Working on the chain gang

Knitting needle threaded through crochet chains

I have finished the knitting on Tulpenkatz, aka Giant Lace Thing.  Which is excellent!  Slightly less positive: I still need to work the crocheted edging.  Nothing wrong with crochet except that I'm bad at it.  I slip a few stitches off at a time, crochet a chain, slip off more stitches, chain, and repeat until my arm falls off.

In-progress edging

R) little bit I've accomplished, L) what's left to do

This is going to take a while.  The funny pink thing is my inline crochet hook.  I inherited it from a relative and I love it for chaining with laceweight.  A regular hook kept wanting to split my yarn.

Slip-sliding symptoms

When you're chronically ill you get used to a lot.  Pain and disability can sneak up on you, and the more things that go wrong the less energy and desire you have to deal with them all.  One of my best coping mechanisms is to distract myself, which is great until I realize I've managed to not consciously register a whole host of problems.  Generally I keep my own counsel about these things, but I guess that's what blogs are for?

Recently I've realized how many symptoms I have, and how many minor issues would be concerning to someone else.  Like fungus.  This might seem gross, but it's unfortunately common in immunocompromised people.  So I drink my yucky anti fungal every night, apply cream between my fingers, and hope it goes away in another couple weeks.

More bothersome is that I am losing sight of my ankles.  I wouldn't mind for aesthetic reasons, I have bigger fish to fry.  But the swollen tissue around my achilles tendons makes walking and standing stiff and painful.  My feet always have this cold burning pain sensation and much of the time my toes feel half frozen.  Even in summer.  What's worse though is when they feel warm--then they swell with even more blood and feel hot and congested.  Elevating my legs helps, as does physically cooling them down.  Suddenly I love having tile floors.

The minutiae of being chronic are petty and irritating, like a tiny sliver under the skin.  Each new problem adds one more task to my list, as I try and fail to maintain the status quo.  But on I persist.  Maybe I'm a splinter under life's skin.  That would hold a pleasant irony.