Climbing the Third Stair

OK, it really didn't attack.

Tuesday afternoon I was sitting in my home office minding my own business (which in this case was an L5R story that I absolutely had to get done for this week) when I noticed some noise coming from my sun room. I didn't pay it any attention at first, figuring it was some birds causing a ruckus up on the gutter, or on the roof of the house next door, but it went on longer than I would have expected so I got up and headed into the sun room to investigate. I got half-way across the room when I realized that there was something in the plastic cottage cheese container I use to collect egg shells in for my garden and that something was in fact a bat. ( Bats. Why does it always have to be bats? )

Usually when I don't stop to update my journal it's because I've been too busy to stop and write something non-work-related; this time it's because I've felt too lazy. Part of it, I guess, is the lingering side-effects of the vaccine. I got the Day 14 shot on the 4th of July, and have only the Day 28 shot to go.

I have had some busyness: We had inventory at work on the 2nd, and I dedicated my day off on the 4th to cleaning house. I'm never the greatest of housekeepers, and I'd really fallen behind the weekend after my first set of shots. Today I need to go into work for an hour or so to finish off the post-counting inventory paperwork, but most of this morning I've just been laying around my apartment, reading. I did get out around 10 am and water my garden, because I hadn't done that in a few days and it is supposed to hit the upper 90s--not a good time to let flowering and fruiting vegetables go thirsty. I've had two small harvests of green beens from my bush beans and my purple pole beans are flowering nicely. Also, my Early Girl and Juliette tomatoes are loaded with green tomatoes. I can hardly wait for them to ripen! I'll probably pick them before fully ripened and take them inside to finish, to keep the squirrels from getting hem.

I got the bill from the hospital for my visit to the emergency room and first set of shots. Oh. My. Stars. I was expecting something bad, in the hundreds of dollars, and was shocked to find I was off by an order of magnitude. I have insurance, but even the deductible is going to be a pain. My fourth decade of life is not proving to be fun--first mom's cancer, then her house drama, and now rabies shots. I've gone so far as to consider skipping Gencon this year, but I really don't want to do that. Gencon is my once-a-year chance to hang out in person with koshindou and all of my other gamer friends in different time zones. Easier, I think, to work out an installment plan with the hospital than to live with the year of self-hate I'd put myself through if I didn't go. Am I being irresponsible in this? I think I might be, but I'm not up to fighting the impulse right now.

Today's allotment of responsibility will go to getting a shower, going to work, and finishing paperwork. This was our end-of-year inventory, and our bookkeeper will get twitchy if she doesn't have all the departmental paperwork in her inbox Monday morning.

The last few days have been very uncomfortable for me--the side effects of the rabies vaccine are not fun. It's made harder, I think, by the fact that I'm generally pretty healthy and I don't generally have bad reactions to drugs. The last bad one was to the narcotic pain reliever the dental surgeon gave me after my wisdom teeth removal: it worked great the first day, and on the second day it started making me throw up every twenty minutes. It made for a very unpleasant four hours, but then it was out of my bloodstream and I stopped taking it. But stopping the rabies vaccine isn't an option.

Yesterday was a low point; I didn't have the tingling and weird vision effects that had made Sunday so interesting but the pain in my head was the worst yet. And I was tired: tired of the pain, tired of the fear. I was stressing hard over it, so much that I went into a friend's office, closed the door, and asked for a hug. I normally live in a don't-touch-me bubble of space, and my friend knows it. She gave me a big long hug and told me that I was being wonderfully brave and she admired how pro-active I was being in managing the issue. I feel neither brave nor pro-active: rabies is fatal, and that's that.

I am feeling better this morning, but I have a tetnus shot today and another rabies shot tomorrow so I'm not expecting it to last. On the other hand, yesterday I still managed to bake two batches of gorgeous-looking rice bread, so apparently I don't need a fully-functioning central nervous system in order to bake. Good to know, I think.