My favorite rodent and I just shared a meal together. Yesterday, I was tired as fuck because an unusually loud truck woke me up, and it was hard to get back to sleep. Today, I'm still tired as fuck because I woke up struggling to breathe through my nose. Once I switched out the kid's nose strip for an adult one, it opened me up a little more. Still had trouble falling back asleep right away, so this is the second time my sleep was broken up, and any idiot with half a brain knows that just one night of shitty sleep can really make you feel horrible the next day.

I think I should definitely go down with the full clonazepam next time around. I know part of it is stress, but today I feel a sense of hope and determination much stronger than I've been feeling in a while. I only hope to hell it's not false hope. You know how life is— we plan, and then life shits on those plans. Nonetheless, the plan is to get our health on track this year and bust out of here next year.

I know I said I wasn't as desperate to escape this place as the last place since it's not nearly as noisy, but yeah, I am. With the way my allergies have been and the intermittent asthma, you bet I'm definitely ready to go! Although outside sources only wake me up once in a while, my own damn body is waking me up nearly every single fucking time I sleep. Every. Single. Fucking. Time. So in a sense, even though it's quieter here, I'm sleeping worse than at the old place.

Moving to a dry climate won't uncollapse my nasal valve, but it will back the allergies off. If my nose isn't so swollen from allergies, then the nasal valve issue won't matter as much. It won't be as noticeable. Even Tom feels it at times. Yes, I'll miss the warmer weather, and yes, this is a cute house. But the climate is all wrong for me, the house is too small, healthcare is even more fucked up here, and I feel totally out of place being in such a red state even though I’m antisocial and keep to myself. The people here just aren’t as friendly in general, and I’m sick of being in a flight path and listening to dozens of planes a day. It's after midnight, and they're still going.

A quick check shows that Oregon has Death with Dignity laws, and land outside Klamath Falls starts at around 15 grand. I was wondering about the area between the city and the base of the mountain we were on—that way, it wouldn’t take an hour to get to a hospital if we needed one. I know we weren’t on the mountain long, but I don’t remember hearing a single sonic boom while we were there. I hated the cold and snow, but out of all the states I’ve lived in, my asthma and allergies were the best there. Some of our happiest times were there. Not saying we would go back, but it’s interesting to gather as much information as we can even though it wouldn’t be adding a new state to our list of adventures and my TMJ may be worse. Becky wouldn’t be around but neither would the noisy monsoons. So, just trying to keep all our “drier” options open.

So he's going to check into dealing with his cataracts, and I'm getting this damn tooth pulled next Monday. The gum area started irritating me, and realizing that I don't want to have to worry about it getting infected—which is the worst pain I've ever experienced—and since it just doesn't feel right, I had him call the dentist since I had to sleep. I guess it's going to be about $40. They anticipate it breaking up, but hopefully, it will be a simple elevate-and-extract. I don’t know what kind of sedation they offer, but the most important thing is getting a numbing agent without epinephrine. Hopefully, they have that. I may or may not take clonazepam beforehand. I trust that this is a good dentist who knows what she’s doing, so I’m not too worried about it. Unless it does break up, it shouldn’t take long. It takes a lot longer for the numbing agent to set in than it does for the pulling. I just didn’t want to wait five more weeks until my maintenance appointment, and I didn’t even know that they could pull it at that time anyway. So that tooth is officially on death row! I look forward to getting rid of the weird feeling thing, and it will be one less tooth to worry about. Funny because after having my wisdom teeth pulled and the impacted baby tooth pulled, I thought I was done having teeth pulled, but that was about four teeth ago. This is going to end up being the ninth pull.

Then we got some bad news. I can’t get into the sleep lab for a study until June. So by the time I got the CPAP, I would be struggling to get used to it during storm season. During July, August, and September, it storms nearly every day. I was damn near in tears of frustration as we talked about all the medical expenses holding us back from getting the fuck out of here. Then an idea came to me— what if we bypass the referral?

I know you have to have a prescription for one, but if I could get this denier of a pulmonologist to give me a copy of the original CPAP prescription, we could just buy a CPAP outright from Amazon, and it would actually end up being cheaper than the portion we would have to pay for the sleep study and the CPAP that we would still have to pay for anyway. This way, I also wouldn’t have to stress about one of us being available when they call every month to ask if I’m okay with accepting new parts that they change periodically. We could just get them ourselves at our own convenience. We'd have to pay for it, but they usually have good deals on Amazon.

The tricky part may be getting the prescription. Mr. "You can’t have N24 if you’re sighted" is rather defiant in some ways, but worst-case scenario, we’ll go to another pulmonologist. Really wish the second one I saw was in-network, but he’s not. Tom has to do more research first to see if that really would save us the money we think it would.

A good friend of mine reminded me that I’m definitely not alone. She, too, had a test for sleep apnea, and while she doesn’t have it, she was told she just has delayed sleep and disturbed sleep. Just like me, she made multiple attempts to get on a “normal” schedule, but it only got her so far for so long. I think N24 progresses the older we get because it's gotten harder and harder with age to try to force myself on a different schedule or to break up my sleep.

That’s the problem with some doctors—yes, they went to school for years and had a lot of training, but no one knows our bodies like we do. Two other doctors confirmed I do indeed have N24, and it's really a no-brainer in this case. I mean, it was as obvious that I had it before I was diagnosed as it was obvious that something was wrong with my thyroid just based on the symptoms. Not everything is that complicated. If you read a list of symptoms and you can check off every single one of them and nothing else correlates with those symptoms, you're almost certainly going to have that particular issue.

So I'm definitely anxious to get our health on track and get the fuck out of here. Hopefully, the white lines appearing on my nails don’t mean anything other than that I’m getting older. I’ve got white lines appearing from the tips to the cuticles on several nails. Some don’t go all the way back to the cuticle. I’ve never had this many before. Most of them are in my toenails. I read that it can be a sign of heart, kidney, or liver trouble, but more than likely, it’s related to age and my thyroid since I doubt I have any nutritional deficiencies.

Anyway, my only concern would be sonic booms, but I would rather get boomed and monsooned awake at times than feel exhausted every single fucking day. My worst fear is still that a CPAP doesn’t help and I have chronic fatigue, but I can’t know that until I get the CPAP back that I never should have given up and make damn sure I use it. And believe me, I am more determined than ever to do just that!

I also don’t want to stick around long enough for climate change to hurl a Cat 4 or 5 straight at us. Even if a Cat 3 hit us head-on, the results could be devastating. Hell, I would go back to Oregon—cold and snowy as it was—before I remained here, as I told Tom. Do I regret leaving there for the reasons we left? Yes and no.

I dreamed that my parents were alive again, and I was actually happy to see them. We were sitting in some restaurant or someplace in public, eager to chat and catch up. “I have so much to tell you and ask you!” I exclaimed excitedly. Of course, my mother had to be annoyed with me at times, but it was otherwise a very pleasant meeting.

I've often imagined them suddenly being alive again and reaching out to me, wondering how I would react if that could actually happen. I'm sure my heart would be in a great tug-of-war with my mind. My heart would be curious and say, Hey, shitty parents or not, they were still my parents. But my mind, which is usually much more sensible than the heart, would remember their abuse and the fact that people don’t change. Mom would still be a selfish, narcissistic, jealous, and overly sensitive bitch, while my father would still look the other way when he wasn’t actively making excuses for her.

I won’t mention this on PB just in case, but I was looking to see if someone I was talking to on FB decided to join after I told them about it and happened to wander into the mystery girl’s latest account. I was a little surprised to see she’s mostly private or friends-only. But what friends would she add if she’s not sociable? The fact that I wasn't one of the ones added makes me think even more that she's not one of my regular readers. I kind of have mixed emotions about that too. I mean, this is someone who's been troubled and can be unpredictable. At the same time it was kind of flattering to at least think I had this silent but mutual connection with this open-minded person that could relate to me. Someone that knew me well and really got me. Yet if you cared to read someone that regularly, wouldn't you add them as a friend?