updates

[kindkit]

1) I voted yesterday. It was easy, with hardly any wait, because I'm lucky enough to live in a place where there's no voter-suppression effort happening.

2) Work is frantic and will only get more so for the next two months. One person from my team (I have a team now! if you can call two people a team) has been out since Sunday due to possible COVID exposure and a winter storm that closed the COVID test locations for a few days. The other is going to be out on Tuesday because she's working at the polls, which is an excellent thing for her to do but may mean I'll be trying to do 3 people's jobs by myself. I worked an 11-hour day on Wednesday, and a 9-hour day on Thursday, and I am tired. Today's a day off, then back to work tomorrow, but at least it'll be a short day to make up for the long ones.

3) Today, not having a physical therapy appointment (those ruin me for the entire day), I lounged around and then managed to tidy up a bit, vacuum, and mop the kitchen floor. This made me feel a bit less despairing about my own little corner of the world.

4) The rest of the world, on the other hand . . . *sigh*. After I finished my tidying I looked at the latest COVID numbers for my area, and they are not good. New Mexico was doing really well for the first months of the pandemic, due to an early and fairly strict lockdown. Then we opened up a lot and are now reaping the consequences.

5) I'm reading Allie Brosh's Solutions and Other Problems, which I bought as an actual paper book after finding it in, of all places, a supermarket book section. I'd been meaning to buy it on paper, but hadn't wanted to order from Amazon and was putting off ordering it from anywhere else. It's good and enjoyable but also pretty harrowing in places.

6) Paper books are heavy! Especially when they're made of the thick high-quality paper that can have illustrations on both sides without bleed-through. This is the first paper book I've bought, or even read, in a long time, because I switched to ebooks when my vision was bad (before my cataract surgery), liked them, and never switched back.

7) I want to buy Jonny Sims' upcoming novel Thirteen Storeys as a paper book, and I may end up ordering it from Amazon UK because I know they know how to ship books overseas. Don't wanna order from Amazon, but . . .

8) I actually don't think Amazon is innately terrible--small local businesses are over-romanticized and the usefulness of centralization is under-valued. I just wish it would be properly regulated and taxed.

9) I wish I could post coherently about anything, but I am so tired. So so so tired. Depleted. I've been working through 7+ months of pandemic now, and my supposedly progressive employer took away our "hero pay" (*spits in disgust at that patronizing name*) at the end of August, and they're also being obstructive and shitty about giving me a job title or a wage that remotely compensates for everything I'm doing, and they're also being obstructive and shitty about covering trans-related healthcare ("maybe next year; no, not 2021, 2022."). I work and sleep and nothing is fun except Rusty Quill, and right now that's not fun either because Discourse is happening again, and I am so tired.

10) Sorry? I know this is hard for everybody. But I'm very tired.

11) ETA 1: Yesterday I ran into someone I used to work with, who greeted me with, "If it isn't Miss [Deadfirstname] Lastname." Now, this is a very nice person, who doesn't know I'm trans because I wasn't out when we worked together, and it wasn't a discussion I wanted to have on the sidewalk outside a store, so I went along with it. Awkward.

12) ETA 2: To end on a happier note: I'm roasting a bunch of veggies (potatoes, carrots, butternut squash, cauliflower, and daikon) and cooking a pork chop for dinner. I'm looking forward to eating real food after too long (due to work + tiredness) of reheated frozen things.

Comments

[lilacsigil]

2) Work has been flat-out here as well, and Melbourne people are going to be allowed out of Melbourne again starting 8th November, so I have no idea how busy it's going to get!

5) I was also reading Allie Brosh's latest then ended up crying too hard to see and had to stop for now. I might go back, but not while Other Things are going on, I think.

9) I'm sorry they're being shitty about trans-related healthcare, that's complete bullshit. So much for being "progressive" when it comes to actual employees.

12) st_aurafina suggested we roast cauliflower and we did and it was SO TASTY we've been doing it a lot

[rydra_wong]

Can't vouch firsthand for how they do with overseas shipping, but I'm trying to shift my physical-book buying to Blackwells:

https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/Thirteen-Storeys-by-Jonathan-Sims-author/9781473228726

And it's on Jonny's list of places that ship internationally, even:

https://twitter.com/jonnywaistcoat/status/1315334276053905409

I have a soft spot for Blackwells because it was while standing in the Oxford Blackwells searching through their psychology section about 26 years ago that I found out for the first time that there might be a thing (autistic spectrum) that explained me.

[rydra_wong]

Also yay voting! Go you! \o/

[kindkit]

Thanks! I've pre-ordered from Blackwells. I didn't even know Jonny had posted a list, because Twitter continues its practice of not showing me the tweets I actually want to see.

And it was cheaper than buying a hardcover in the US ever is, which raises interesting questions about US book prices.

[rydra_wong]

For bonus context, the first ever Blackwells is the big academic bookshop in Oxford, with a gigantic underground basement, and is therefore a place where both real and fictional Jonathan Sims will have spent a lot of time.

[rattfan]

I winced in sympathy about your encounter on the sidewalk and the misgendering. That is so painful. My aged aunt in England does not know in my case (I had enough grief with my mother) and still sends me Christmas cards with "[wrong gender] on them since of course my name does for a boy or a girl and she has not realised. If she saw me and my face fungus, but of course she doesn't.

I'd also be interested to hear about cataract surgery as I'm headed for that some time in the future. My eyes are ok right now but the optician keeps making ominous noises. All I wanted to know was how long I'd get off work....

[kindkit]

Cataract removal is actually really easy, and (at least according to my optometrist) something they recommend doing sooner rather than later, as more developed cataracts are harder to remove. Mine were extensive and fast-growing, but I've had very good results.

The surgery itself takes no more than 5 minutes, although with prep etc. it's more like a couple of hours. I had local anaesthetic + a sedative, so I was conscious but calm. My biggest fear beforehand was that I'd be able to see them cutting etc., but that wasn't the case at all. I could see light and very vague motion, but that was it.

You'll need someone to take you home afterwards, because you'll be in no shape to drive, walk, or take public transport. (But you shouldn't need help once you get home--I live alone and I was fine.) Your eye will be taped shut and will stay closed, due to the anaesthetic and paralyzing agent, for some hours. You're supposed to remove the tape once the numbness wears off and you can move your eye voluntarily.

I had bad luck with my first eye to be done, and ended up getting a fairly serious corneal abrasion when I took off the tape. (They think my eye opened prematurely, while still numb, and some of the tape stuck to my cornea. *shudders*). That was quite painful, but they gave me a "bandage" contact lens that helped enormously, and it healed well after a dose of steroid eye drops. The second eye, done about 6 weeks later, was fine with no complications.

You'll almost certainly want to take the day after the surgery off work, because they have to do a follow-up exam, and anyway your eye will be sore (it shouldn't be actually painful, but it'll feel a bit gritty and irritated) and very light sensitive. I ended up taking 3 days off after my first surgery, due to the abrasion, but only 1 day off after the 2nd. Don't plan on doing anything immediately after your surgery except going home and resting; I was very tired/sleepy and also, even for the eye that didn't get a corneal abrasion, in enough pain that first day that I just wanted to keep my eyes closed and rest. No pain the next day, only a bit of soreness.

They'll probably give you a pair of big ugly sunglasses after the surgery, ones that have side pieces to shade your eyes completely. Definitely wear them outdoors for a while. You might also want to have a lighter pair for indoor wear at first; I wore sunglasses at work for a couple of weeks after both surgeries.

The improvement in your vision should be immediate, and it continues as you heal before finally settling down after about a month. At that point you can be prescribed new glasses if you still need them. And I forgot to mention that they can put in a corrective lens for you at the time of surgery--they have to put in a lens anyway, to replace the natural lens they're removing because of the cataracts, and that can be a corrective lens if you need one. You can choose between a near-vision and a distance-vision lens, and I chose near vision, so I don't need glasses for reading, computer use, or close work. Fancy things like astigmatism correction cost extra, so I didn't get that.

Hopefully that wasn't way more detail than you wanted! I'm a big enthusiast for this surgery, because it literally changed my life. My cataracts were super disabling--I couldn't drive, walking was getting harder because I couldn't always see curbs or uneven pavement, reading was very difficult, etc. etc. But I was scared of the surgery until a work colleague took me through all the details of hers; now I try to reassure other people!

[rattfan]

That's awesome detail, thanks. The most worrisome detail for me would be the being awake - I hadn't realised that. But sedatives should help, as you say. So far I can see fine [well, with my glasses] so they won't do anything until I can't. I do court transcribing so I'll probably need time off until both eyes are ok, but that's what I'm saving the sick leave for!