(no subject)

So I'm sitting here in the hospital cafeteria this morning, waiting for the blood lab to open so I can have some blood drawn, eating a bagel, and I am listening to the most magnificently horrifying "smooth jazz" cover of Mac The Knife I have EVER HEARD. IT'S SO AMAZING. AND TERRIBLE.

I do think that if you could get some hot young pop star to autotune his way through a peppy club-mix-with-rap-bridge adaptation of Mac The Knife, Bertolt Brecht might actually rise from his grave. And that would be no bad thing, in this day and age.

FYI, everyone, Lulu.com is having a 20% off sale; everything on their site is 20% off with the code SUPER20. It's a good time to buy books, including mine!

AND ALSO my ancient Roman erotic novella, The City War, is 25% off all this month at Riptide!

(no subject)

So, Damien has been identified, and it was complicated, I have to give her that.

My mystery rash is a symptom of follicular mycosis fungoides (yeah, I had to write it down) which is a form of dermal lymphoma.

This apparently sounds way scarier than it is. She told me not to google it, and if I did, not to freak out.

Basically, as I understand it after a ten-minute discussion during which I was somewhat tense, mycosis fungoides is a nonaggressive form of lymphoma that will probably never enter any of my actual internal systems. It's just gonna hang out in my skin and cause rashes occasionally. The good news is the rashes go away with steroid cream (mine has already actually disappeared). I do need to get checked out every few months, and go back in if I get another Damien, but otherwise basically it's just a thing I have that will probably never impact my health.

It's a bit anticlimactic, but I suppose that's for the best. I AM covered in bandages from the FOUR PLACES they had to stick me to get my labs this morning, but all the labs are normal.

Apparently I caused quite a ruckus amongst the dermatology staff. Not only did they all have a get-together to try and figure out what the fuck Damien was putting out, they had to call some expert somewhere else and have him take a peep.

So, IDK, I guess a nonaggressive skin-based lymphoma IS like a confused Goa'uld, in a way...

(no subject)

EVERYTHING has been ten percent harder than it should be today. Nothing's been impossible, everything's just been that much more annoying.

Getting to the hospital this morning, I knew that would be a pain in my ass because the University of Chicago Hospital is basically near NOTHING when it comes to public transit. But even walking south from the 55, which is usually a straight four-block walk, became an exercise in navigation when two of the sidewalks between me and the hospital were closed. (Though I did get to walk past the Ronald Reagan Memorial Construction Site Parking Lot which always makes me happy.)

The phlebotomist trying to find a vein in me, anywhere in me, had to stick me four times before she finally got a useable vein in the back of my hand, so tomorrow I'm going to look like someone hit me with sticks. Then we had The Lymphoma Talk, which, that actually went okay, but the way you check out after seeing a doctor in the Dermatology section of UCMC is so bizarre and outdated that it literally took me half an hour to check out, even when I said "I'm not doing this right now" after they wanted me to fill out an "insurance re-verification" form that apparently I should be filling out once a year.

I caught a cab to work from the medical center, which work should have covered, but the cab driver's Square couldn't process the credit card I gave him (corporate) so I gave him my personal card which it also couldn't process, and he kept rubbing my cards on his pants, and I was like "I don't think my cards are the problem here" and he got all huffy. And then my personal card worked, so work didn't pay for the cab ride after all.

The "budget emergency" at work, which I hurried back for, turned out to be two hours of making budget data look pretty so my boss could read it. The bus home was twenty minutes late. When I went to Walgreens to pick up my prescriptions for Damien I bought some groceries, TOTALLY FORGOT the prescriptions, then had to go back and get them, but only one was available.

But I am home now. THE WORLD OUTSIDE HAS CEASED TO EXIST. NOTHING CAN FIGHT ME HERE.

*breaks teakettle*

I AM SO DONE WITH THIS DAY.