was training for a half marathon and it decided to hurt all the time and scare everyone. Here it is in all its glory:

It's that huge black thing wrapping around the bone. It looks scary, but it literally does nothing but sit there. Kind of like me right now, which brings us to:
6. Some butt thing idk. I would be more specific, but a team (A TEAM!) (but decidedly not the A-team) of physical therapists has no idea what's going on. I think it's piriformis syndrome, which is a fancy way of saying that I've somehow pissed off a muscle deep inside my butt, but the doctors can't agree on anything. To "recover," I'm basically half-assing a bunch of PT exercises that don't seem to help or hit the correct spot. Some days it hurts, some days it doesn't. I'm friends with ice packs and heating pads and ibuprofen and whining. Standard. (My poor boyfriend, y'all. I am lucky that he is the sweetest.)

Us and my butt, in happier running times.

In the mean time, I'm not quite sure what to do with myself, aside from canceling my registration for the marathon I was going to do in June. Registering for races and then not getting to run them is totally becoming my jam. I think I will get a second opinion from a doctor who maybe knows what he's doing. I think I will try to bike, I guess, but that hurts my extremely bony butt in a whole other kind of way, which seems to sort of defeat the purpose.

On the plus side, I am relatively sure that there is not a tumor in my butt. Though I guess that would be the logical progression of my life.

That time I ran a half-marathon pain-free. I remember you fondly,

on account of you were a month ago.

Edited to add: existing tags I added to this post include "ow my butt," "it's not a toomah," "sadness and woe" and "these tags are ridiculous." Just. What.

a tropical heat wave

It's cold in Wilmington and I can see snow on the ground from my couch. Snow! This hasn't happened in the three years that I've lived here and predictably, the city can't deal at all. Everything that can be shut down is shut down, which irritated me to no end - IT'S LIKE TWO INCHES OF SNOW YOU PEOPLE ARE SO WEAK - until my office was included on that list. At which point I was all, "Oh, yeah, it is kind of bad out there, maybe we should all stay inside until Saturday."

I did venture out twice, once to take a little photo walk and the second to go to the gym. It took about 15 minutes to drive the two miles there, only to find that the gym was closed despite its Facebook page telling me it wouldn't be (liars). There were a bunch of guys in the parking lot and when I turned to leave they all piled into their BMW and spent 10 minutes turning doughnuts in the parking lot. They were idiots - it's a large stretch of pavement, but there are a lot of light poles scattered throughout it - but it reminded me of being 17, when it would snow for days and my boyfriend would take me to the empty high school parking lot to do the same thing. I turned that into dramatic poetry post-breakup - "You pull the emergency brake and we go in circles," is how I worded it - but today the only drama is the fact that my hot water pipes are once again frozen and I can't shower. Apologies to my coworkers tomorrow. I tried.

(Title is a reference to this...

...which I always, always think of when it snows.)

2013

I mostly hate 2013. So many ridiculous things happened to me this year - the five months being terrified that I had a debilitating disease, the eventual diagnosis of peripheral neuropathy, the gluten intolerance, a breast lump (diagnosed fairly quickly via slimy ultrasound as benign), a severe allergic reaction to an antibiotic that swelled my lips into Angelina Jolie-size and caused me to break out all over in hives, the subsequent dose of steroids - that my greatest feeling about the past 12 months is mostly a profound relief that they're finally over.

Which is ultimately short-sighted, even if I don't like to admit it. Some really good things happened this year, too. I met Brandon, which is probably the best thing that's ever happened to me. I learned a lot about giving myself a break. I tried yoga. I ran every single day for a month. I traveled an insane amount. I went to Wisconsin - twice! - and didn't hate it either time. I relaxed and went with the flow and, I like to think, changed for the better. And I documented it all the best that I could, both on paper and with my camera(s). Here, in photo form, are some of my favorite moments from 2013.

I'm thankful for many things that happened this year, but sorry, 2013, I'm still not sorry to see your bitchass in the rear-view.

Happy new year! xo

Up to speed

I can't remember the last time I was in shape.

That's a lie, I can. It was the day after I ran the Chicago Marathon. I was sitting in the airport with my feet on my suitcase, occasionally pulling out the finishers' medal to assure myself that yes, I actually did that, and there were so many racing possibilities and I couldn't wait to tackle them all. And then, for all intents and purposes, I never ran again.

I mean, I did. I registered for a November marathon, I once again started training too late, and I ended up having to stop completely because I was taking a medication that made my joints ache and it hurt too much. I deferred that marathon entry to this November. I registered for a marathon and half-heartedly tried to train, but got shin splints, a side effect of what turned out to be a fairly serious vitamin D deficiency.

And then, my left foot started going numb for no reason and I began having weird twitches all over my body. I went to the doctor thinking it wouldn't be a big deal. Instead, I've spent the past five months mired in the terrifying and frustrating and maddeningly slow-moving process of being diagnosed with a nerve disorder.

I don't have a firm diagnosis yet, because it takes forever and there are a bunch of terrifying things that have to be ruled out first. Most likely I don't have multiple sclerosis. Almost certainly I do not have ALS. Probably what I have is peripheral neuropathy, but I don't know what that means or how I can treat it and I'm still a few steps away from getting to that point.

(You can Google this if you want, but it will just confuse you. Everything you'll find will talk about diabetes, and I don't have diabetes. Essentially what peripheral neuropathy means is that the pathways between my brain and my nerves are breaking down, and that's why I'm twitching. Does it get worse? Does it get better? That all depends on the outcome of tests I haven't taken yet, and Googling that shit is terrifying so I no longer do that. I try to be content with the waiting. I am sometimes successful.)

What I can tell you is what it has meant in terms of running, which is basically that I haven't been. At all. My main symptom is nerve twitching in my feet. Sometimes, it is strong enough to move my toes, and I can see the nerve fibers moving under the skin. None of it is painful and so it probably doesn't sound like a big deal to you, because it wouldn't to me, but trust me when I say that it's not the only symptom and it is very, very, very unnerving, and that it happens every single day, for long periods of time. For several hours after every run, the twitching would be worse, and stronger, and scarier, and it made me panic, and so I just stopped doing it.

What this means is that I have essentially been out of shape for a year and a half. I have not run consistently since before my marathon. I do not remember what it feels like to go run three miles and not be gasping for breath at the end. Stairs make me winded. This is the least physically active I've ever been, and it's a devastating feeling. It's a lot of, "How did it get to this point?" and, "Why can't I do this?" and it leads pretty quickly into a spiral of self-loathing, with not a small amount of fear over the ongoing neuro stuff.

What I've decided is that I need to just snap out of it. Both my research and my neurologist say that it's fine if I run as long as it doesn't make my symptoms worse, and according to the doctor, "sometimes it twitches more for a while after idk" is not a sign that it's getting worse. Exercise can actually help with neuropathy symptoms, and so can a healthy diet and so can calming the hell down about it.

So that's what I'm trying to do. I've really only been giving it a serious try for the past two days. Yesterday, I was out the door before 6 am to run 2 miles (twitch-free!). Today, I just ate a lot of pasta. Everything in my life is a process and a balance and it usually involves a lot of food because I like food, and that's okay. All I want to do is to treat myself really well, and to remember that I know how to run, and to believe that it will feel good again someday. I want to drink more tea and eat more strawberries and stretch more and write more and take more photos and read more books and do fun things with fun people. I want to take my whole life one day at a time. That's a cliche, and I know it, but I've never been able to do it. I jump 87 steps ahead. What I have learned in this health-scare process - one of the many things I've learned - is that leaping to conclusions is awful. Googling things is terrible. Looking eight years to the future doesn't help anyone, unless you're doing it to finagle a detailed plan for saving to buy an awesome house or a puppy. And so going forward, I'm going to do my best to stay right here, in the present, where I am.

Which is here: on the couch, having a little gchat with my cute boyfriend, not caring all that much about my stupid feet twitching, and looking forward to my run in the morning. It'll be 6 am and the city will be cool and quiet and it will be all mine, and that is good. That is all very good.

Decision-making

I'm pondering deferring my registration for Raleigh to next year. Thought process? Thought process:

1. I'm still taking Accutane (one month away from being done). It is a fabulous, wonderful, amazeballs medication that has completely transformed my skin but it is also a serious drug that has common but serious side effects, including increased sensitivity to sun, super dry lips and eyes and, most importantly, joint and muscle pain. I have been running consistently and increasing my mileage slowly and my fitness and endurance levels have been handling it fine. My body, on the other hand, feels like someone smacked it repeatedly with a tire iron. My hips hurt. My shins hurt. The backs of my heels hurt. As I type this I haven't run in six days and my muscles, mostly around my hips and butt, are still sore. My doctor is aware of all of this and said it's fine for me to keep running. I'm not injured or running myself toward an injury; this is just how the drug works. But popping ibuprofen three times a day for the next six weeks seems...not smart, and forcing my body to do something that makes it hurt fairly consistently seems similarly unwise.

2. I'm not really where I need to be to run this race for real, which I want to do. I have zero doubt that I could continue training and finish the marathon, but it will hurt and my time probably won't be very good and that doesn't sound like fun.

3. It's free to defer. I thought about dropping down to the half, but they charge a $20 change fee for that and I'm just...meh. Marathon I already paid for and want to do >>> more expensive half marathon that I'm not all that interested in.

4. Frankly, the thought of taking the time to build a rock-solid base and just running in the mornings four times a week because it makes me happy and because I want to do it makes me kind of giddy.

5. There are a couple of really, really great marathon options in my area early next year. The Charleston Marathon is the second weekend in January, and there's a marathon literally eight miles from my front door in March. Maybe I will do both! Maybe I will do neither! But they're both great possibilities, in completely realistic timeframes.

Right now, while my face looks great and my body feels like it's 86, I want to take some time to be in love with running and with spending time on my feet in my town and with seeing the seasons change firsthand outside (as much as the seasons ever change down here). I'm kind of sad because I want to do another marathon, but I'm not that sad because I will do another marathon, and when I do, I will do it correctly, with adequate time and without a training plan slapped together at the last minute. All in all, happy. Good things are in store. A lot of them.

Completely gratuitous cat photo:

I hope you all are well and that none of your running hurts your hips. I almost can't remember what that feels like. One more month!