Happy anniversary, Sheryl!

Hair: my pixie is in the middle of the worst phase (I hope) of growing out. Eventually it'll be back to a short bob. It since I'm not going anywhere anyway, this seemed like a good growth opportunity.

Happy anniversary! (we did take out for our 30th earlier this year)

My SIL just texted me. Hurricane baby on the way. Her water broke. Not due until end of month, but all is well. She is admitted and in labor now.

Watched the splash down. Exciting stuff.

Yep.

Happy anniversary, Sheryl!

Hair: I'm contemplating ordering clippers, because my hair is now so shaggy that I can't really tame it and I don't know when salons will be allowed to reopen here. Can I give myself an undercut? If I mess up, I guess the only real consequence is having bad hair in meetings for a while. But not cutting it also means having ridiculously poofy hair in meetings.

I had fun anxiety dreams last night, one of which where I was outside on a city street without a mask.

Waiting to see who will emerge first, the astronauts or my new nephew.

I don't either cut or color my hair anymore so no covid hair for me!

• sits with Zenkitty on the "I want my old hair back" bench*

Ken told us a couple of weeks ago that he's looking for a new job and working towards buying a house. With four members of the Horde moving to Washington, it will probably be closer to where they settle, but - a house? Is he old enough to buy a house? That can't be right, can it?

Gah. It is so challenging to not scream at my mother. Her total knee replacement on Wed went well, and she's been home since Thursday.

Venting: she refuses to take prescription pain meds (ok, fine) but also is terrified of taking of OTC meds because she's read about the liver damage that can result from too much acetaminophen. So basically she doesn't want to take ANYTHING to help with pain management...and she's in a lot of pain. So she's cranky because she's in pain, and I'm cranky because I've spent the last three days doing everything humanly possible to control her pain that she will allow. Which is qigong, ice, and tart cherry juice. Seriously, that's all she's willing to try and i'm fucking exhausted.

I get that acetaminophen can be dangerous in large doses, and they prescribed her 500 mg pill, to take 2 3/day. She doesn't want to take any dose more than 250mg at a time...but doesn't have any in the house and won't buy any because she doesn't want that "toxicness" in her home. Headdesk. She's so obsessed with being healthy that she is denying pain management. She won't allow acupuncture (she's afraid of needles) which is fine because it would agonzing getting her anywhere right now considering how much pain she's in. I've tried to assuage her concerns about acetaminophen overdosing by by keeping a sticker on the bottle and writing the time when she's taken a dose (well, she's supposed to but generally won't take one unless I hand it to her and watch her swallow it. She had a headache this morning and attributes it to taking tylenol yesterday. Sigh. She also spent most of the day in bed staring at screens, but nooooooo, it MUST have been caused by the evil demon pills that the evil doctor keeps telling her to take even though she doesn't want to. Then i'm the bad guy trying to poison her when i just don't want her to be in so much pain that she can barely walk to the bathroom!

So she reasons that she shouldn't take the acetaminphon because it gives her headaches (this is a new discovery as of today) and won't take the rx narcotics because they would make her less productive (makes me laugh every time she says it. She's retired, lying in bed and faffing about on her iphone. I really don't think she could be any less productive. At least if she were sleeping she'd be getting rest and healing. But no, she couldn't sleep more than a few hours at a time last night because she was "restless" (her phrase. My interpretation: in pain.)

I've been plying her with CBD extract but she doesn't want to take that during the day because it might make her sleepy. Who cares? Sleep a little! There's no reason for her to be awake all day! Napping is good after surgery! I can't talk sense into her, so she calls the Drs office EVERY FUCKING DAY and asks essentially the same questions, they give her the same answers which she promptly forgets because she doesn't like them. I standing the room with her during these phone calls so *I* Remember what she's being told, but she doesn't like hearing it from me either so she just plows ahead being miserable and not allowing effective pain relief.

I brought up Hamilton on her laptop, hoping that would distract her, but she insists on browsing Amazon in the meantime and keeps pausing it in order to yell comments at me about whatever she's looking at on her iphone instead of watching the musical.

Oh, and the online shopping. Gah. 8 packages in the last 2 days. On Thursday she had me go out and buy her melatonin and evening primrose oil. Which I did. Then Friday and Saturday she asked me about procuring bottles of each...so I pointed at the brand new bottles next to her bed. "Oh right." Then today a package arrived containing melatonin and evening primrose oil that she ordered yesterday because she forgot about the bottles in plain view. This is not medical-related-memory loss, it's totally normal behaviour for her and always has been. She describes it as "hummingbird brain." I describe it as INFURIATING lack of awareness and short memory. Also, why did I brave a (continued...)

( continues...) store solely to purchase those things for her, when she apparently could wait for amazon delivery??

So yeah, that's how my day has been. I've also been trying to coax her into a shower all day which I know will be an exercise in frustration and misery for both of us, but would probably help in the long run...but she's still refusing and i'm not pushing super hard because I keep having to bite my tongue to not just shove pain meds in her mouth. "But I was up walking around the lake the day after my last surgery..." which was a fucking lumpectomy, not a knee replacement! I know that she is an intelligent person, but she acts like such an idiot about health-related issues and her own body. Sigh.

Apologies for all the venting, there's really no problem solving to be done at this point. She's determined to suffer through it because one person she knows who had the same surgery from the same doctor "wasn't taking any pain meds two days after the surgery." On further questioning, this friend didn't actually have the same surgery, she had a knee resurfacing - totally different procedure. And I asked mom "when she says no pain meds, does she just mean no narcotics? Because you haven't taken even one of those." Mom doesn't know, she just doesn't want to put pills in her body. Including the blood thinner to prevent strokes. She keeps "forgetting" to take that one in the pill planner...just leaves it in. When I point that out she starts listing all the negative side effects of said medication. Which I counter with "the doctor prescribed it to keep you from dying from a blood clot. Do you want to die from a blood clot? I don't want you to die from a blood clot." Today her response to that has been that she thinks her dad died from a heart attack, not a stroke. Uh, whatevers, that's all well and good, but the blood thinner wasn't prescribed because of family history, it was prescribed because you had surgery for breast cancer one year ago and then a major surgery this week so OMG JUST SHUT UP AND TAKE THE FUCKING MEDS ALREADY. Which is what I have managed to NOT shout multiple times. I feel like a teenager wanting to slam doors and flounce away after dropping lines like "well then, just don't take the meds and die already!" which I keep hearing in my head in spite of not meaning at all. Because I do love my mother...I just wish she weren't so much herself all the time, ya know?