All about my pincushion

Slacker. Yes, I missed another week, but I'd rather skip a week than write when I have nothing to say. I think I've been working too much. I need a vacation: two weeks to go have fun and then two weeks to laze around and rest up from my vacation.

Today was lab day, and I arrived in good time. Having blood drawn has been a terrible ordeal ever since I got clean, but, happily for me, I discovered a functioning vein in my right hand just before I started the Interferon treatment, and it has served me well. Until now. Even with this nice new vein, I have my own phlebotomist at the lab: she knows just where to go, and we've had almost no trouble up to this point, but today she had no luck. I think there's too much scar tissue around that vein now and probably its heyday is over. So instead of having a quick two-minute blood-draw, I spent an hour and a half at that lab, with a team of phlebotomists hovering over me, poking me here, there and everywhere. After seven sticks, we filled almost all the tubes. There's one left unfilled, but the lab people said they would put in a request for one of the others to do double-duty. If it can't, they'll call me. I was an hour late for work, and on a Monday, too, which puts an unfair burden on my co-worker because Monday is always the worst day for phone calls. Next month I'll do a bunch of push-ups before I go to the lab and see if that helps. I already drink lots of water before I go, and I use heat packs when I get there, but none of that made any difference today.

Oh dear. I just realized that I forgot to order my meds today. I use a mail order pharmacy for the Interferon and Ribavirin, and I cordially loathe them. Their phone menu is one of the worst I've ever had the misfortune to deal with, almost as bad as Sparkletts water. It infuriates me every time I have to call to place an order. It's slow and repetitive and misleading and incredibly obtuse. Usually I end up frantically pushing zero over and over until I get a human being. I do my best not to yell at the person on the other end because I know it's not their fault, but sometimes it takes all my self-control to keep a civil tongue in my head. A month or so ago I asked if there was a way to reorder online and was told that, yes, they had a web site. I went there and signed up, and that's as far as I was able to go. Every time I sign in and click on "refill prescription," the page takes about a hundred years to load, after which I see a message saying, "service unavailable at this time," or some such thing. So I'm back to the phone orders. This time I have to talk to a human being because I need a new sharps container and because, for some reason, when I entered my prescription number over the phone on Saturday I was told that it wasn't valid. And now, since Thursday is a holiday, I have to order tomorrow or I'll run out of meds.

On to other topics. Like hair, which I still have. I've been putting off shaving my head from day to day, but I don't think I can hold out for very much longer. At the lab this morning I saw a woman who is way more bald than I am, and she didn't seem to mind it at all. I don't know what her trouble was, but her hair was really thin on top. To accentuate this, she wore her hair parted in the middle and combed straight down over her ears, leaving a wide strip of scalp showing on the top of her head. Has she not heard of the infamous comb-over? I, on the other hand, still have enough hair that there wouldn't be a swathe of scalp if I parted it in the middle, and yet I'm considering shaving my head because I can't deal with the inconvenience of styling it the way it is. Each hair is so thin and sickly that when I wash my hair it feels like I'm washing my head, and no matter how much product I use, it stubbornly retains the texture of angel hair, and I end up with little filaments of hair waving merrily on the top of my head. It makes me crazy every morning. Lately I've taken to wearing headbands, which helps a little, but I'm really just getting sick of the whole damned thing. Besides, it's now time for me to bleach my roots, and I seriously doubt that the pathetic strands I have left will withstand ten or fifteen minutes under the dryer with bleach on them. I'd end up having to shave my head anyway. Perhaps by the time I write next I will have taken the plunge.

My mood has improved considerably in the last two weeks, and I'm no longer jumping down people's throats at the slightest provocation, which saves a great deal of trouble, as I don't have to keep going back to people to say I'm sorry. I'm still overly emotional, though. I watched a movie last night and sobbed like a heartbroken child through the last ten or fifteen minutes of it. The movie was a tearjerker, but still, half a box of Kleenex is a bit excessive. I'm happy that I'm able to feel, though, no matter what I'm feeling. Becoming a living, breathing, feeling human being is the best thing that ever happened to me, and I'm grateful for the gamut of human emotion which is now available to me because I'm clean.