The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
My dearest wife
I opened my eyes on the last day.
It was the only thing that came to mind.
You were awake before me, as usual.
Rolled to my left and saw the same thing
I've seen for a third of my life.
The back of your head, back-lit by your phone.
I shifted closer, draped my arm over yours,
and kissed your shoulder.
You grumbled something and shrugged the arm off.
So I lay there, three inches away,
and tried not to shake while I cried.
In a few minutes, our lives are going to change.
I'm never going to walk down this hallway again,
use this bathroom, or type on this computer.
You went down to make tea and I'm writing.
When the drinks are done, we need to talk.
The papers are filed, the process server will be along.
This is not my home any more.
Trying to learn something from this. Should my wife and I not be both doomscrolling independently of one another in bed?
Don't shrug her hand away might be the main takeaway.
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In order to properly format lines in a poetic stanza, type two spaces at the end of each line, and don't type an extra carriage return between the lines. Use the "view source" button to compare these two examples:
'Twas brillig; and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
'Twas brillig; and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
I love you guys, please never change.
Also, hang in there, @JTarrou.
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Sorry to hear it. How long have you two been unhappy?
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Got my nasal surgery done. The week with the nasal splints was hell, as I couldn't breathe through the nose at all. I got them removed on Wednesday, but the internal swelling still hasn't subsided completely, I can breathe only through my left nostril and it still gets clogged up by morning and I wake up with a disgusting mouth.
At least I enjoy irrigations, especially since they are disgustingly effective at this stage of recovery. My wife hates the feeling of water in her nose and I can't imagine how terrible she would feel in my place.
What is this all for? Will it at least make you sound more manly?
Right now I sound more like a neurotic Jew (or Lois Griffin, who's voiced by a neurotic Jew, come to think of it), but the swelling should go away in a couple of weeks.
I've always had a deviated septum, but when I developed AERD, nasal polyps made aerobic activities even harder. Getting my airways straightened out was literally the only reason.
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I planted a (very messy) garden with the kids. Onions have come up. Squash seedlings have come up and produced some leaves, and decorative bulbs have come up. Other seeds may or may not have gotten washed away by a heavy storm, but I'm still somewhat hopeful it will produce something, anyway. Onions at least.
"Plant a bit of everything and see what happens" seems to be the right way to go if you have any kind of tough local climate/pests/fungi/etc. Our green beans grew great. Our okra next to them grew even better but went from "not yet ready to pick" to "basically wood" so fast that we only successfully harvested a fraction. Our vine plants mostly didn't sprout, except for some that sprouted and grew great and then suddenly died for no apparent reason. Our peppers grew very well; our tomatoes did the same, then came back on their own the next year, but didn't really fruit that time before a heat wave got them. Our parsley kept coming back, huger and huger, through heat waves and freezes, though I think this summer might finally finish it off. Etc. etc. I'd never have predicted any of that in advance ... except the peppers and tomatoes, I guess.
But I'm lazy and our planting season is tricky, so mostly I gave up and started with hydroponics. We still had the same problem with cucumbers (it's got to be fungi?) and of course it's a tiny garden, but it's wonderful for herbs, still good for tomatoes and peppers, and infinitely better for things like lettuce that can be hard to distinguish from the local weeds until they're big.
Okra varieties can be really different on size and edibility - I once planted seeds of one called, IIRC, Milsap White, and those pods were still good even at 8 inches long. Alas, the vendor I got it from no longer sells that variety, though I did get a different one this year that claims similar performance. I may or may not be able to verify that this year; my four-year-old likes to pick and eat raw pods when they're still quite small.
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Unwellness, then Wellness Wednesday
I know the Sell-By date has long since passed for this kind of write-up, and I also realize that for most everyone here the type of experience that I am about to relate in this comment may be all-too-familiar, and therefore reading the account of another person's experience boring as hell. So, with those two important criteria fulfilled, let me launch into another tale of physical woe.
I finally got COVID.
I had successfully dodged it a number of times. Co-workers were felled by it. Too many students to count. Friends' aunts and cousins back home died from it. My wife and two sons all had it--twice--and during those times I was the caretaker, launderer, cook, and general nursemaid. But seemingly immune. I did wear a mask when in the room with them at those times, washed my hands a lot, kept opening up windows for ventilation, and I was vaccinated with the Moderna 3 or maybe even 4 times, though the last of those was over a year ago.
My resistance to the virus--impressive, I thought --apparently crumbled when my 13 year-old last week contracted a fever and a cough, and I, like the Irish consigliere Tom Hagen in letting Sonny drive off wildly, was overconfident, when I should have redoubled my precautions. I guess. Anyway, I got it. Or it got me. Bam. They got him on the causeway.
It's not what I expected. Back in 2021 when she had it, my wife, who had also been vaccinated, was down for a day or so. She'd sleep downstairs in the tatami room, occasionally moaning. I brought her okayu on a tray. My sons, also a few years ago, as expected were really only feverish for one night and coughed a few times and spent the rest of their required (by their school) quarantine contentedly watching YouTube in their bedrooms and eating curry on makeshift tv trays. (If anyone here has any idea what a tv tray is.)
The second wave through our household was similar, only their illness the second time seemed even more brief. Everyone seemed to be getting it in that era; my sons' classes would regularly shut down for days at a time due to clusters. You were always hearing so-and-so has COVID. My father, who never got it, was nevertheless killed by it, as the protocols in place in my hometown in the US kept him isolated in his late 80s, alone with only my less-than-winsome brother, whose lack of initiative, coupled with everyone staying away, slowly broke my father's mind. That's a whole other story that I'd rather not tell. But I have my own, personal, reasons to hate COVID as well as the resultant policies surrounding it. I only mention this to say this is not a political post or a comment on greater policy issues in Japan or the US.
So my famille had it a few times. I'd go to work after the all-clear and the hospital staff had me wait in a big ET tent. I took many home covid tests, and a few in said tent, where the doctor, who apparently knew me, would speak to me half in English, half in Japanese, meanwhile ramming the elongated nasopharyngeal swab so far in I expected it to pop out my throat like some David Blaine routine. These tests were all always negative. And then, last Saturday, a positive.
COVID-19, five years late, put me down for a good three days. Even with paracetamol every 4 hours, I had a temperature hovering at 100 F/38C for about 72 hours. Body aches, fatigue, blurred hallucinogenic thoughts, etc. All the best things. Luckily I have had no real respiratory issues besides an occasional cough. My image of serious Coronavirus complications were always of someone lying intubated and unconscious in some racked up hospital bed, breath coming out like Darth Vader--not the deep, resonant , fearful Vader but more like at the end of ROTJ when he's just had his arm chopped off and been force-shocked halfway to oblivion. Thankfully that doesn't seem to be my destiny. So far. But I could have done without that fever. Very little consistent sleep is possible. And what sleep does come is nightmarish. The mind really unhinges, and I've never enjoyed that sensation--if sensation is what I can call it, and it probably isn't.
I am now sitting here with a mild headache and very little energy, but even this is absolute bliss when juxtaposed with the twisty turn-y Sweat Hell of that fever. It's quite something just to not be sick. I suppose that's the reminder.
So. Be smart, contrary, snarky, and argue about shit that probably only tangentially affects any of us, I'm all for it. Carry on. But stay well, fellow travelers.
I've caught COVID 4 times as confirmed by RT-PCR, and I suspect at least 2 or 3 more times. At my age, it's not really an issue, one of the hazards of the job really, especially given that I was in an ICU at the height of Delta.
At this point, I don't bother getting tested unless I could get a comfy fortnight of sick leave. I used to fret about infecting the older members of my family, but they've made it through their own infections without much consequence, so I treat it like a new variant of seasonal flu. It's here to stay for the foreseeable future, and life has to go on.
That's...a lot. I'm 55, but have a BMI of like 22, don't smoke, and exercise literally every day (though not for a week). I guess age still comes into play for various reasons. I do hope if I were to get it again (or a new strain) I'd not have the same brutal fever.
I was catching COVID every 6 months or so, which, if memory serves, is about as long as natural immunity persists. I spent a year as an intern in an extremely busy government hospital in questionable conditions, think rationing out one N95 every week levels, before vaccines were available. The bulk of my stint in an ICU was also before I got a vaccine, and that's with me cutting ahead of the queue as a medical professional.
Of course, as is now common knowledge, the vaccines don't prevent transmission and whatever they do for infections, it wasn't sufficient when I'm spending entire days cooped up with severe COVID cases.
Funnily enough, I could have sworn I'd caught COVID a few months back, but sadly the PCR came back negative. It felt precisely like COVID, including a day of total anosmia, but eh, could have been test error or just the flu. So I was back to work sniffling away, COVID sick leave is enshrined here, but the hospital I was working at wasn't so considerate of anything else that didn't literally leave me bedridden.
In terms of the fever you had, well, I'm not aware of anything better than paracetamol, ibuprofen or other NSAIDs. You could consider paxlovid, but I don't know how readily available that is in Japan. It's one of the only drugs that reliably works, and reduces severity and mortality. I think stocks globally are past the stage when they had to be carefully rationed out to the most morbid, but perhaps the doctors you saw didn't think you needed it. If you have the bad luck to catch it again, make sure to ask!
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I haven't seen you too much lately! How's everything been going? UK treating you right?
I'm alright, thanks for asking!
I'm leaving for the UK in a few weeks, which means a lot of hectic last minute preparation and packing, and wrangling bureaucracy, which leaves less time than can be desired for Motteposting haha. I presume I'll be kept on my feet for the first few weeks once I'm there, but the perk of that is that you have more procrastination posting to look forward to!
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I think I had covid last week, too. Not sure, didn't test. Can I test for it 11 days after it started? Had some severe aches, some fever, pained throat, difficulty sleeping for a few days, and a sometime dry cough that only went away today. Nothing horrific, but bothersome enough. I've no idea where I caught it or from whom, can't remember being close to anyone who was sick. That's what made me think covid, aerosol transmission in a store or something. First time for me too, if it was covid.
PCR and antibody tests will effectively let you know if you have had it any time in the last several weeks. Rapid antigen tests are much less robust and liable to give false +/-.
We still had a couple of home PCR tests from what I'll call the old days. Hope you're fully recovered.
I was able to do a brief workout today, so I should be fine-ish, thanks.
I had a look at pharmacy websites for my crappy little country, and they only offer rapid antigen tests. Where do you actually get a proper one? Do you need a blood test at the doctor's?
I wish I could answer your question with any sort of accuracy, but I think it would depend on the clinic. I don't think a blood test would be necessary as the PCR test, for example, is still a nasal swab. Why not phone a local clinic or hospital and inquire if you can be tested?
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That sounds awful, glad you seem to have mostly gotten over it. Hope no one else in the house picked it back up from you?
Glad you didn't have to deal with that wretched coughing. I wonder if the new strains gotten weaker at that.
Btw, does every house have a Japanese room? It's pretty rare for modern construction to have more than one, right? Outside of guest houses and such anyway.
Whenever I used to make sweeping statements (eg about toilets or something) about Japan, there would be fifteen different responses from people around Japan saying I was wrong, often with pictorial evidence. So with that in mind, yeah, every house has at least one smallish (or large) tatami room or 和室/washitsu. In fact when I lived in apartments this was also true of apartments, as long as it isn't a one-room of course. More than one, probably not, unless the whole house itself is a traditional structure, as you suggest.
Edit: Everybody got it, though it only made my 15 year old feel like he has a sore back, my wife has no fever but coughs a lot. My youngest is like When's dinner?
My two-bedroom apartment, built in 1973, does not have a 和室. It was renovated more recently, though, so maybe it had one before I moved in.
As they say, the fastest way to find out a fact online isn't to ask....
I've probably lived in 6 apartments here and now a house, and all of them has had a tatami room, but there you go. I guess not everywhere has them.
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