chesneycat

I am off the Quensyl.

I am STILL itchy. Everywhere.

It has a biological half life of one to two months.

Excuse me while I tape up my hands, drink more water, and try and speed up my metabolism a little.

...I was the size of a small whale.

Daniel is still a little monkey when it comes to wriggling around in the middle of the night. Still not walking, either, but I think he gets around faster than Matthew ever did at a crawl. He's got teeth #7/8 on the way, and is Not Happy about it. And I am most definitely the number one person in his life. He's an incredibly cuddly little chubbler.

Tomorrow, we'll be saving the presents until Daddy gets home from work, but we've set up the present from us already - we got a little ball-tent for him, and judging by the few visits we've made to the local soft play centres, he's going to LOVE IT (and Matthew will too). Added bonus: no germs from other kids!

All we need now is for him not to wake up in a cranky mood sometime in the small hours...

So. In addition to my vitiligo flaring and my hands becoming increasingly skewbald, my handbones/knuckles/finger joints have been giving me gyp since, what, some time last autumn? Took the problem to my GP back in January, she sent me to a local rhematologist, and hey presto, auto-immune disease #4 for me! The added bonus is that my sister also got off her ass and got tested - her auto-immune count is now up to two, adding thyroiditis to the psoriasis. Yeah, good genes we have, eh? Immune systems like a well-entrenched horde of paramilitary bastards, and who gives a shit about the collateral damage.

Well, I do. I LIKE using my hands!

Anyway, the golden timeframe for picking up on rheumatoid arthritis or one of its other similar-but-different friends (my diagnosis hasn't been solidly confirmed, but I had high levels of rheumatoid factor and ANA) is two years. I'm on the drugs well within the first year, so let's hope they work. The steroids have already calmed things down a bit - my hands feel just hot and stiff and inflamed rather than hot and stiff and OUCH and inflamed, and it's steadily improving - and the quensyl (doubling as an anti-malarial!) should kick in by the end of the summer. It may eventually wreck my eyes, and hey! I need those too! but that's what the opthalmologist visits will be for...

What it also meant was that I had to stop breastfeeding. Oh, a lot of emotions there, especially as I'd never have conceived Daniel in the first place if extended breastfeeding Matt hadn't tweaked my hormones into the perfect (i.e. somewhat approaching human female normal) condition for it. But... Daniel didn't need a non-cow source of calcium, like Matt, and I did need to start on those drugs.

Cutting back from, what seven or eight single-side feeds a day to zero in the space of two weeks... not fun. Not pretty. And I really miss the cuddle time. On the plus side, having started Daniel on bottles a few weeks before (I'd had a pretty good inkling of what the doctor would say to me), he had been starting to treat me the way he treated his bottles, i.e. biting and tugging when things started to run low. I think this may be a very good argument against combining breasts and bottles... bottles can't scream and put you down when you get too rough!

Still. Eleven months ain't bad. That's 33 months total for both kids. Someone give me a medal!

I've got a lot of paperback books to re-home. I'm asking for postage costs only - details will be given below.
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Lessa woke, cold.

Not the cold of Benden's winter - that was kept well at bay by the nest of furs in which she and her weyrmate slept - but a deeper cold, a cold that felt more akin to the darkness of between than anything natural. The chill in her heart became one of great foreboding, and even before the dragons started keening she was reaching out across the bed towards F'lar. There was a fear that had been growing in silent denial in the back of her mind over countless unnoticed moments throughout the past decade of Thread-free skies, and for the briefest of instants it threatened to consume her. But then she touched Ramoth's grieving mind, and Mnementh's... and that fear was gone at once, because F'lar was awake and already half way out of bed, the furs flung aside onto the floor.

"Who is it?" he askd. "Mnementh doesn't know."

He was running a hand through his hair in exasperation, Lessa knew, not that there was light enough to see him do it even had her eyes been open. "Nor Ramoth," she answered, her mind reaching deeper, further, out to all the Weyrs of Pern. Each and every one, and every dragon within them, all were united in grief. The Weyrholds in the South, the Watchdragons still stationed in the Holds and Crafthalls, the Starcraft dragons, the Messengers, the Healer-bearers... every dragon on Pern grieved as one, but for whom?

Lessa concentrated harder, and like the infinitely scattered stars sparkling in the depths of night, her straining mind touched a multitude of firelizards, their small and generous hearts adding to the throbbing refrain. Master Menolly will need to write another ballad, she thought to herself. And still, the dragons keened. Lessa's soul ached with it, but she could make sense of it now. A woman, as old and white-haired as herself. Eyes of green, with a Harper's heart.

She was no-one Lessa knew, no matter how much it seemed that it should be otherwise.

"I don't know," she whispered, knowing full well the truth that there wasn't a single soul on Pern who did. "But she was well loved, and more than worthy of the dragons' respect."

And that, too, was undeniably the truth.



Anne Inez McCaffrey
1.4.1926-21.11.2011
Rest In Peace

Hello there!

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Someone nominated LOOK AROUND YOU for Yuletide.

:-D

Good: sharing toast with your toy trains
Bad: sharing toast with your shoes

Can I go back to bed yet, please?

Anyway, Matthew had his latest check-up this week, and another visit to the docs yesterday. He's about 5th percentile for height, would you believe? Looks like he got the genes from my maternal grandparents rather than Jez's. Otherwise, he's bright as a button, and there's still hope he'll grow out of the asthma-type episodes and some of the allergies. The asthma is only triggered by chest-colds at present, and it does seem to improve faster the quicker we react to it, which IS good.  Less good is Daniel coughing and snuffling when Matthew sleeps, and vice versa. Hey, that's kids though. Love em both to bits.