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| Photo copyright Aji, 2025; all rights reserved. |
That was this morning's smoke haze. Nope, not an inversion layer; it's been too hot for folks to need fires in fireplaces or woodstoves, even early in the morning. This blew in yesterday evening, some of it from the fires in Arizona, but probably most of it from the two fast-growing fires at opposite ends of the Gila, in the southwest quadrant of NM. Both have been burning for days, are at zero percent containment, and are likely to get a lot worse very fast given the heat and the winds.And we get the smog and smoke. It was heavy enough that I had to wear a mask outside this morning for chores, although the winds have blown most of it out now. But it'll likely be back tonight, which will mean masking for evening chores, too. I don't need asthma issues on top of everything else.
I realize that most folks probably don't understand why severe autoimmune disease equates to severe chronic pain, but it does. In my case, it's lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, and several other things, but those are the two most damaging at the moment. And while the RA is busy attacking my joints, destroying the cartilage that cushions them and holds them in place, the lupus is busy doing the same to my connective tissue, which means the tendons and ligaments and other tissues that surround each joint and hold them together. The fact that my connective tissue is being systematically shredded all through my body, coupled with congenital hypermobility, is why my joints routinely sublux. And I realize most folks also don't know what that means: It means that my joints dislocate. Not fully, just a bit here and there; but any dislocation means that gravity puts pressure in all the wrong areas, and it's extremely painful. And no, you can't go the ER four or five times a day to have them put back; they have to resolve on their own. If I'm lucky [almost never], it might be a few hours; usually it's days or weeks; sometimes, it's months on end with things out of place. The connective tissue damage? At some point, it becomes an internal problem, too, because that's the thing that holds your organs in place. And given the amount and types of pain I'm having now [the last couple of years, but accelerating], I'm pretty sure we're there. That's the thing that ultimately gets people with lupus: organ damage. It can cause heart and lung problems, kidney problems, liver problems, including cirrhosis entirely unrelated to anything to do with alcohol . . . it can also be oncogenic, and given my current spate of lymph issues, that has to be in the back of my mind all the time. The other issue is that, especially with those of us who tend to be seronegative [as I was for decades, while the damage was accelerating inside my body], is that labs don't necessarily show the markers you might expect, and so by the time something like that gets DX'd, it's also too late. But my labs did not show anything, so all I can do is wait and monitor and hope for the best.
And deal with this goddamned unrelenting pain that's absolutely everywhere.
I couldn't afford the testing anyway. And while the world gets torn apart, this Nazi regime still demands our fucking taxes.
We have a big payment due in under a week. I need to make a middling four figures' worth of sales to cover all of it. The likelihood of that? Yeah. But I have to try. I would dearly love to cover them all at once and not have to worry about it for a while, since we know there are there are other huge expenses lying in wait for us. Which means, of course, that we still need shares, and we most definitely still need weekly sales, until I can get everything covered that has to get covered [and that will be a good long while]. I don't get any breaks from that, either. Links are here:
- Sales here;
- Testimonials here;
- Amazon wishlist here (new priorities, needed for Miika, and after refiling her meds we just can't swing it: 3-4 pairs of the fly traps [the second item on the list]);
- Patreon here;
- Ko-fi here.
After such a grim year last year, and the first half of this one at least as bad, we urgently need to move 2025 onto a better footing, because taxes to this Nazi administration have already tapped us out and we still owe more anyway, so please share all of the links.
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2025; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
