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Chiggety-Check In

tragerstreit1 Comment

That was the longest break I’ve ever taken. Between no longer having a job, and COVID warping the reality of time itself, the last three months have gone by in an instant and an eon at the same time.

It’s been long enough I think I need to do a general check-in. So that’s what this blog post will be all about. If you don’t care, that’s totally cool and I will have something else for you very soon.

Strength
My FRS scale has gone down a point or two. I’m beginning to notice weakness in my arms now. I can still wiggle my fingers and grasp things between my first finger knuckle and my thumb. That’s going away though. My laptop is becoming too heavy to manage. I can still just about move my toes, I can’t kick with any real strength, but I can stand as long as I’m leaning heavily on something else. This means I can use the walker for a step or two, but I haven’t tested anything longer than a couple steps lately. There’s not really any way to pick me up off the ground if I fall, here, so I’m not going to take stupid risks. I’m still able to transfer myself to my wheelchair, and to the toilet from there, so I’m still pretty independent. I can still write a little bit, especially if I’m using a special pen that one of my blog readers was kind enough to send me. Along with some lovely edible treats. The pen she sent me is a kind of crutch for my finger, and it is much more easy to control with fingers that are weak. I’m not going to be writing any new novels anytime soon, but I can still sign my name and fill out short forms.

Breath
For the longest time, we weren’t able to test my breathing because Covid. When you’re dealing with a disease spread by droplets and aerosols, the last thing you want is someone purposely and forcibly blowing air into your face. Last month during my medical trial though, after getting a Covid test to prove I was clean, we were able to test my forced vital lung capacity. The Covid test sucked so bad. They dug around in the very back of my sinus cavity and I felt like I was a dead body being prepared for mummification and they were going to pull my brain out through my nose. I was coughing and sneezing and I watery for a couple of hours after the test. It sucked, is what I’m saying. The last time we tested my breathing back in March I was at 52%. When this all started I was at 115%, to give you an idea. This last trip I tested at 46%. Quite a drop. I am definitely feeling this change, I am so much more easily out of breath. I am still breathing okay this, I only noticed when I exert myself somehow. If I lose my breath it takes me a bit longer to catch it back. There’s no need for breathing apparatus yet, except the AVAPS machine that I use at night. I’ve still got some time.

Eating
I need help cutting up my food, but I can still feed myself. I have not begun choking on food or having things go down the wrong pipe – at least no more than average people do. It’s awful when I do choke on my own spit though, because in order to get my breath back I have to take these huge ragged breaths in to be able to cough it out, and it makes this horrible death rattley noise when I do it. It scares the living shit out of everyone around me, and I don’t have the breath to explain to them that I’m all right – as long as I’m choking I’m still breathing – but it’s gonna sound like I’m dying for a minute. Which is not to say that I’m not also scared, being unable to breathe is one of the worst things in the world, but I know that the choking is only temporary. And even if I do pass out, there’s a couple of minutes before any possibility of brain damage sets in, and my airway will probably be cleared out by somebody attempted CPR and up be fine again. I have not had to make any concession to the disease with regards to how I eat. So far, we haven’t had to make any concessions to the disease in regards to what I eat, either. I am still fat under medical advice. I have an obscene amount of junk food in my room for snacking on. I mean, obscene. I’ve got a little three drawer shelf unit full to the brim, and two square baskets that slide into IKEA furniture full. I have a habit of craving something obscure, and then allowing myself to get that thing because fuck it, I’m dying, but the only way I’ll be able to find it on Amazon or wherever is by the case. So now I’ve got a case of whatever. People also gift me edible things all the time, because they are amazing, and they don’t want to burden me down with material things but they do want to give me a present. Candy is perfect in that regard. And I love it. I love it all. The problem is I don’t actually eat that much junk food, so will have a couple of pieces of whatever and then it just sits here while everything else piles up around. Hence, three drawers and two baskets. This isn’t a complaint, at all. I love candy. And obscure Australian treats, and macadamia nuts, and pop tarts, and marzipan, and Lara bars, and Apple chips, and every other thing that is currently shoved in to my little space. Love it.

Speech
My voice is becoming affected. If I talk for too long my voice goes a little wobbly and raspy. This is most likely due to my breathing more than anything, there isn’t enough breath being forced out when I speak to make my voice strong. I can still enunciate properly, and get my point across. But something’s happening there.

Mental
ALS doesn’t really affect your cognitive behavior, which is all at once the best and worst thing about this disease. You retain your faculties, but eventually you become trapped in your own body with no way to communicate, still perfectly aware and understanding of everything around you. There are some cognitive issues possible though, and I’m wondering if I’m having problems with that. It seems recently that I have much more of a problem getting my point across because my thoughts are so scattered. It could quite possibly also just be ADHD or something, but I’ve never noticed it so much as in the last year. I have lots of other ADHD traits so who knows. I was never formally diagnosed with that but I also never formally sought out a diagnosis for that. My brain has always gone very quickly in circles and I seem to say something completely unrelated to what we were talking about; but I do have a definite path that I used to arrive at what I said. We were talking about chocolate, which makes me think about dogs being unable to eat chocolate, which makes me think about a cute dog video I saw with a dog biting at a stream of air from a compressor, which makes me think of really windy weather, which makes me think of another video of an umbrella rolling down the beach with dramatic music, which makes me think of going to the beach. And that’s why when you say “I really like this dark chocolate”, I respond “we should go to the beach soon”. There’s a path there, a definite way I arrived where I did, you just don’t see it. Lately I am having trouble even explaining that path out loud, even though my brain understands completely.

Emotional
This one. This is the one I’m struggling with the most, if I’m being honest. I have the absolute worst time being unable to help myself. All my life I have been entirely self reliant, and any help I accepted was on my own terms. I obviously don’t have that luxury anymore. Friends come over and help me unpack, and I can literally do nothing to help them, and that eats at me. Even though I know they don’t mind, and are even happy to do so. I sit here in my room and see something that needs to be done, and it would take me all of five minutes to take care of it forever if I were able-bodied. But I’m not. And so it must become this hour-long effort to get someone here with enough time to spare, and explain what needs to be done, and then have them do it. And so much remains undone because it seems so stupid to call someone in here just to push a thumbtack in that had fallen out of the wall. It is frustrating in a way that I have never thought possible. And it absolutely eats at me to know that it’s just going to get worse. More than my own death, I fear being a burden. And my friends and family can say all they want, that I’m not a burden, but I will never be able to believe that. And that’s just how it is. Still, I have many more good days than bad days. I try to take things at face value as they come and be gracious about the help I do receive. I mean, I’m still going to completely obsess over it mentally and examine it from every angle in minute detail And stare at the ceiling until 3 o’clock in the morning thinking about it, but… um… Where was I going with that.

Anyway.

House
We are slowly but surely getting into this house and settling in. It is taking an excruciatingly long time because of the three people living here only one of them is able-bodied and he has a job. Thanks to some amazing friends who have come over to lend a hand, we are much further along than we would otherwise be. For example this is what my study looks like now!

My stuff’s cooler than your stuff.
I’m 45, why do you ask?

Neato torpedo. The place is actually beginning to resemble my living space now. We’ve been pulling things out of boxes that I haven’t looked at in over five years because they were packed up from the house that I owned and then just put into storage while I lived in the apartment. It’s nice to be able to go through these things, and get rid of so much. My friend Tamra did all of the work you see up there. She is absolutely an amazing person and I’m lucky to know her. We have some semblance of the living room, rather than boxes piled upon tables and couches, you could almost sit in it. We are still discovering the um.. Character that this house has. Like the skeleton of a rat in a rat trap in the crawlspace. And the very interesting decisions or more owners made in regards to the electrical wiring. And duct placement. Our back porch is still a mess of boxes and other things needing to be sorted and there’s an entire storage unit out there, full of even more stuff from my old storage that we need to go through. We are taking it a little bit at a time. This house feels much more like a home now, already, and it will only become homier.

Travel
I am still participating in a medical trial which necessitates traveling by plane to San Francisco once a month. It’s usually a two or three day trip, but it seems to take half the month to prepare and recover from it. As per my previous post, traveling in a wheelchair is not easy. I can’t tell you much about the trial itself, except that I do undergo a spinal tap each and every time. It’s… becoming routine. Which is not something I ever thought I’d say – spinal taps aren’t something I would ever think someone could get used to? But here we are. I can, however, slip you this link which details some of the preliminary findings of the trial in general. The results are looking pretty good.

Tofersen Safe, Appears to Slow Disease Progression in SOD1 ALS Patients, Phase 1/2 Trial Shows

Outside influences
I have to keep all of my mental and emotional facilities trained to what’s immediately around me, because the outside world is pretty fucking scary right now. I live near Portland, which the president is trying to paint as a lawless expanse of criminals and terrorists, but really there’s protests happening in two square blocks in the inner city and the damage is mostly confined to the federal buildings. Driving through downtown is not unsafe. The president has promised a tax break should he get reelected, which would mean disability becoming unfunded by next year, so I’m pretty scared about that. I’m really scared about the slide into fascism that our country is taking and the wannabe dictator going unchecked when he says really dangerous shit. Some really scary shit going on outside and I can’t do anything about it, so I do my best to bury my head and just not think about it. Sometimes that works. Sometimes it takes Ativan. Otherwise I spend every waking minute angry and terrified. I cannot wait for a time when a week can go by and I don’t even think about the president. I hope I live to see that.

Overall though there’s nothing too horrible or too awesome to report. I’m settling into the new normal at the house, settling into the new normal of my disease day by day, and settling into a sort of routine. One of my absolute biggest stresses was finding a house, and getting this place has helped immeasurably. So I don’t really have all that much to complain about. Overall I’m doing pretty good. I still feel like I have some time. I still have things to do, things to say, cats to pet.

And all this junk food to consume.

Home. Coming.

tragerstreit7 Comments

Seven years ago today, I had just started cleaning and painting my new home. I’d had keys for a scant two days and there was a lot to be done. Seven years and two days ago my dream of homeownership had finally come true. It was pretty much my dream home. Huge backyard, a shed AND two car garage for storage, five bedrooms, huge kitchen. I had such dreams for that house. I was going to convert one of the bedrooms to be a kitten room and foster kittens. I was going to install baker’s racks I my kitchen and get serious about patisserie in my spare time.  My office was set up for studying for my computer science degree in the works, a spare bedroom-slash-library for guests, my bedroom with a ceiling like the night sky. It was gonna be a giant garden in the back and a haven for the snakes I was delighted to learn lived there.  I was going to install bat houses.

Six years, eight weeks and one day ago I received news that changed everything.

One of the first things to hit me, after the whole “holy shit, I have a terminal disease and I’m going to die” thing was “oh no I have to sell my house.” My new dream house was two story you see. I was beyond crushed, I was devastated.  I hadn’t even had it for a year and now I was looking at having to give it up. And unfortunately giving it up was not a question. I tried every scheme I could come up with. There was no way to put a master bedroom downstairs, no way to expand the downstairs bedroom to encompass a roll in shower, no way to put a lift in to get the wheelchair upstairs. The hallway was just too narrow. The layout was just too open downstairs. The only aspect of choice I had was, do I sell it now? Or do I wait until I’m physically forced out of the place.

I chose option one. The thinking was, I could get out of this house and purchase a new one while there was still ability in me to decorate the new place. If I waited until I was wheelchair-bound and had useless hands, I wouldn’t be able to make the new place my own. So I sold it pretty much right away, at a nice profit, even.  It wasn’t even on the market a week. I had owned my dream house for just over two years. I rented an apartment as a temporary measure, because I knew it would be a little bit before I could find the perfect place. The new place had to be single-story, had to be wheelchair accessible or at least have the bones to renovated to be so. And crucially? It had to be affordable on what I was going to make while on disability. I had estimates of what I was going to be earning, and at the time Danielle was going to move in with me so I would have help with the mortgage.

It has turned out to be a nigh impossible task. The economy recovered in spades, and suddenly I couldn’t afford literally anything in the area. People were coming from California and other places with cash to purchase homes and I simply could not compete. Real life then conspired to interfere, Danielle and I split as friends, so I was suddenly going it alone. Jay decided to move in with me and so all of his needs also needed to be addressed in the house search.  My stepfather passed away, leaving my mother unable to afford her home, and so I moved her in with me in my 2 bedroom apartment and we weren’t sure what was going to become of that, if her living with me would be a permanent solution or not. My needs became very, very complicated, my buying power dwindled to almost nothing thanks to the booming house market and the pittance you earn on disability, and my “temporary” apartment became more of an unwanted permanent fixture.

Staying permanently in an apartment was never an option though. I need a roll in shower. Apartment complexes tend to frown upon you doing demolition in their units, so installing one here is not an option. Ideally I wanted to stay in the same-ish area so I could keep near my support network.  Leaving Portland metro, thus leaving the care of Doctor Goslin, was NEVER an option. I need a bedroom big enough for my bed, wheelchair, and a lift to eventually get me out of bed into the wheelchair. This place simply does not have that much space; I play a stupid game of Tetris with my wheelchair, walker, cat scratcher, and closet door every time I get dressed. And even after the economy recovered somewhat, and even though Jay was willing to commute up to an hour each way to work every day so I could extend our search parameters to include BanjoLand (where our neighbors were GUARANTEED to hate our liberal asses), there was simply nothing out there for me. Everything we found was falling apart, or the master bathroom wasn’t even big enough to get a wheelchair in, much less turnaround in, or the side bedrooms where J and my mother would be staying were closets.

Quick shout out here because credit where credit is fucking DUE.  My real estate agent Christina Griffith is one of the most patient people on the face of this planet. I half expected her to give me up as a client at any time. It was frustrating for us both, but she never quit on me.  I didn’t have an option to quit and she did, and I’m grateful as FUCK she did not take that route.

All I wanted was a place to live until I died, one way or another. My last breath in my own bed, with my cats beside me. No more transition housing. A place I could get around in my wheelchair, with place to store all of the necessary equipment (like a huge-ass Hoyer lift) that will become part of my life as the disease progresses, with space for the people taking care of me. (And the option for grocery delivery because I’m in a wheelchair and mom is blind and J can’t do everything.)  I didn’t care what kind of dwelling it was. House, condo, manufactured home, as long as it was accessible, and affordable, I could literally give a shit. It has been the single greatest stressor in my life ever since I was diagnosed. No hyperbole. All I want is a place to just be and be allowed to die in and not have to worry about my belongings getting packed up and my cats transitioned a to new environment separate from me while I still drew breath. The actual disease and its effects have actually been secondary to all of this. My life has primarily been all about finding a home.

It’s taken five years.

One thing I’m definitely grateful for is all of the people helping me look. My realtor is amazing, as I said, (seriously if you’re in the Portland metro area look her up) and I had lots of friends and family keeping an eye out for me, as well as automated searches on places like redfin. This lead came from my psychiatrist of all people. He’d been keeping an eye out, but most of the places he found were way out of my price range.  A client of his was sadly transitioning to a care home, and his wife had to sell their home. It was a depressing thing for them but could be a godsend for me – it was already ADA set up. Ramps to everything, even the backyard, doors wide enough for a chair in every room.  He gave me the owner’s email address, and I didn’t have high hopes to be honest, because there was no way I was going to be able to afford this place. I contacted them anyway, and the wife turned out to be a total peach.  She answered all of my questions gracefully,  but sure enough their asking price was $50,000 more than I had been approved for. I told her thanks anyway. She said hang on. let’s talk.  It meant a lot to her that we’d been introduced through my shrink, and she really wanted the accessibility features to be of use to someone. Let’s have me look at the place, she said, and we can discuss it.

I didn’t get my hopes up.  I didn’t dare.

We toured the place, and it was such an awesome feeling to be able to actually go into a house I was looking at purchasing, and wheel around freely with nothing off-limits to me. Typically when we go to look at a house, I stay in the van while J and Christina go inside and then report back to me. All I’ve had to go off of was their opinions and maybe a video tour taken on Christina’s cellphone. But here, here I was able to see for myself. And here I was able to see myself living in this space.  This could be My House. The space was big enough. There are already ramps everywhere. The shower even was already a roll in shower. It was not quite perfect, the other two bedrooms were still kind of small. But with a little renovation we could make things work. So not daring to get my hopes up, I checked with my bank to see if maybe I could get approved for just a little more money. It still wasn’t what they were asking, but it was all I could afford.  The bank said OK, and I presented an offer tens of thousands less than they’d said they were going to ask, fully expecting a counteroffer or flat-out refusal.

They said yes.

I get the keys tomorrow.

It’s been a very fast roller coaster ride, having to scramble to get all the paperwork together, and proving that even on SSDI I can make the mortgage (thanks ENTIRELY to Intel’s retirement plan), getting everything coordinated and submitted and 10,000 signatures on triplicate and witnessed by two rabbis and a chimpanzee, but it’s all sorted. It’s taking literally everything I have saved and my 401(k) and what little stock I still owned, but we’re doing it. There’s gonna be some work to do, we need to move a wall to make one of the bedrooms a livable size for J. There’s painting of course, but that’s just cosmetics. My fondest wish is to see what putting in central AC will cost, because the placement of the windows are not great for the window units that I have and I am a huge baby when it comes to heat and it’s going to SUCK when I’m too hot and unable to push the covers off. I’m not sure I’m going to be afford AC, but it’s a dream I have. Buying a house is incredibly expensive and there’s always going to be one more thing to purchase that you never thought of. I have to hire movers. Not that I don’t have a squad of willing volunteers, but for one – COVID is still very much a thing, even though America has seemed to decide that it’s boring now so we’re just not gonna quarantine anymore – and for two, most of my friends are willing but not necessarily able. I’m 45 years old and most of my friends are around the same age bracket. We can’t just haul shit around willy-nilly anymore. And my adjustable bed weighs a ton and I’m not subjecting people I love to that nonsense. So I’m doing what I can and praying that I am able to afford it all. So hey, if you ever thought about dropping a dime into my GoFundMe, now would definitely be a good time.

I called all of the utilities today to transfer them into my name, and every single one of them wished me congratulations on the new house. It’s a magical phrase. My new house. I was sincerely beginning to despair it was ever going to happen, and I would be relegated to sponge baths in my bed until I needed to be transferred to a care facility. I’m so happy it was wrong. I’m so happy this finally happened. I’m so glad I get a permanent address at last. I wish it hadn’t taken so long, and I’m no longer able to do all the decorating myself, but I can be a damn good supervisor and project leader. My friends are amazing and they will help me. I will have the space worthy of dying in, at last.

My final resting place.