Posts made by surreality

Trader Joe's (I swear I feel like an evangelist for that place sometimes) had something with a small amount of real juice in basic seltzer. I'm one of those people that for whatever reason cannot do artificial sweeteners. It's either the full sugary/syrupy version of a soda, or 0 cal seltzer without the sweetener (plain or with a flavor, the basic lemon-lime or mandarin orange has always been fine), so I gave it a shot. It wasn't bad! It's more bitter than seltzer, though I drink black coffee more than any of the above combined, so, uh, needless to say, that's not a huge issue for me!

I can deal with LaCroix but never got into getting it regularly. It's a good switchup to one of their more exotic flavors once in a blue moon, but I stick to the non-sweetened types.

That 'thirstier than when I started' is dialed up to 11 with me for all the artificial sweeteners, even in colas/etc. I'm that person that would rather have a can of 'real sugar' pepsi once a week than the artificially sweetened anything all the time. (This is kinda what we do.) It's more like 111 with the 'zero calorie sweet seltzers'. My mother was super into them for a long time (and my husband still is), so there was a period of years in which they'd have me try 'the best thing ever totally can't tell it's artificial!' yet again and I'd have a sip then immediately fill a cup with ice and need to wash the taste out of my mouth with three ice cold glasses of basic filtered tap water.

I may be misremembering this, but I think there have been studies on some of the sweeteners and the 'thirstier than when you started drinking' factor.

Update: So, he's hoping it will fill in and heal up. Marginally better painkillers that do seem to be working.

And yet, the funny moment was maybe priceless.

I have been getting spectacular amounts of shit about everything for months even before this because I smoke. (Cloves, 12/pack vs. 20/pack, usually go through less than a pack a day, for reference -- this wasn't sinking in with him at all.)

Naturally, he asked if I had been smoking. I had stopped (on my own, no aids/etc.) for most of a week and then had just a couple per day since. He didn't seem super alarmed by this and said that since other than the spot he knew would be a problem area to monitor anyway, everything looked really good.

So, he gets to talking about the packing material they're going to use, and warns it has a very strong smell and taste, but it'll more or less stay put and keep that area super numb.

...it's some kind of binder heavily infused with concentrated clove oil. I'm not making this shit up, y'all.

Doing the mental math, he realized that the scrip he'd written (that my parents didn't hand off for whatever reason when they picked it up, I was too much of a space cadet to drive/etc.) for patches was twice as much nicotine as I was normally taking in before pausing and slowly trickling back. They would have done more harm than the normal smoking re: nicotine. (Sucking on things is another issue -- no straws allowed, for instance -- but that's not been an issue.)

...and that they're cloves was helping dull the ow.

He is way less concerned about it now, which is a huge load off of my mind. The, 'well, very good, carry on then and try to keep it down!' was about the quickest turnabout I've seen in forever.

@Derp I still have them! ...in a baggie.

The bottom ones are still there. We get to go through all of this again for the lower in a few months.

Also, thank you, I kept blanking on the name of that thing. It weirded me out so much. More than anything else from that experience.

Skull drilling isn't #1. It's still #2 with a huge distance between it and #1.

Totally not going into #1.

Irony: #1 is the most minor of all these things.

Randomly, I have a hint of a sad because I remember they were looking at using coral for bone implants ages ago. Looks like they don't any more. My inner beach geek would have been down with that!

First followup this afternoon on the first round of the dental surgery nightmare.

Since I don't think I actually posted about this when it happened, here goes nothing:

They're doing this in two stages: top first, it heals and is done, then they start on the bottom. Healing == 3-9 months. FML.

Most places offer to knock you out for this shit -- or offer gas or twilight sleep. NOPE. Not on offer. I got to be awake throughout. FML.

Since everything was numb to the point of 'do I have a face? I am not sure if I have a face... ' I didn't feel anything, but that wasn't really the problem. There is the existential horror factor of 'they are ripping out every one of my top teeth', which is bad enough, but it takes a while, the noises are disquieting as fuckall, and in the case of implants, there is another step.

This step hit #2 on my personal body horror checklist, displacing the creepy IV drip that ran from my upper arm to just beside my heart in the hospital (I forget the name of the thing, but needless to say, someone playing mouse maze with an IV tube and my circulatory system gives me the skittering crawlies).

Because there's that moment you're wide awake and you realize that the friendly all-smiles person staring down at you is boring a drill that looks like it could strike oil straight up into your skull through your gums, and you realize: 'I came here on purpose.'

And it takes a fucking while, y'all.

It takes long enough for you to really sit there and ponder the life choices that brought you to that particular place and time and circumstance. While there's not a lot I could ever have done differently to change things -- bad genes, highly acidic body chemistry, years of not being able to keep food down due to stomach issues, braces ripping off enamel, the shitty work done by the clinic that was all we could afford -- I was already well into time travel scenarios involving a now-aged me yelling at my (then me-now-aged) parents in a Timecop jumpsuit about how slightly crooked teeth are not the end of the fucking world before handing little me a selection of winning lottery numbers before stage-whispering, "Get out!" like a ghost in a horror flick before diving back through the time portal by the time he was done drilling six mine shafts into my skull.

(I will reiterate, I was not gassed or otherwise high at the time. I'm more or less always like this.)

I'm sent off home to go rest, with 3 days worth of quite literally the weakest vicodin scrip available (less effective than two excedrin, this is not a joke). It does the job well enough to mostly just knock me the fuck out for the rest of the day.

Positives: despite over 30 injections, no nerve damage. This has happened before, and it fucking blows. (5 years later sensation is mostly back, but not perfect, and that shit sucks -- smiling like you've had a stroke leads to a lot of not smiling.)

The next day, I have to go to the other dentist so they can screw on the fake temporaries.

Shit they don't fucking tell you and you don't necessarily think to ask about:

• The temporaries do not have spaces between the teeth. (Finals won't, either.) I am a floss whore and hypersensitive to the feeling that something is stuck between my teeth. This is driving me super insane. Having only seen models before, and that being the kind of corner people cut in models, I had no clue this was coming and OMG, guys, nnngh.

• There is a brand new ridge behind the back of my teeth, where tooth met gumline. 'Broadcast English Theater Me' now has the craziest fucking lisp and this is not even the tiniest bit OK. There are some other issues here but they're more technical or gross so just augh. My tongue is grumpy with me like it's the last remaining old guard codger hanging on 'til retirement at a small town business that just got inundated by hipster millennials.

• "Don't eat anything you can't cut with a spoon until the permanent teeth are in place." Yep, that's 3-9 months from now. For maybe like, two weeks, before it starts all over again for the bottom ones. Time to become besties with the slow cooker and finally get around to ordering that foodi cooker thing, which has moved from 'would be nice to have' to 'a person cannot actually live on pudding, even if you can get little mini-flans now', and I don't always have 12 hours to wait for meat to fall apart in the old slow cooker.

I get bounced back and forth between the surgeon and the doc to get these things screwed on. The swelling is so bad the surgeon has to do it. The words 'lasering off excess gum tissue' are used in my presence -- which seriously would also hit the top 5 personal body horror list in a nanosecond -- but they thankfully do not have to do that. <wood knock goes here>

"Don't worry, the second and third day are the worst, then it gets much easier."

OK. I'll trust you, smiling man with the skull drill.

And maybe that would have been the case, but...

...one of the clinic's badly capped teeth cracked and fused with my jawbone. Unbeknownst to me, it ripped out a 1/4 square, jagged-as-fuck chunk of jawbone when it came out. That very unhappy part of my face has been spitting out bone fragments -- wait, that is not the way to put that.

That does not convey what's happening here.

Tiny, multi-pronged, spiky bone caltrops are tearing their way out of that space on a daily basis as part of the healing process.

This is actually predictable and not very unusual; I had a minor version of it years ago. While it sucked, it was two tiny slivers, not a tribble farm of calcium devil-nettles. It also hurts badly enough that I literally cannot think or sleep through it, and tears just randomly appear from out of nowhere at intervals. If I took enough Tylenol to even dim that shit, it would actually kill me.

Weird side note: I have the teeth. I figured this would be a strange request, but the doctor insisted that most people want to keep them and I am thinking, 'good gods, why?!' (In my case, I had veneers done on the top front six many moons ago, and they fanged the shit out of my canines for me, as this happened back in my LARP days. Yes, I am that tragic geek loser that wanted to save my fangs. If my sad pretend vampire ass had to have my fangs pulled, by gods, I was keeping 'em.) There cannot be that many vampire LARPers out there, people that still believe in the tooth fairy, or are afraid the biomedical waste trash witch will put a curse on them.

Looking at the horror show that was the remains of them is how I figured out why this was happening, because... holy shit.

Hopefully, he can do something to fix it today or schedule a short-wait time to do so. Ideally it won't be a huge extra cost, but it may mean some kind of bone graft. (Nnngh.)

Hopefully, something more useful for the pain factor won't be a nightmare to insist on, because it's necessary, and while I'm sure I will die in some spectacularly stupid way, I don't want it to be 'my oral surgeon is so scared about the opioid epidemic that I die from a Tylenol overdose'.

I even considered just making sure I sleep through much of any recovery period, but I grind my teeth in my sleep when something hurts, and that will fuck things up faster that a wrecking ball to the chin and ensure nothing ever heals properly. I also apparently have crazy bite pressure, who knew? We will not discuss the number of sleep mouth guards I've completely torn apart or how quickly.

It's been an adventure thus far, y'all. Folks were supportive and understanding about this here in a huge way, so I figured the update was worth doing. It's not as bad as it could be, but dang.

@Thenomain Somewhere, amongst the beach stuff, there is a guide book to various things you find in the area where we go shell hunting on vacation.

It has a section showing a handful of maps from about the 1920s to present, with some future projections -- every 20 or so years, iirc.

At a glance, most of Florida will be retiring when any hypothetical kids I may have had do.

@Auspice Malibu Vampire Barbie.

...dammit, now I kinda wanna make one of those some time.

@Derp Oh no. They don't do gas, twilight, or full knockout. They just don't. I got to be awake throughout, though heavily numbed with novocaine, obviously.

Xanax came in handy.

It does not help with the psychological body horror of 'this person is drilling six channels into my skull right now to insert titanium rods', though. Not even a little.

Also: ow, that novocaine wore off fast.

Dental hell surgery starts in a few hours. 8:10AM. (The ten minute specificity freaks me out more for some reason.)

Naturally, I can't sleep. Of course. <headdesk>

@Roz said in Random links:

Victorian ivory dildo BELONGS in a MUSEUM!!!

How is this not upvoted 100 times. The comment thread is a joy.

This is the first time* I've ever read through a Twitter thread thinking "oh I hope they get the haunted dildo"

*ok, 2nd.

<helpless cackling>

<whimper-sniffle>

@Auspice I don't actually take anything currently for it, and deal with it through coping strategies.

I have in the past, when I was in college or working outside 'self-employed artist working from home', and it made an important difference: it allowed me to better manage in an environment structured by others and on their timetables.

In current circumstances, it's not as vital. Adaptability is definitely something of a perk, and while there are sometimes hiccups and problems, they're the kind that would hit in any environment (illness, etc.). While my hours range all over the map, following my own pace has been a huge help, and I can do it without medication, because I'm following my own (changeable) structure as it unfolds.

I run into a number of similar issues. Some of these aren't necessarily new for me, but these are what I work on:

1. I'm another person totally cool with creating spotlight opportunities and setting myself as support for others. Like most folks, it's frustrating when this is never reciprocated. I've stopped hoping for it to happen to avoid disappointment; I never expected it to happen but I've shifted toward a conscious expectation that it won't. It may be pessimistic, but it prevents the disappointment, and turns the times it does happen into something much happier and shinier, and I find I am more grateful for them. Still working on the frustration part.

2. "I cannot fix everything." Some days I have to repeat this out loud for a while. Stereotypical Libra. Seeing both sides of the problem is not the issue. Can it help find a solution? Sure, sometimes. Not always. I need to find a way to chill some regarding those times it doesn't, because in those cases, seeing both sides of the problem that has no solution is knowing those two sides are unhappy.

3. Even if a problem has a solution, most of these things involve compromise. Rarely does this mean everyone is happy; it generally means everyone is somewhat happy and still somewhat upset, because there's typically give and take involved. Work on trying to not dwell on the grousing the 'give' part involves or consider it a sign of being some horrible failure, because there's usually continued grousing, even if the solution works out well for everyone.

There's more than that, but that's all my brain is up for for now.

@AeriaNyx Short people who ask other short people to get things from the high shelves (barring the sort of injury/etc. that would prevent this, obviously) deserve to have their brooms set on fire.

If I wasn't annoyed before, I would be now, purely on principle.

@AeriaNyx I have more to say about this (in support of what you're describing) when caffeine withdrawl headache fucks off, but... yeah.

What you're describing is a lot like a 'pay to play' scenario. While they aren't looked on grandly in this hobby, at least those are generally transparent and open to anybody.

I know when Spider was here, she sent some of the stuff she found in the room she was staying in to this person. (Not her things, my things.) She was already boxing that shit up before she even thought to ask if this was OK -- then claimed it was a single old stuffed animal, but dang did that box rattle loud and get heavy for a single old stuffed animal.

I dunno if it helps to have someone say they know this shit was definitely, absolutely going on... but this shit was definitely, absolutely going on.

@Rinel In some respects, HorrorMU is a perfect example of this principle in action. It is a lot of fun that way.

While the characters are more different from setting to setting than it would be in a traditional example of this, it's a similar thought experiment in some ways, with recurring themes/general traits/etc.

@Coin There is that. It's why it's mantle art for the time being. I'll be damned if I don't get some use out of it.

@Coin Not a lack of wanting to. Just what you mention: no one ever does.

I was kinda sad to discover I was the only person who actually picked up a copy from our local shop.