Which One is the Wolf

Some days I feel like someone thumbing through one of those suspect books on TV, in the police station.

I’m looking for explanations, although really? I’m just trying to find easier ways to explain my life to the rest of my world. I flip through the pages until I suddenly stop and say, “That’s the guy!”

It my case, it was thermal dysregulation.  It’s jargon-y term for a very simple thing that is really just…see? It’s really just thermal dysregulation. Cold bad. Hot worse.

People with Long Covid have plenty of GI symptoms, depending, but my experience with nausea and the subsequent special events that follow were not really lining up. Hence I saw the term in a well-researched paper on LC symptoms, and eureka. 

The other night, I had the cold version (more rare), when a perfectly normal temperature — but a change from one room to the next — sent me into a spasm of shivering.

This looks a lot like a seizure, to the layman anyway. My jaw clamps and all my muscles tense (yes, all of them). I can’t move or speak, and it can take a few minutes to resolve. So yuk to that.

 Nausea related to heat is a constant companion now. I’ve been under the covers too long (or too many blankets) and had to run to the bathroom to puke first thing in the morning. Actually, it’s a kind of morning sickness, just trying to wear the right amount of layers to keep warm but not that warm, except the vomiting is not common. It’s just there, no idea when it’s coming until I get my two-minute warning. 

I’m living with that OK. What’s on my mind, though, is comfort and my willingness to do a lot to maintain it. I make sure the bathroom is heated up before a shower. I’ve been known to toss a slightly damp towel in the dryer for a few minutes first.

And no way am I washing my face with ice-cold water, so I run that for a bit.

The other day I ran it for an hour. Boy, was that overkill or what?

I forget everything now. My stories of cookie trauma are familiar to some. Burn them because I forget to set a timer, or sometimes because my timer goes off and I immediately forget. Seriously, I can turn it off and rise halfway up from my chair, get distracted by A SUNBEAM, and forget immediately.

And I don’t burn them as much as I forget to put them in the oven, or to actually turn on the oven. It’s not just cookies but that’s all I bake (and just oatmeal-raisin, because the recipe is simple and now memorized); I do heat up frozen food sometimes, and I’ve literally take out a tray of chicken, plopped some down on a plate, returned to the TV to watch whatever I’m watching and stick a piece of very frozen meat into my mouth. Happens a lot.

This doesn’t worry me from a progressive standpoint — it’s worse than it was, but it may be better next week; things do wax and wane like that, just not as much as before. I tend to get a new symptom, or a worsening one, and it stays. Now. It’s an adventure.

Even without my heat intolerance, particularly inside cars, I wouldn’t be comfortable at all driving to an unfamiliar place, or one further than a mile or so from my house. My hands are firmly on the wheel, no music or podcasts, no phone use at all, and still sometimes I’ve forgotten I was driving.

It’s the hardest thing to explain to someone else, by far. I can’t describe the chaos in my head, but it’s real and real annoying. I’m now in a living situation where I’m comfortable, and really pretty safe from myself. I’m not gonna burn the house down. I may forget to take my laundry out of the dryer for a few days. I don’t feel unsafe.

But I am feeling a bit like the boy crying wolf. I don’t seem to be able to keep anything to myself, so there’s a little fear that things will suddenly break bad and everyone shrugs. So you forgot your name; you forget a lot of things. Like that,

———-

At the same time, I want to write now, for whatever reason. I haven’t figured it out yet — my fingers don’t work well, and it takes forever sometimes to fix all the mistakes.

But I can live with typos. And I can live with a broken brain, particularly if I think it might at least be an interesting story for others. Your brain could break too, you know. Things start to feel tenuous when everything is jumbled, and it can happen out of the blue. I might have some stories here.

I know what’s going on in the world. I know about politics and sports and arts. I don’t engage nearly as much, and I limit it because stress is now a literal killer, but you don’t need my commentary. I don’t know anything.

Mostly what I do lately is draw cartoons, which is hilarious and bizarre when you consider that (1) I can’t draw well and (2) I’m not that into cartoons. I mean, I guess. I don’t really understand.

But it’s coming along, and I’m actually getting better. I still use some stabilization and smoothing tricks, but the drawing is mine now, no AI help (I love making images with AI generation, but this is a fun and new skill). I still have no idea what I’m doing or where I might be headed with this, but FYI. There will be toons here.

And more writing, maybe. I can’t really say, but it seems to be a new thing. Which is also a bizarre thing for me to say, but there it is. I try not to think too hard about it.😂