a shot in the arm

is it just me, or is all the current news coverage of the COVID-19 vaccine rollout in the U.S. and canada making anyone else a teeny bit apprehensive?

i feel a bit like we're all in some kind of disaster movie, and we're at the part of the story when it *seems* like a rescue is imminent... only to discover that, newp, it's a false alarm and things are about to get even worse.

over the past few days, on every single news broadcast, cameras and reporters have been excitedly covering every second of the journey of these vaccines from their manufacturing plant to the four corners of the continent. they're talking about "finally" getting the vaccines, and how this will "finally" help everyone get back to "normal." everyone seems to be behaving as though once this vaccine is out, the pandemic will be but a distant memory. "we're SAVED!" seems to be the subtext to every enthusiastic report.

to say a lot of people have put every single egg in this vaccine basket is not really an understatement.

and it's all makes me want to yell, "tone it down! don't jinx it!"

YB works for a hospital network, and all staff received word about when and how they will be vaccinated. thing is, this pfizer vaccine is ridiculously unstable -- the conditions under which it must be stored are extreme... and extremely precise. if the temperatures are just a teeny bit off or if something happens during transport or if you just look at the syringe the wrong way, POOF. the vaccine is rendered useless. and, YB pointed out, there's absolutely no way to know if the vaccine you're getting has been stored and transported 100% correctly 100% of the time. (some of the other vaccines in development, by comparison, don't require such stringent conditions.)

so... what if your dose isn't effective? how will you (or your doctor or nurse or whomever) know?

i also get antsy when i see all the senior citizens and frontline workers getting vaccinated. i know the vaccine has been tested, but i can't seem to let go of the nagging sense that the testing, and everything else associated with this unprecedented efficiency, was rushed.

what if something was missed? what if there are long-term -- or even not-that-long-term negative side effects? trials only began a few months ago, so what if all those senior citizens and frontline workers suffer some kind of unforeseen complications six months from now?

look, i see a lot of movies, and i fully realize my brain (coupled with my anxiety) sometimes works cinematically and overly dramatically. i can conjure up worst-case scenarios like nobody's business. and i'm definitely pro-vax -- i get my flu shot every year, and will be getting a COVID vaccination when it's available to me.

i just hope we can all look back on this a year from now, five years from now, 20 years from now, and think, "PHEW!" and "yay!" not "oops!" and "YIKES!"

yep, i'm still here!

 

::: flipping on the lights, brushing away the cobwebs :::

oh, hello! lest anyone think i'd fallen into a ditch somewhere, i'm still here. it's been a somewhat chaotic month and a half or so, and blogging -- in words or in photos -- kept falling lower and lower on my priority list. every day, i'd think, "TODAY! today i'll go catch up on the blogging!", only to have the day end, and to find myself laying in bed thinking, "argh! okay, TOMORROW! tomorrow i'll go catch up on the blogging!"

the dust has finally settled. i updated the photo blog a few days ago and here, then, is a bit of a recap of where i've been and what i've been doing.

• for most of october and november, i was working on condo-board-related stuff. primarily: planning and executing our building's first-ever virtual AGM, which was a huuuuge, stressful task that had me working six, seven, eight hours a day, for MANY days during those two months. keep in mind, board directors are volunteers -- we don't get paid for the work we do. so, my full-time board work netted me exactly zero dollars in revenue. 

i was running the entire event, handling all the behind-the-scenes operations, preparing instructions, training myself on the platform and making sure all the owners knew how to participate. much of the success/failure of the AGM rested on my shoulders, so i did everything i could to ensure it would run smoothly. thankfully, despite a slew of serious "uh oh, we might have to cancel this"-level technical glitches on the day of the AGM (which were caused by the company providing the platform, but nonetheless resulted in me literally stress-sweating right through TWO T-shirts over the course of about four hours that afternoon), it went okay. we had a very good turnout despite the advanced age and tech-unsavviness of many of our owners, and post-AGM participant surveys indicate most people thought it was a success. I AM SO GLAD IT'S OVER, THOUGH. it ate up SOOOOOO much of my time and energy for about eight weeks, and finishing it was a massive relief.

• in related news, the condo-board workload i've endured since about august has me seriously considering stepping down from the board when my term expires in november 2021. it's just too much, and as much as i want to participate in the decision-making for the building, i can't be spending 15 hours or more a week on this stuff. if i were to have any kind of semi-full-time job, it would simply be undoable.

• on the home front, mom's been having some health challenges. sometime in october, she did something to her left knee -- she doesn't know what, just that it hurt. for weeks, she hobbled around as it got worse and worse, and wouldn't call the doctor. "i don't want to complain," she said. when it got to the point that she couldn't walk around the house without holding onto walls/furniture, couldn't get in/out of the car, couldn't go up/down stairs... i finally had it and told her this couldn't go on. plus, her knee had ballooned up due to swelling. so, she finally went to the doctor, who was shocked at the swelling. long story short: mom had the fluid drained from her knee, had a cortisone shot a couple of weeks ago, and her knee is finally improving. she's back to walking almost normally again, but was hobbling around for so long that she now also needs to go to physio to correct all the damage she did to her *other* muscles and joints while she was compensating for the wonky knee.

• the knee issue above meant mom obviously did not exercise for weeks and weeks and weeks. she's a fairly regular walker/exerciser, but she spent almost two months unable to do much of anything. then, last weekend (and as her knee was beginning to improve), she had one of her freakish and inexplicable dizziness + nausea + insanely-high blood-pressure-spike episodes. she has normal BP almost all of the time, and hadn't had one of these episodes since august 2019. at the time, her doctor ran a battery of tests but came up empty in terms of a cause. she gave mom an extremely low-dose BP prescription to take only if/when her BP spiked. mom hasn't needed any of that medication since last august.

things had been fine since last summer, mom's BP was consistently A-OK, she wasn't on any meds... then, last week, BAM. it happened again out of the blue. another long story short: for no discernible reason, she got extremely dizzy, extremely nauseated and her BP spiked to over 200, which is considered a "hypertensive crisis" that could lead to stroke. 

despite YB and i having drilled into her that she MUST take her BP whenever she feels dizzy, and then MUST take a BP pill to reduce her pressure if it's high, she did neither when this episode hit last friday. instead, around 5 p.m., she just went to bed. when i called shortly thereafter (unaware of what had been happening) to chat with her, my father casually mentioned the situation. i said, "YOU GO WAKE HER UP AND TAKE HER BLOOD PRESSURE!" 

he didn't really want to (it would have meant getting out of his recliner and putting his ipad down for five minutes), and said he'd do it in the morning. i yelled that she could be dead by morning if she were to have a stroke in her sleep. 

so, he went and checked it: 192 over something or other. she took a BP pill. i called YB to fill her in and she was just as upset as i was. by morning, mom's BP was back in the normal range... but then it spiked again in the middle of the night/into sunday morning. by 10am on sunday, her BP was 207 and she couldn't keep any food or water down. she threw up the BP pill she'd taken. so, i headed over. i consulted with YB, who said that if we couldn't get her BP down within several hours, we'd need to take her to the ER. thankfully, when i arrived at my parents' place, mom was sitting up and feeling a bit better. i think me being there -- i.e., she didn't have to rely on my father, who refuses to wear his hearing aids and thus would have no clue if she were somewhere in the house, calling for help -- helped relax her. i gave her some gatorade, and her stomach began to settle. i gave her another BP pill and, an hour later, her pressure was way back down. it has stayed down, getting as low as 109 but staying around 130 most the rest of the time, since.

we documented all the key moments in this saga, and she sent them to her doctor via email first thing monday morning. the doctor ordered a refill of the "in case of emergency" BP medication, gave mom instructions to monitor her BP at least twice a day for the next several weeks, and they have a phone consultation tomorrow. YB says that mom should request a CT scan just to rule out any mysterious bleeding anywhere in the body, which can cause a sudden BP spike, so we'll see what happens there.

it's a bit of a chicken/egg situation -- does the dizziness cause the BP spike, or vice-versa? the epley maneuver, which is used to help remedy vertigo, does seem to help with her dizzy spells, indicating that there might be some kind of deep inner-ear issue to blame. suddenly feeling the room spinning *can* cause your blood pressure to go way up due to stress/panic. at the same time, sudden changes in BP can cause dizziness. so, who knows what's happening first and causing the other.

it was all very stressful, for all of us. my anxiety caused my mind to race with all the worst-case scenarios. i told mom not to mess around with her BP -- and taking the medication when it spikes -- in the future, and that i didn't want to spend the rest of my life being angry with her if she were to die needlessly because she decided she'd just "sleep it off" instead of following protocol if/when another of these episodes were to hit.

anyway...

• in happier news, i have now written 92 terrible pages of a screenplay! on november 30, i realized there was one month left in 2020, and that i was nowhere near reaching my ONE goal for the year -- to finish a screenplay. i barely had ONE page written, let along an entire script. so, starting on december 1, i gave myself an order: write at least 10 screenplay pages a day, every day except weekends, until i get to "the end." no matter how bad the writing. i took two weekdays off to complete an unexpected writing assignment, but have otherwise stuck to the plan. i had an outline completed, which is always helpful, but the process of turning it into a screenplay has revealed all its many flaws. 

the screenplay is bloated, confusing, meandering and repetitive. there are scenes and characters that i now realize are completely pointless, and there are key elements/plot points that i've discovered are missing entirely. the dialogue is absolutely terrible: flat, obvious and devoid of subtext. it borders on:

CHARACTER A: I am angry with you.

CHARACTER B: Why are you angry with me?

CHARACTER A: Because you did that thing.

CHARACTER B: You are right. I did do that thing.

CHARACTER A: And that is why I am angry.

(actually, the above exchange is a considerable improvement on what i've actually been writing!)

but i am not stopping to revise or edit, no matter how cringe-worthy the writing is -- my goal is to just forge ahead, plot holes and exposition be damned, until it's finished. THEN and only then will i let myself go back and fix allllllll the things that are wrong with this story. 

draft #2 will, i hope, be a big improvement on draft #1. based on where i am in the outline, and the ratio of outline pages to script pages, i still have about 50-ish pages left to write, which should be an indicator of just how horribly overwritten this script is (a typical screenplay should run about 100-105 pages, but mine will likely clock in at almost 150). but... onwards! it *has* been a bit freeing to just let myself write drivel and to focus on getting it finished vs. getting it right on the first attempt. there's no agonizing over words, just churning them out. quantity over quality. for now.

• i've started watching The Good Wife on amazon prime and i love it. i'd watched The Good Fight (the spin-off series) first and enjoyed it, so i went back to watch the original series. there are seven seasons of 23 episodes each, and i'm about halfway through season three. so, this'll keep me busy for a while. i also have a pile of DVDs from the library to watch through new year's day: season three of Westworld; season six of Silicon Valley; season three of The Deuce; and the movies Mulan and Summerland. gracie has no clue yet just how much time we'll be spending on the couch in the coming weeks.

• speaking of my small friend, i bought her christmas present last month and, thankfully, it arrived before visitors were once again prohibited from my building. YB was therefore still able to come over to help me put it together. it's a swanky cat condo and, for the first two weeks it was in my living room, gracie would NOT go near it. nothing could entice her to even step on it -- not food, not treats, not toys, nothing. then, one evening while i was eating my dinner, she walked over all on her own, hopped up into the second-level cubby, curled up and went to sleep. and she now LOVES it. phew!