laceblade

I keep wanting to blog about what happened in the massage appointment I had last week & being unable to do so. So here are my tweets, along with tweets today about my acupuncture appointment.

Massage Appointment
(This is the second massage I've had. I have a lot of upper back pain. I believed this is b/c I have, as they say, a large rack.)
Massage this morning! "The reason this is painful is b/c you don't breathe deeply enough/from the right place."
CAN I JUST HAVE ONE BODY THING DONE RIGHT? CAN I BE DOING ANYTHING RIGHT? JFC.
So now, in addition to feeling anxious about when I eat/what I eat/how much I eat & how much pain it's going to cost me...
...I can also feel anxious LITERALLY EVERY TIME I DRAW BREATH that I'm not doing it correctly.
In conclusion, fuck everyone, & fuck everything.
But hey, now I can articulate what it is I like about makeup? It's something related to my body that I feel like I am "doing correctly."
And I give absolutely zero fucks about how un-feminist that makes me.


Acupuncture Appointment
So, Acupuncturist got all, "Wow, even when you follow your diet, you still have pain? What's different on days when you have pain?" with me.
She got all bent out of shape when I said, "It's chronic pain. It's much better than it was. I don't expect it to ever go away."
& wants to sell me more pills next time.
That's 3/3 with medical professionals this month. SOMETIMES PAIN IS MEANINGLESS & WON'T GO AWAY. SOMETIMES YOU HAVE TO ACCEPT IT.
Sometimes people are already trying as hard as they fucking can, in every fucking way. Back off.

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I feel angry, all the time.

[Ironic use of icon because drinking from a straw causes me unbearable pain due to inhaling air, & I don't drink milk!]

I have a busy day today, and I expect it won't be until I've actually tried some recipes that I fully form an opinion about the book.

In the meantime, I'll copy/paste the impressions I tweeted this morning.

Verdict on the acid reflux cookbook: My reflux is way worst than the majority of people's. I guess I knew that, though. #lolsurgery

In general, portion control = huge (knew that). Author thinks tomato & etc. are okay in small portions & prepared certain ways. #SKEPTICAL

Author recommends lifestyle changes I've already implemented, some unknowingly - like taking a walk after lunch, making lunch biggest meal.

Author says repeatedly: people become anorexic or develop disordered eating habits due to fear of pain. #hahahasob #wishidreadthisawhileago

IN SUM: Ready to try some recipes in the coming weeks. Glad I have other cookbooks that explain HOW to cook b/c this one really doesn't.

There are a couple of lifestyle changes I hope to implement immediately/this week: We don't have a kitchen table in our apartment, but I'd like to stop eating dinner on the couch. I can either eat on the white chair (very upright) or standing at our breakfast nook counter.

Elaborating on one of the tweets above: I started taking a walk every day at work back in February, when I had returned to work from medical leave. This is in part because after my surgery, my body literally had to learn how to eat again, with a newly twisted stomach. I knew that walking aided in digestion because every time I ate something, I would pace around the rooms of my parents' house, either reading while walking or playing my DS.
I continued this when I returned to work because of extreme pain.

I also continued it in part to encourage some meditative time on my own part during the work-day (meditation has been recommended to me to reduce stress and anxiety - things that both cause and are resulted from chronic physical pain).
Lastly, walking midday is nice because my work environment has no natural light. My cubicle is cozy because I've decorated it with anime pencil boards and various buttons, but there's no beating natural light.

Rather than make me unproductive, I usually return to my desk quite focused after a walk!

ANYWAY. This is all to say that I'd like to try taking a walk in the evenings, too. Maybe not immediately after dinner (on a typical night, I watch 1.5 hours of evening news: CBS then PBS), but after that would be fine.

The book confirms a lot of what I already knew about exercise: Moderate exercise is good. Intense exercise that gets you panting ends up triggering reflux.
I'd still really like to try biking. I joined our city's community bike-share program and then we had a summer of unbearably hot temperatures and going for a bike ride sounded like torture.
I've been busy lately, but I'd like to at least try this before the bikes get taken away for winter.


Recipe-wise, I think I'll be starting with some of the salad recommendations. A lot of things in this book look like they're beyond my current skill level; the author assumes that people know how to cook/have a lot of time to cook.
Rather than make my own ~chicken stock from rotisserie chicken leftovers~, for example, I'll just....buy some already-made organic chicken stock and dilute it with water.

The book does stress organic foods, which is something I've mostly switched to anyway, as I live close to a grocery store that emphasizes the same.
Lately, a lot of things I've read about GERD point to processed and chemical-ized food as a problem.

Obesity is a huge contributing factor - reflux is becoming much more widespread as people become bigger - and in my own case, the switch of my reflux from "minor annoyance" to "unbearable pain" was likely caused by significant weight gain that I had a few years ago.
However, due to the severity of my GERD, we already know that weight loss alone hasn't/didn't fix it.
It sucks that fixing the cause can't be the cure. That would be much more simple.

The author of this book wants people to make lifestyle changes to avoid taking medications like proton-pump inhibitors, and treats surgery as an ultimate last resort.

I've already had the surgery, and I'm not going to spend time wishing I had known about some of these rules before the surgery: I don't think using the recipes in this cookbook would have helped me.
But it helps me in feeling better about having had the surgery because I'm no longer on any medications for reflux, although I probably have more Tums than I should ^^;

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The book emphasizes throughout that many people become anorexic or develop disordered eating habits due to fear of pain. Rather than make me feel sad, it just makes me think, "Oh thank God, it's not just me."

--I am still watching The Newsroom, but I am loving the ever-living fuck out of Political Animals. meganbmoore and liseuse are both writing great thoughts about the show, and I don't have much to add. EXCEPT THAT I LOVE IT SO MUCH.

--I finished reading Kou Yaginuma's 12-volume manga series, Twin Spica. Its premise is really interesting - a small, young girl wants to be an astronaut, so she goes to space school. There are some flashbacks to a tragedy that took place before the series begins. The protagonist, Asami, meets friends at space camp school and it is sometimes pretty adorable.
After a few volumes, though, the story begins to lag.
And then to wrap things up, the manga-ka takes this turn with chronic/severe illness, basically saying that it is okay to literally work so hard that you kill yourself by refusing to live by any standards that aren't the same as your best friends - so long as you're all together.
This was extremely disturbing to me. The emotional impact of a character death had a way different effect on me than it was supposed to, I think, and this narrative thread kind of retrospectively ruined the entire series for me.

--The first omnibus volume of Mitsuru Adachi's Cross Game was emotionally compelling in a way I wasn't expecting. Highly recommended; I'll be reading more.
I somehow came to this book unspoiled despite everyone & their mom blogging about it the last couple years.
I'd also give a shout-out to the flawless backgrounds. Normally I find this vaguely cartoon-ish drawing style hard to get through, but the amazingly well-done backgrounds make it extremely tolerable for me.

--Kaoru Mori's A Bride's Story continues to be fantastic. It's worth picking these up just to sigh at the art. I <3 Kaoru Mori.

--ALSO EVERYONE, EVER, SHOULD READ CODE NAME: VERITY BY ELIZABETH WEIN. HOLY SHIT.

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Manga Bookshelf recently held a blog carnival about series by the group CLAMP.
This post about Why You Should Read Cardcaptor Sakura is great, and includes many images from the series. Cardcaptor Sakura is one of my all-time favorites; this blog post does a great job explaining why.

Text of an e-mail I just sent.
The assumption that people who don't get better aren't trying hard enough can die in a fucking fire.

( La. )