33

It is night and it is 33 degrees Fahrenheit, the coldest it has been so far this autumn. Tonight is probably the first night it will get down to 32 degrees, since it is only 10 p.m. or so. Maybe it will snow!

Back in July, I saw my primary care provider at Kaiser about the vestibular symptoms I was having. I have self-diagnosed this as vestibular migraine. My chiropractor not at Kaiser did not disagree. My doctor asked if I take calcium and magnesium supplements, said the way my body metabolizes them might have changed, and suggested discontinuing all supplements for two weeks.

This worked like magic. In about four days, my symptoms were entirely gone, and after a bit, I discontinued doing my vestibular exercises: not needed. (My chiropractor said it was fine to stop. He said if any particular exercise made me feel weird, I should continue doing that one, but I was too lazy to assess this. I just stopped doing all of them.) I went back to taking BroccoMax, oregano oil and vitamin D3 without problems.

Then last week, the symptoms came back, just like that. Various things can trigger migraines, including certain foods, many of which of course I eat. A lady online suggests an elimination diet and then adding things back one by one, but I have a severe eating disorder history and I just cannot do an elimination diet. The idea is enticing, but panic soon sets in. On the other hand, discontinuing one possible trigger food, waiting two weeks, seeing that nothing has changed and discontinuing another food and having to go through 20 foods—working my way to the elimination diet in reverse—before I get to the right one sounds equally bad or even worse.

I basically eat the same extremely healthy things every day, and am worried that some or all of it has ceased to be good for me. I have been having a salad for breakfast for at least seven or eight years and maybe longer than that.

I have also been having a bit of nausea off and on over the past year or so which gradually has become pretty bad, pretty often nausea, pretty unpleasant. Due to GERD? Associated with self-diagnosed vestibular migraines? A food sensitivity? I had also self-diagnosed myself as having GERD, as I occasionally have heartburn, but as of yesterday, I have undiagnosed that. Occasional heartburn is not GERD. The heartburn is quite painful, but it’s about once every month or two on average, and it lasts for about two minutes or until I chew up two deglycyrrhizinated licorice tablets, in which case it goes away immediately. That stuff really works.

I think the nausea might be due to walnuts (the very healthiest of nuts!). The one time I vomited in the past year was after eating a small meal of nothing but toasted walnuts. I put toasted walnuts in the salad I have nearly every day for breakfast, and I put walnut butter on toast on the days it isn’t cashew butter, and I also put walnut oil on toast before I put the nut butter and fresh minced ginger on. I have discontinued all the walnut things, and plan to give it a month, start one of those things again, and see what happens. (A teeny-tiny elimination diet. This one I can probably do.) (Amazing and disheartening how often a problem turns out to be entirely self-inflicted. I have the strong suspicion this is yet another example.)

On Monday, my friend who lives in Chelsea came over to see the house, and then we took a walk. (“It’s so empty!” she said when she came in, and then politely backtracked.) I felt perfectly fine when we set out, but after about an hour, I felt so lousy and dizzy, all I wanted to do was to go home and lie down, which I did, for three hours.

Things were better the next day and better still on Wednesday, but the vestibular symptoms are definitely back, so I have started the exercises again and I also made an appointment to see my doctor at Kaiser while I’m in San Francisco. She will only be my doctor for about two more weeks, but maybe she’ll have another excellent idea.

On Tuesday I went to Knight’s for the monthly lunch of my father’s high school classmates. In June, the lunch organizer died and his widow was not seen for several months, but this week she was there, in tears. I was sitting next to her and got to use some of my chaplain skills. Besides this woman, there were four other people at the table whose spouses had died, one who is divorced (I believe the ex-spouse is still living and that in fact they are friends), and me, who never married.

On Wednesday and Thursday, the renovations people came to continue their work. On Wednesday, it was two people I was meeting for the first time and on Thursday it was my favorite person (he and Marvin are great pals; he picks Marvin up) plus another person I was meeting for the first time. Just as the workers were leaving on Thursday, I glimpsed my plant-loving next-door neighbor walking by with his dog and rushed out to buttonhole him. He agreed that I could show him something. I pointed out the permanent marker between our front yards, near the sidewalk. I asked him to, accordingly, please not cut away too much of the forsythias and he actually claimed he has never touched them, which is great, if true. Maybe they are a bit naturally concave on that side. Maybe my father succeeded in placing them so that not one bud crosses the property line. I appreciated being able to cross that worry off my list.

I have been plugging away at my raking daily. Going for a walk has fallen by the wayside, but that’s okay. The leaves have been top priority, because I didn’t want my sister to feel that she should rake while I’m away. She pointed out that the gutters had filled up with leaves on which snow will soon fall, making a big sodden or frozen mess, depending on the day. She offered to come hold the ladder while I see what I can do, “so I can call 911,” she added.

I have to have said six times that I want to climb up onto the high ledge in the living room and see if I can change the air conditioner filter without it ever happening. I finally figured out that my sister is worried I’ll fall and crack my skull (person with vertigo up a tall ladder, should not be a problem?). The fellow at the A/C place said the filter should be changed quarterly or three times a year, but over the past several years, I’m pretty sure it has been an annual event, done when the A/C people do the yearly inspection, and also, my father was of the opinion that it didn’t necessarily need to be done even that often. I don’t know what caused him to think that. Anyway, with my assistant balking, I decided just to wait for the spring maintenance appointment and ask the person who comes over to show me how to do it, because that was part of the reason it hasn’t happened. If I was positive I knew what I was doing, I would have more strongly encouraged this exercise, but between the two, it was pretty easy to not do it.

I did, however, move all the cans of paint and primer from the garage to the basement for winter, placing them off the floor, since it floods down there, and I replaced all the bad fluorescent tubes in the ceiling light fixtures in the basement, thus ascertaining which size tubes should be retained and which can be (properly) disposed of.

Regarding the heating of the house, I had been puzzling over when to switch from the heat pump to the boiler. It’s more expensive but also more environmentally friendly to use the heat pump. It can’t be used all year because it loses efficiency as the weather gets colder. People on the internet said to make the switch somewhere between five degrees above and five degrees below zero (we’re always talking Fahrenheit around here). However, my A/C guy said that about now is the right time: when it gets cold and stays cold.

So yesterday I turned the boiler on and set it to 70 degrees at the thermostat that covers the living room and a few other rooms. I set the heat pump to 68 degrees in case the boiler goes on the fritz. My bedroom is in a part of the house that uses a different thermostat, in a room far away (odd setup), which had been set to 65 until this afternoon. (There is a third and final thermostat in the basement, set to the lowest temperature of the three.) 

This morning when I woke up, my bedroom was 66.x degrees: freezing, in every sense of the word. The office, however, right smack next door to my bedroom, and controlled by the thermostat set to 70 degrees, was 78 degrees and still is: a difference of almost 12 degrees between one room and the next. I guess that is due to keeping the office door closed to keep the cats out. (Good to know there’s a toasty place to sit, if needed.) The thermostat itself, in the living room, says it is 70 degrees, just as requested. (The nearby thermostat for the heat pump claims it is 71 degrees; close enough.) This afternoon, I changed the set temperature in that far-off room to 68 degrees so that my bedroom will be warmer, and can also use the space heater that is in there, if needed.

Earlier today I was hoping that a hyper-local variation in the law of physics (or maybe something to do with aerodynamics and gravity) might occur such that a strong breeze would blow all of the leaves out of the gutters but not deposit them on the ground, but this did not happen, so I spent another couple of hours raking leaves. It was grey and cold out. As long as lots more leaves don’t fall, which they very well might, since there are still plenty on the big tree, things all the way around the house are in reasonable shape for snowfall. There are leaves everywhere, but a sprinkling with plenty of green showing rather than a thick layer. I left some leaves in all the beds on purpose, to be mulch and also due to laziness. In the spring, I can see if that was a good idea, assuming I myself am here in the spring.