new year's eve eve
At the moment I am concerned about my health. At one end of the spectrum I have a torn lateral and medial meniscus with my left knee. Most likely it happened by over-exerting myself throughout the achilles tendon injuries I got from various activities. In May my knee flared up something fierce, got fluid drained from my knee and received a cortisone injection. Since then my knee has been mostly fine and only sometimes I'll get a "tight" feeling in my knee. Other times my left knee will feel warmer than my right knee, making me think there's more blood rushing there in hopes of mitigating any damage from my day's activities.
Over the past couple of months I've become forgetful, sometimes making weird errors when doing a runsheet for a title search, and most recently I was holding my phone in my hand and I started wondering, "Where did I put my phone?"
This is terrifying because I believe my mind is the only thing of value I have. My weight affects my sexual performance. I manage my high blood pressure with medicine and I take 10,000 iu of vitamin D3. What bugs me is I had to stop taking 325 milligrams of aspirin every day because the aspirin was contributing to my frequent and painful gout attacks. I was taking the aspirin since 2001 to ensure my heart health and keep my blood thin. Right now I'm hoping my ticker is still relatively strong despite the fact I have a bicuspid valve which was only diagnosed a few years ago.
Next up is an issue with my legs. During the summer in New Jersey I am a movable feast for mosquitos. Despite my best efforts, my legs wind up scabby and bloody and itchy because mosquitos love what I have to offer. Reckon they have their own version of Yelp and I have five stars. Right now it's the start of winter, just before the new year, and when I looked at my legs I noticed they were covered in blemishes. Not a good thing in my eyes.
Fun doesn't stop there. While I was driving to Passaic County to drop off the company computer equipment in-person, I stroked my right shin and noticed right under my knee there was a rough part under the skin. Now I'm all paranoid I either have skin or bone cancer.
On January 19th I have my physical, my first since 2020, and I'll find out what's going on. Inshallah, I am a hypochondriac.
In less concerning news, I've rediscovered radio.garden which is a site (and app) which aggregates radio stations from around the world for one's listening pleasure. On Thursday night I discovered a station in the Netherlands playing only the sound of ocean waves breaking. That got old and I discovered the app has a browse function and discovered this nifty little radio station in California that only plays theater organ music. As I write this it's playing Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer. Earlier they were playing Springtime For Hitler and Silent Night, as one does. Funny thing is that I feel a little more focused and my mind a bit more lively.
My pessimistic self says it's the same mechanic from a documentary I saw about people with senility/alzheimers/dementia. An old African-American man was non-responsive in a adult care facility, but when the nurses played his music he brightened up and came out of his trance. Same thing supposedly happened with Leah's uncle, who had some horrible form of dementia, who became lucid when he heard music or was talking about music. On the other hand, or lobe, I am thinking about this really old documentary which was on HBO in the eighties about dementia. The scene which stands out is this old man in decline who is playing his electric razor and its power cord like a trombone. Not to mention there's Everywhere At The End Of Time where The Caretaker (Leyland Kirby) uses degrading loops of sampled ballroom music to portray the progression of Alzheimer's disease.
My concern is compounded by the fact that my maternal uncle passed away because of cancer some years back. My paternal grandmother, whom I credit with preventing me from becoming the monster my biological mother believed I would become, suffered from dementia in her twilight years before succumbing to it.
Thusday was a bit productive for me. I splurged on an eight dollar lunch at Costco of two slices of their pizza, two hot dogs, and a large Pepsi with free refills. After lunch, and a squirty poo, I took notes for the future.
Earlier in the week I was talking with my friend Wednesday from Ohio who gave me some support regarding my situation, and it meant a lot to me.
In other good news to round out this dismal entry, I spoke with one of my roommates in Neptune about my job situation. It came up because I was telling him about how inflation and rising interest rates are making the real estate market softer than the back of a baby's skull. See yesterday's entry for the brief, yet informative, infographic.
He told me how he got a job as an assistant dean at a charter school and about how FedEx is always looking for people to work for them. The pay would be much closer to what I was earning as a title searcher, but far from the income I believe I deserve, so that's a bonus. Plus the work is physical which means I'll have exercise in my life. Just a bit more physical activity than I had as a title searcher humping 15 to 25 pound / 7 to 11 kilogram books the size of medieval prayer books at some remote monastery.
At the moment I feel more hopeful than I have felt in the past two weeks. Not a lot, but it's taken the edge off the persistent anxiety haunting me.
