Nano-rant: Facebook’s threshold for “you interacted with this post, therefore you must want your feed flooded with posts just like it!” is very low. Yes, I once commented on a post my friend shared from some quilting page. I don’t give a fuck about quilting and don’t need to see a bunch of bland jokes about fabric stashes. And yes, I clicked on a post a friend shared from her sphynx cat’s breeder about testing for hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. I didn’t even interact with it apart from clicking on it. And now, Facebook is like, "Oh, you clearly want to see a bunch of breeders’ pages. No the fuck I don’t. I’m not going to say I’m absolutely against breeders (it’s too nuanced an issue to take a hard stance like that), but sorry. My life is too full of discarded animals who are amazing and perfect and whom nobody wants because they’re not corgi puppies to even think corgi puppies (or mini goldendoodles or maltipoos) are cute. I don’t want to see it.
Micro-rant: I’ve been trying to find some form of counseling and my god, the fees are outrageous, even at the “low-cost” places. Like okay, I live in a world where we do surgery for $40, first of all. On a cat, yeah, but you can’t tell me a veterinarian opening up an abdomen and removing an organ and leaving an animal happy, healthy, sterile, and ready to party by the next day doesn’t take more skill than listening to a person bitch and sometimes suggesting that they try deep breathing or yoga. And if it were a one-time thing, I’d be all about forking over $110. But that much every week? Especially for something that has such a minimal chance of being helpful at all… I mean, I’ve heard tell that if you find “the right fit” it can be helpful, but that has yet to happen for me. And picking one seems like such a shot in the dark… it just seems to unlikely that “the right fit” will ever happen.
Mini-Rant: I spent my whole day today on appointments and was absolutely drained by the time I got back home, ready to crawl in and make a beeline for the bed. I pulled into my driveway and… a large branch had fallen down and brought my power lines with it. So I had no electricity and a live wire down in the yard and had to call the power company and my landlord and to top it off, I had a grocery delivery scheduled and it was too late to reschedule, so the poor guy pulled up in the midst of a disaster area. It wasn’t even windy today.
Midi-rant: So I don’t know if I already mentioned this, but my doctor’s final word on my glitchiness was basically “it’s just stress.” She said she could refer me to a neurologist if I really wanted her to, but that, with a clear MRI they would probably think it was just stress as well. I’m trying to be open to this idea and not see it as being as dismissive as it feels. Hence the counselor search. That’s the thing: my issue with the “it’s just stress” idea isn’t that I so dearly want to have lupus or that a brain tumor would validate the impact it’s had on my life, it’s that it’s a dead end. It leaves me with no concrete solutions, directions, or timeline for when or if it might get better. That was about… two weeks ago? I was going to skip the neurologist. She made it sound like it would be pointless. Everyone in my life seems to be adamantly opposed to the “it’s just stress” idea, though. It’s too extreme, it’s not like me, it’s gone on too long, etc. So I started seeing a physical therapist because tbh I really don’t give a shit about a diagnosis unless, like I said, it comes with a plan of some sort. The PT thinks it looks like ALS, which… you know… isn’t fucking terrifying at all. The acupuncturist (don’t laugh at me- it was recommended by a friend who doesn’t take no for an answer. I don’t know that it’s doing anything, but it does kind of feel nice) who is firmly on the “something is very wrong with you and this is definitely not just stress” train, asked if I had googled my symptoms. I said yes, and that the results are pretty uniformly unpleasant. I mentioned ALS jokingly and he jumped right on it and said that’s what it looks like to him. Soooooo I guess I will ask for that neurologist referral after all. I mean, I guess I would think (hope?) that my doctor would have thought of that, but specialists exist for a reason, so… that looks like the next step.
:D:p