Genghis Khan and rhodium

Today I learned that Genghis Khan et al. killed 40 million people, which comes out to about a tenth of the world's population. I say 'about' because the world population dropped from an estimated 450 million people before the plague (1348-1350) to 350 or 375 million afterward.

In other news, rhodium is the world's rarest precious metal, and if you're a terribly smart investor, you can buy a little vial of rhodium powder to sell to your friends, or you could name it 'the precious,' and clutch it to your chest, preferably while muttering something moderately unintelligible.

things we already know, with bad news

Today I confirmed that stress improves your eyesight. My one-person study of me had already concluded that I might need glasses again, having not worn them since I got sick. This is the only downside to not being all screwed up.

In other news, researchers have confirmed that using HEPA filters in your house if you live in a smoky area improves your health. [Bad news alert] Which only reminds me that the EI community in Tucson lost somebody over the holidays, and we don't know exactly why yet, but I do know the person in question was highly sensitive to air quality, and we liked her. [End bad news]

ears can breathe a sigh of relief

Tonight I noticed that I'm way more flexible than I was a month ago. I'm still not back where I was before I got sick, but playing the fiddle in tune is so much easier because my arm does that twisty thing again that you have to do. Playing out of tune had been sucking all the fun out of it.

still working on it

Today around 5 am I learned that I can turn off that grinding pain under my ribs on the right side that I get every time I have a hormone reaction. It has something to do with serotonin, and I don't remember what, but I can turn it off. Over and over again, because internal reactions are harder for me to deal with than the usual temporary inhalant-type reactions. The thing is that I eventually got to go back to sleep, which was much better than my old approach of just getting up and feeling a grinding pain under my ribs all day.

In honor of only mostly having that reaction under control*, we ended up at the mall again. This time we went to the dead mall, which has three anchor stores, and that's all. All the other stores are more recent and live in the parking lot, like a fairy ring. The halls were empty, so they were easy. Then it turned out that the JCPenney didn't have a perfume counter, so I got to go wander around a department store.

So now the trick is going to be going in a store in the newer mall, but I'm not going to try that for a while.


* Not really. Really, we're just not that bright sometimes.

things I forgot to mention

It has come to my attention that I was writing to the newsletter editor when I mentioned the other brain retraining website, so here is Gupta Amygdala Retraining™. The explanation part is pretty helpful, but you will be extremely aware that Mr. Gupta got a real medical paper published in 2002. In a real journal. In 2002.

Which could be a red flag for fakery, but he has a money-back guarantee, plus he sent out his dvds to well known people in the chronic fatigue community, no strings attached, and got what look like good reviews.

Also, gun ranges smell like smoke, which can get a little old after a while, even outdoors.

this is about armpits

Today we went on a probably-ill-advised, spontaneous experimental quick mosey through the mall, where we got dosed with so much perfume that I had to put our clothes in a plastic bag when we got home. I think the problem was inside the cell phone store, but you could smell the Abercrombie & Fitch store outdoors for a lot longer than you could the perfume store next to it, which I guess is not too surprising since I understand they spray their smell out the door.

In news of why the trip to the mall was probably extra stupid, I've been detoxing something to the extent that it made the lymph nodes under my arms sore. (I read in the testimonials part of one of the brain retraining websites I've been talking about that somebody else got sore lymph nodes, too, so it's not just me.) This morning I had to get in the sauna to sweat the whatever out because I realized my general crankiness could easily have been attributable to the stinging in my armpits. Whatever it is wants out, and I can't get it out fast enough.

And I have always tolerated using the infrared backrest thingy in the sauna on at least low; today I got heart palpitations on any setting other than 'off,' and no amount of attempting to settle down my fight-or-flight reflex changed it at all. I'm hoping the whatever it is leaves soon.

fastest air-out in the west

Yesterday I got a brand new book, something I haven't tolerated in years. I didn't tolerate it, so last night I put it in a plastic bag. I had to open the bag to turn the pages, but that's the way it goes.

Tonight, the bag seemed kind of annoying, so I took the barely-offgased book out and have been reading it without any trouble. This getting better thing is excellent.

In the spirit of 'naming the feeling,' I feel happy.

still making progress

I suffered a bit a of setback the last couple of days. My husband had an old toe injury that was getting really bothersome, so yesterday he had toe surgery. Toe surgery sounds funny, but it is still stressful, and not just for the guy with the toe injury. I keep practicing being fine in different situations, but husband surgery was a little out of my league.

In my league: buying a little calendar/notebook at Office Depot all by myself. Definitely out of my league: an alarm clock going off at 1:30 am so husband can take his precautionary antibiotic. I don't think I came down off the ceiling for a good half hour after that.

keeping notes on the weirdness

Today I got to go hang out with the really, really sick lady for hours, something I couldn't do two weeks ago. When I got home, I felt myself relax when I hadn't actually done it on purpose. Now, about six hours later, the lymph nodes under my arms hurt. I expect I'm detoxing something, but I could just be getting sick.

Also, I like doing my taxes. Part of it is that I was too sick to work for about half of last year, so I'm getting back a decent amount of the estimated taxes I paid early on. The other part is that I love numbers so much I will even love them if the government orders me to fiddle with them.

I wrote this on Dec 29, and it's time to post it, so here you go

Today I learned that now I can go running in the national park when the air quality is worse than it was two weeks ago, when I was stuck at home with heart palpitations.

So how exactly did this come about? You may recall that a little over a week ago, my friend called and said she was doing a whole lot better having attended a Dynamic Neural Retraining System™ seminar. I thought it sounded like something that would probably help me, too, so I looked into it, by which I mean, read the entire website.

What I took away from that was that when your body sustains some kind of injury, physical or mental, when you start healing, your brain might or might not come back out of fight-or-flight mode. Given a long-term injury, like living in a house with stachybotrys inside the kitchen ceiling for two years, your body could easily have forgotten what calm is. There was a bunch of stuff about what that does to your limbic system, and what I remember it saying was that when you're geared for a fight, you don't bother absorbing nutrients from your food, or sometimes even digesting it very well, your hormones get screwed up, you can't think straight, and you don't do anything with your own personal garbage, e.g. chemicals you inhale. So for the last five years, I've been taking nutritional supplements, and sometimes one to help me digest food, my hormones have been screwed up, I've definitely had 'brain fog' (my best example: I got lost in a drugstore in the summer of 2004), and I have chemical sensitivities.

It sounds like I got stuck in fight-or-flight. So I take a look at the seminar schedule, and there's one in April. Ok, so I need some money for that, but conceivably I could be seriously better by, say, June. Maybe able-to-go-to-the-mall-for-three-hours better.

That kind of revelation is enough to maybe make you relax a little. The 'articles' part of the website also talked about verbalizing how you're feeling because that helps you relax, too. Thus I found that I've been clenching something in my back for probably the last five years, because it kind of hurt when I unclenched it.

It probably didn't hurt that I was going to visit my parents the next day, either, which sounds fun instead of stressful (in my family, anyway), and I really wanted to be enough better that I could tolerate their house, with its kitchen-sink mold and a decorated fir tree in the living room.

So I got in the car at 6:30 am on Tuesday morning with my mask on, and my husband got us across town, and when we got just north of town, it was my turn to drive. Counting the snack break, which isn't technically driving, but I'm taking everything I can get, I drove for six hours. For the last five years, I have been uncomfortable driving, except going from my house to the really, really sick lady's house, which is a grand total of 1.8 miles on lightly-traveled roads. When we got to my parents' house, with a few minor modifications, our room was fine, and so was the kitchen sink. The tree didn't seem to bother me at all, and for the first time, the leather furniture wasn't a problem. I didn't try out the mall or anything challenging, and the worst thing that happened was that at the end of Christmas day, I was pretty worn out. The pie I was stressing over (!) almost didn't even last four hours in a house that usually takes a couple of days to finish a pie. We had to make another one the next day.

The drive home didn't go as well. We wanted to do the drive all in one day again since it worked really well on the way out, but I-5 freaked me out, and I wasn't even driving. There was a lot of traffic and sudden slowing, and by the time we got out the other side of the Los Angeles basin, where it was my turn to drive, it was getting dark, and I was fried. I drove for almost three hours anyway, but it sucked.

Now that we've been home for a few days, I've learned a few more things. My back stopped hurting when I relaxed it after about a week, and I started noticing a spot behind my forehead felt like it was relaxing somehow, too. I can make that happen on demand, but where the website talks about flipping a switch, I end up having to hold the switch. It flips right back to 'tense' if I let go of it, but today I was able to go in a bunch of stores and still hold onto it.

I suppose the ability to let go of the switch and have it stay where you want it to be is something you'd learn at the seminar.