Good morning, friends.

First I want to say thank you to the person who made a donation to my ABLE fund last week. Thank you, “Reader of A Gaishan Life,” for your contribution to my disability expenses. I appreciate it so much – you will read why shortly! Thank you to agaishanlife for sharing my info.

I’ve been off social media for the week and just now writing this post, this very morning. I had a significant flare up and was down for several days. Then I was sad for a bit, and then, I fell. Eye roll.

I’m fine, but I’ve got several good bruises on my hip and knee. So I feel better, but also worse? The flare up has eased, but I’m stiff from the fall.

I think…no, I know, that I’m a bit worn down from October’s challenge and pushing so hard. I was planning to do a different challenge for November, but after the past week I’m realizing I need to slow it down a bit and creating a challenge is not slowing down.

I have to remember that I’m also helping out my parents a lot right now. My mom just had to medically retire, and I’m using a lot of energy helping her with projects and getting caught up on everything that entails. Can’t keep adding more on, Tami.

I’ve not sold anything this past week. I also didn’t repost, renew or push at all, because: bed. I’m going to slowly start pushing those out starting tomorrow. Giving myself another day to not have to do meet ups.

I’ve secured one pet sitting gig.

I did go through and put my affiliate links throughout some of the website pages. Baby steps to progress. My Pet Plate box arrived, and I had all these plans for promo materials/videos, but they will have to wait a few more days.

I finished cleaning and testing a thrift item from my previous shopping. It’s a really cool vintage looking stylized record player, radio, cd player, and cassette player. I had to find a record to test it! Buy Nothing came through once again! I just need to take some good photos and it’ll get moving.

I had an appointment with my neurologist last week and she confirmed my diagnosis of dysautonomia based on the tilt table testing I did at the University of Washington. It’s similar to POTS, but not quite because of the cause – which they do not know for sure. There are multiple reasons based on my health issues that this could be happening, and it makes no difference in treatment to actually figure out why so they aren’t bothering to. As a patient, this is bothersome.

The treatment usually offered for this is a medication I cannot take. I’ve been referred to a new cardiologist for a second opinion and hopefully more treatment options. That’s another 3-4 month wait to get any meds/treatment. In the meantime, I’m told to drink 100 oz of water a day (which I already do), increase my salt intake (gladly), compression sleeves/ socks (I’m using the socks I used to, SAD FACE, run in) and a referral for more physical therapy. Gonna be honest, sick of physical therapy. Already did 6 months of PT this year.

I’m supposed to create log books and track my blood pressure, heart rate, and more. Plus create a training regimen for myself that is very slow and progressive. I’ve found this one online and I’m going to read it through/modify as needed. I don’t know why I feel the need to say this, but all this PT is not going to fix anything. The nerve damage throughout my body cannot be fixed. It is progressively getting worse. They are dying off in all different places. What the PT is doing is helping my brain adapt and create work arounds. It has helped some. This particular PT is going to focus on helping with vasoconstriction I think.

I’m trying to decide between a chest band and continued use of my Garmin, plus my blood pressure machine (which I am terrible at remembering to do) or maybe looking for a holiday deal on a Galaxy watch that will do ECG, and blood pressure, and heart rate and what not. Another dysautonomia patient I follow on Instagram messaged me and suggested an APPLE watch because they track all of it, and I don’t have to do all the labor of tracking and remembering to do it all. But I have a Galaxy phone, and I like it, and it seems the Galaxy watch will do similar/same. More research needed. And also a point to make: this is all out of pocket expenses.

Things to do:

• Drop sponsored dog food off for donation. I tried once, but the shelter was closed.
• Drop the huge amount of saved cottage cheese containers a client gave me to another shelter, as they break down big bags into small containers to give out this way.
• Take good photos and list the player.
• Clean up all the house plants
• Begin the transition to winter/Christmas in the house. I’m considering buying a tree this year. I have a 3ft tall table top tree I’ve used for a decade, but now that I have the sliding door in I’m considering doing a pencil 6ft tree.
• Do social/promos for Pet Plate
• Clean the ductless heat pump
• Decide on garmin/watch/chestband, whichever.
• Finalize the training regimen/ program.

That list is very ambitious. We will see where we end up.

Much love and best wishes,
Tami