Sleep at last. Also a closet and a dishwasher at last. T-2 days for labwork, I hope. Sales/shares/registries needed.

Photo copyright Aji, 2017; all rights reserved.

We now have a functional closet; Tony finished it up today. They'll stain the wood to match after the first of the year, but this means we can get our clothes arranged in some sort of halfway-organized manner finally, instead of draped over whatever's available or stacked on the floor. We've managed to keep it fairly neat, but it's been a pain, and I can't really bend over right now, so it's especially useful to me to have them up within reach.

We also have a working dishwasher, which will make life much easier now. I stood at the sink to do our very few dishes two days ago, and even though my movement was minimal, it wiped me out. I can't begin to describe what a blessing it is to have a working kitchen sink, either; now that my movements are so severely curtailed, just having to walk, no matter how slowly, between kitchen and downstairs bath to fill the pot to make coffee is exhausting. Speaking of which, I had already cut my coffee consumption back to only one morning cup, but that was bothering me, so I tried decaf this morning, and about fell asleep with my brain in neutral. So I tried a midday cup of the kind of leaded we drink, and it was too strong. Tomorrow, we'll try half one and half the other, mixed together, and see whether it's doable for me. I can't function without coffee.

And nope, no hard answers yet. The one good thing is that for the first time in over a week, I did not wake up in the middle of the night feeling like I was in the middle of dying. No need for a bad nitro trip, either. In other words, I slept. But it's pretty clear that what's been happening at night has been happening to a lesser degree during each day, too, and so I've spent almost all of today upstairs, where the concentrator cord will reach, with the cannula firmly in place. If I had to guess, I'd say some sort of autoimmune-driven vasospastic response, which could be a really, really severe form of vasculitis like what sometimes occurs with lupus, or could be arterial spasm secondary to something like hypereosinophilia. [Yes, I've done the homework no one else was willing to do, because I know both my body and the autoimmune possibilities that have been in my system literally my entire life; I've had to, because no one else will.] I don't think it's an accident that the first incident occurred in the literal middle of my exposure to that mist cloud of deck stain, the active ingredient of which is cobalt 2 ethylhexanoate, something treated fairly cavalierly here in the States (natch), but tightly regulated in the UK and EU. On Thursday, I see the doc for a follow-up, so keep your fingers crossed for blood labs that tell us something, at least.

Lots of expenses coming down the pike (first one already here in yesterday's mail), and we need to make some sales. Given the circumstances, I'm leaving up the donation link, too, and the registries have some new items on then, mostly lower-priced, to replace stuff damaged by the RV or given away when we first moved into it seven years ago. So please share the links:

• Wings's direct PayPal link;
• Wings's site, for sales;
• Wayfair gift cards, to replenish all the furnishings that the RV has destroyed in one way or another.
• Partial registry #1, from Bed, Bath and Beyond. There are new kitchen-y things on it now, stuff that I didn't realize we'd need to replace (either because the RV ruined it or because we gave it away when we had to downsize).
• Partial registry #2, from Wayfair. Still waiting for them to resolve this fulfillment/shipping problem they have with their site. Even so, I've added some things (kitchen/dining room stuff mostly), most of which are comparatively reasonably priced. Now, it's going to be mostly odds and ends that make this place more liveable, because of the sheer volume of stuff destroyed by too many years in the RV (e.g., by the oven and stovetop, by the wiring, by the water, by the mold, etc.), or that we simply gave away seven years ago because we had no room and no place to put them and despaired of ever being able to use them again. A CHANGE ABOUT WAYFAIR:  NO MORE CROWDFUNDING. Their Web site coding is bad, and it will not permit crowdfunded items to ship. Items purchased outright arrive in two business days, but you can't even get the others out of the warehouse. I've spent the last month fighting with them about shipping the dozen or so things that folks fulfilled, and today's message was finally terse enough that they did the manual override, four whole weeks later, that I knew they could do but simply weren't bothering. But I'll be removing all the crowdfunding options. I'm supposed to keep my blood pressure down these days.

As I've also been saying, I am still catching up, and will be now for a while. But this is the holiday season, and the sales/commissions from these few weeks are what keep us alive throughout the whole long winter and spring months (to say nothing of what's in the offing medically), so please continue to share the links. And please refer folks to Wings's site (and if you have an endorsement, too, so much the better). I'll be trying, slowly but, I hope, steadily, to get caught up over the course of this week. We have some massive expenses coming down the pike, and a lot of testing yet to be done before I'm out of the woods. So please keep sharing all our links. For now, I'm just so damn grateful to be alive, to have a healthy heart, to be back home with the love of my life and our dogs, the whole world is beautiful. Thanks again, to everybody, and we love you all.

All content, including photos and text, are copyright Aji, 2017; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.