So I'm old and intolerant.

Thanks to Streak, I've developed an appreciation for taking 3mg of melatonin at night.  It helps with the sleep thing so much, except when I can feel the coiled wire in my neck from where the aneurysm was repaired back in October.  Yes, I can feel it.  I don't know if that's normal or not, I just know I can feel it when I lay down at night and I'm still.  It feels strange and once I even felt it shift or move in my neck, but that was within the first few days it was in there.  Of course my brain had to go into spaz mode about it.  Fun thoughts like what if it twists and the end starts poking out of my neck.  Would I bleed to death before I woke up?  Would my husband wake up before I was done bleeding to death out of a hole poked in my neck by the wire put in it to fix the aneurysm?  Why does my brain even think about these things?  Is it because I stared Death in the face for an entire year and I'm still alive, somehow?

(Streak, if you're out there, you need a blog so I can link to it on the side.  You could call it Streak's Corner and it would be awesome sauce!)

Speaking of, if there ever was a song that was fitting as part of a soundtrack to my life, that would be I'm Still Alive by Meatloaf, especially after being poisoned by chemo for an entire year.  That is my anthem.  Yes, I'll be pretentious enough to say that.

Yes, I say poison because that's what chemo is.  It's poison.  Don't believe me?  Look it up.  No, I won't change my mind about that because facts are facts.  It is poison and I will be outspoken about it.

I suppose with any new readers coming in, they will notice they can leave comments, but said comments will be moderated.  Any comments I decide are on the ridiculous side will be quoted from, picked apart, and treated as entertainment, especially comments like "You're mean!" and "You're evil!"  I will be very amused and generally not give a fuck that someone wasted enough time to tell me I'm mean and evil, just so you know, because haters gonna hate and Idgaf if they do.  Or I could just already say I'm a SOB; sassy old bitch.

Moving on to other things besides being mean and evil, I changed the wash for the hair to liquid drained off garbanzo beans with a diluted white vinegar rinse.  We'll see if my hair likes that wash, so far it made it super soft to where I couldn't do much of anything with it. Loading it down with silicone and paraben laden products seemed to make it unmotivated to grow more and faster, so alternative hair care methods have definitely done it a favor. After all, I may be steroid fat and shaped like a pear because I have no breasts, but by damn, I will have decent hair.

And I will have clean laundry, be it from my own laundry soap I make or the rocking awesome Foca laundry soap.

The coffee grinder we have had for a million years, okay, well, maybe not a million, it's just been the one and only coffee grinder we've had finally bit the dust and I had to go get a new one.  That was an interesting experience, let me tell you.  How complicated can coffee grinding be?  I mean there was like eleventy one of them to choose from and they all did multiple of fifty thousand things.  Wtf?

Upcoming celebratory number on Pinterest.  When that happens, I'll announce it on here just because I know you people have inquiring minds and want to know about this sort of thing.

Moving on, I got barn time in.  A couple of the horses looked like they'd thrown mud pies at each other's manes.  I guess I'll be picking dried mud out of their manes for the next three months, but that's okay.  I don't mind because horses are amazing creatures.  I love horses the way a horse-a-holic loves that horse fix because horses, fuck yeah!  

Some people I wind up encountering and/or dealing with on an occasional basis, I just have to fucking wonder about and wonder where Darwin is with his Award for them.
And some people are just fucking interesting as hell.  I accidentally found a blog post by Melissa Gilbert, yes, THAT one.  She called it A Tale of Two Titties and I think it's fucking awesome she shared.  Some of you may read it and say it's TMI and Idgaf if you do.  This stuff needs to be spoken about.  (For those of you interested, check out this awesome photography project, What is a Perfect Woman? and The SCAR Project because I'm a bad ass who figured out how to embed links.)

As I began reading, and continued to read, what I discovered was that I was agreeing with much of what she said, especially about body and self-image stuff.  I was pleasantly surprised she'd breastfed her babies, and amazed to see she has many of the same issues that any other of us females have to contend with.  The relevance to my blog in conjunction with her blog post is that she's having her implants removed.  Breast related, correlationally (I just made a new word, woot!) speaking, it's chest related surgery.

Melissa, if you're out there and tracking your stats on your blog and you see traffic from my blog to yours, you are probably wondering "What the fucking fuck?" to utilize your fun phrase.  Best of luck to you if you ever see this and I hope you recover well and quickly.  (I wore Holly Hobby dresses when I was a kid because they were vintage looking before the vintage look was cool.)

It's time to tackle the four loads of clean laundry piled on the couch because I am an Angrivated Laundry Faerie Housewife Minion.  (See what I did there?  That was clever of me.)

To quote Johan;  Toot, toot.

(No, you're not going to get that unless you're a big fan of coffee.)

Kinesio taping is good, I think.

Self-explanatory post title.

Secondary lymph-fucking-edema.  It's the vile thing that keeps on giving, because of breast cancer surgery. Uncontrollable and un-triggered random arm swelling, pain, numbness, severe surgery caused nerve damage, and neuropathy from chemo are all constant in any combination or at any given time, although the chemo induced neuropathy seems to affect my feet worse than my arms.  I have sleeves I wear, which do help with some of it and then Streak (the neighbor) has kinesio taped me for it just so we could see if that would actually help or not.  The first time she taped my arms, the swelling in both arms went down by an inch in each arm in twelve hours.  The compression sleeves are medical grade and supportive, but the kinesio taping flat out stops the pain, so I really like being taped, although I can't wear the tape constantly.  And I refuse to eat painkillers for this shit, so constant pain is something I have to live with, unfortunately.  I also have two sports grade compression shirts I wear which do help somewhat, as do the sleeves, which are something different.  The kinesio taping seems to help the most, though.  I'm debating on informing the consult person who will be taking notes on me ahead of my surgery that I will be taped for my comfort and that said tape better not be fucking removed.  It's for my comfort.

Breast cancer wrecked my life, my health, my emotions, and my thought processes.  I cannot ever say enough shitty things about it or the fact that in thirty years, there's not a cure for any of it.  I don't care who you are or what you were diagnosed with, what was done to you to "cure" you and what is done to "monitor" you are all things that have more than sufficient health risks so that anything questionable that happens to your health now, you better wonder about how/why it happened.  After all, money can't be made "fighting" breast cancer (or any other kind) if there is any "success" with "curing" it.

Did I mention this little gem?  http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/257008  Because, you know, zero "medicinal" value, right?  It's the closest possible thing there could be for a cure and yet it seems like damn near everything possible is done to keep it away from people.

Evidently, the HER2+ breast cancer I was diagnosed with back in 2011 was inexplicable, and so is this aneurysm.  I know what's going to happen.  I'll be taking this blood thinner for the six months I was told I'd need to take it because of this stent and coiling aneurysm fix.  Fine.  I'm willing to bet there will be another reason "found" that I'll suddenly "need" to remain on it.  The blood pressure medication, I get it.  Blood pressure issues aren't generally reversible.  The aneurysm fix is supposedly a "fix it and forget it" option. We'll see how that goes.

On to the cats.

Apparently, The Fat One (Sweetie) cat only drools when she purrs.  Why this is, I do not know.

The Fat One (because Sweetie is fuzzy and looks fat even though she's really not fat) and The Smooky One (because Boo is all black and "spooky looking, hence the Smooky word) are what the darlings across the street who belong to Streak and Mr. Streak. (They, (Streak and her family) happen to have a dog named Sparkle who I dog sit for on occasion.))

The Smooky One (Boo) can purr, does purr on occasion, but he doesn't realize he's supposed to do this very often because he is too busy chasing balls around.
Sweetie is also called The Fuzzy Manatee by the males of the family. I've taken to calling Boo by the name Goblin Cat since he likes to reach under doors like a goblin would.

Good news is, ground breaking on the house build is slightly less than a month from now. (No, I haven't posted about that. I wanted to wait until I knew things would be lined out and closer to ground breaking before I said anything.

Bad news is hospitals are for sick people and I am not sick, but I have won a not all expense paid stainless steel stent, multiple platinum coil repair to a stupid aneurysm in my neck Wednesday morning. Supposedly this is the fix it and forget it version of repair. The worst news is, I am going to be stuck in ICU at the pleasure of my doctor and however long he decides I should remain in there. I will likely go batshit crazy. No phone allowed, no laptop, and likely no internet access. I am wondering if he will take peanut butter cookies as a bribe to let me come home.