Schreiber

There is nothing like being on hold for fifteen minutes while your insurance company's claims representative talks to the hospital's claims representative to convince you that socialized medicine would be a good idea.

COVID-negative! Whoo!
No we just need to look at what the weather's gonna be like tomorrow.

Well. The GOOD news is that my insurance has finally, allegedly, after an unnecessary number of requests for revised paperwork, paid MOST of my hospital bill from Lachine.

The BAD news* is that they didn't pay all of it, which MAY mean that they negotiated them down, or MAY mean that I *still* have to get a bank draft in Canadian dollars and mail it to Montreal, and finding out is going to require what I foresee as an unpleasant time in phonetree land.
(Also, the bastards didn't pay for my lipid test this summer, and so I just had to write a check for that. BCBH, you are making single payer look better and better. At least I have the money.)

But some more GOOD news:

- I have survived annual HR review! With people complaining about my tendency to goof off (oops...), but also with people describing me as "enthusiastic", which is a huge lie but I'm glad I'm being competent and dedicated enough to give that impression.

- The lesbian space necromancers book is actually really good!

(The bad news with that is that I got jack all else done this evening, barring twenty minutes talking to an anthropomorphic owl. oh well, tomorrow's another day, even if I'm going to be spending most of it ringing and disassembling a creche.)

- Secret project! Which is another thing I should have been doing tonight.
But instead, I'm going to actually put my laundry away, and then fall over.

* OK, the actually bad news is that Trump is in the White House, Australia is on fire, and we're down the leg of the Trousers of Time** where these things are true. So this is the SLIGHTLY bad news.
**which are probably more like octopus underpants, but there you go.

(Some of you already know about this, and I think I've alluded to my recent health issues on here but...well, $#!7's happened, and I figured I'd better explain it, or my next post or two isn't going to make any sense at all to most of you.)

Back in...yeesh, December, I suppose...I had a recurrence of my old knee problems. Soreness, swelling, vague feelings of unsteadiness, pain when I tried to run on it. I'd had this back in August, but on that occasion it was partly because my shoes were ridonculously worn out, and this didn't appear to be the case this time around. So I hoped it would get better.
It didn't.
Eventually, sovay--and everyone else I'd talked to about this--browbeat me into seeing a doctor. Trouble was, I'd called my GP, and they'd told me to go to the physical therapist I'd seen last time.
I'd never told them I'd never gotten around to calling the therapist the last time. (Look, it was hell week at work, and I have little enough free time even under normal circumstances.)

I eventually called the physical therapist they'd referred me to anyway. And I got an appointment and went in, and they poked and prodded and massaged and made me do a whole bunch of weird exercises (both there and in my copious spare time), and for most of a week things were going better. I actually canceled my appointment last Thursday, in part* because I wasn't sure it was absolutely necessary.
Perhaps inevitably, it was on Thursday that I got up and realized that while my knee was continuing to feel better, my ankle felt like I'd sprained it the week before and was now on the mend. Slowly.

And equally inevitably, it has gotten worse since. Today I'm in enough pain that I'm skipping the last day of Arisia. No volunteer t-shirt for me. Fuck.

What's going on? Well, presumably I've been favoring that leg, or else holding it funny to compensate for the whole business with the knee, and that's compromised the ankle somehow. And possibly footware's played some roll, and certainly attempting various things yesterday that I shouldn't have tried** has contributed to why it feels so much worse today.

But it all feels so unfair. For my last six sprained ankles, I've done something dumb that put immediate stress on the ligament concerned. And that hurts, but at least you can tell yourself that you'll try not to do that again.
But what the ^%&%* was I supposed to do to prevent this?

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This computer's about out of power. And I've got too many things on my plate--even apart from a busted leg. I guess I'm going to try to drive out to the old-school shoe store sovay and family recommended. "Try" because I'm not at all sure either my car or my leg is going to be up to this. Wish me luck.


* The more important considerations being the very real question of whether my $£%^&* insurance is going to pay for any of this, and secondarily the fact that I was hoping to be doing setup for Arisia, of which more later.

** Contradancing and hitting people with plastic swords, for two. Y'know, the normal things people do at Cons.

Knee is actually better - enough - that I went to running club without doing it damage. Yay, recovery!
(Weather was way too muggy, but Oh Well. Didn't get enough rain, though.)

Meantime, I wish that the day they decided to distribute a thousand copies of [University]'s "State of the Arts" magazine--a publication that I suspect no one actually wants to read--had not coincided with a day on which we received 2500 pieces of REGULAR mail. Just getting it all READY for tomorrow was tricky; distributing it all tomorrow is going to be, quite literally, a pain.

I was feeling good enough that I went off to work this morning, but then was feeling weird enough that I left after three hours, went home, and took a nap. Then I checked my blog.
I was planning to apologize to Nineweaving, in case I gave HER the Lurgi. And I was going to say that maybe we should have just thrown cake at rushthatspeaks and sovay and fled the scene, instead of being sociable. And I was going to hope, forlornly, that I hadn't given the Plague to TOO many people at the contradance Sunday night. But...

I should have mentioned that the Lurgi was a very strange one. It felt like the 'flu...without the flu part: I had (indeed, have) headaches and frequent dizziness in a way that reminded me of being drunk; I got tired easily, and felt...off. But I wasn't nauseous, and most importantly didn't have any cold symptoms.

Sovay, I guess, DID have the 'flu (and is now hopefully on the mend); and she told me I ought to see a doctor, stat. So I did.
Diagnosis: "You don't need to keep the face mask on." No fever, and no cold symptoms: no flu. Instead, we're thinking it's probably a weird, unprecedented side-effect of antidepressants. So I'm to tough it out til next week, and meantime maybe scale back the coffee a bit. We'll see what happens.

(I also got a wart frozen off.)