The Flesh Thing

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

Yesterday older son and I were talking while driving back from Denver from looking at apartments for him, and we agreed this being dragged around in a vehicle of flesh is a pain in the behind.  Because with the drive to Denver and some duties still at the other house (such as being there for handymen and such) we’re netting about viewing an apartment a day.

In fact, he says, the whole apartment thing is a nuisance, because he should be able to just send his mind over to attend classes, of course.

In my case, this is more critical because of course the flesh thing is no longer working all too well, so it keeps giving out on me when I least expect it to.

This is to say that now that we punted back from working in the house 12 hours a day to about 3 hours in the evening, I’m slowly coming up from “stupidly tired.”

And yes we should be done by the end of the week. And the writing should start again today.

BUT I was shocked at how tired I was.  How tired?  Well, full dose ibuprofen was not DENTING pain. I still wanted to cry every time I moved.  I not only couldn’t concentrate on reading a book, I couldn’t stand on listening to a book.  And eating stuff with flavor was too much work, so I was living on milk.  We came up from this to being able to eat and read comics, and today interest in reading other stuff.

The thing is, I HOPE this is because of the surgery four months ago.  I mean, I’m not that old and I was never that bizarrely tired before.

Mind you my doctor told me two months ago I was healed and could live a normal life, but friends who were in the sort of shape I was in and who had the form of surgery I had (well, I actually ended up having both forms) say six months recovery is not unusual and a lot of it manifests as tiredness.

Anyway, what I find amusing and interesting is my mind’s assumption that it’s a separate entity from the body and that it SHOULD be able to overcome the body’s weaknesses just because.  It’s not possible, of course, and sometimes the body is VERY annoying.  Even if no one sends a rescue party into Plato’s cave.

This is totally not an excuse for a post.  It’s a serious thing.  But if you need more meat with your Hoyt post, my husband posted about writing today at Mad Genius Club.

And now the writer who is shamelessly typing this in bed is going to contemplate maybe getting up.  Or perhaps sleeping another hour.

147 thoughts on “The Flesh Thing”

  2. I’ve had this image of “me” sitting in a control room inside my head long before this post. [Smile]

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      1. They’ll build a whole wing of the mental hospital just for us! Think of the fun we will have…

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          1. With this many engineers and other creative types? El Chapo’s tunnel won’t be anything compared to what we’ll have rigged by the time the Powers That Be notice.

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            2. I am reminded of the escape tunnel being dug by the captive scientist in the movie Top Secret! :)

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              1. …and I’m reminded of that nightmare Nick has, that he’s at school for the big exam and he hasn’t studied. Then he wakes up, see’s he’s still being tortured and can only say: “Thank God!” :-)

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            3. Tsk.

              Tunnels are so déclassé, so 19th Century. Let’s just build a portal and step to wherever we want to be.

              Of course, we’ll need someplace to dump the energy from the transfers.

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              1. Portals are so tame and boring. On the other hand there are very few problems that cannot be solved with a sufficient quantity of high explosive and escape is not one of them.

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                1. Good heavens, it’s not enough to go interesting places? I thought tame and boring was desirable in the transport.

                  For wild and exciting, you can always ask Fluffy to fly you. That hits the spot, even when Fluffy’s agreeable. (Perhaps hits it a little too hard if not.)

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                1. Since I was just re-reading To Sail beyond the Sunset (aside, I really don’t like most of Heinlein’s adult novels, it wasn’t just being a teen when I read them) why don’t we just walk through the walls?

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                  1. Only do that if you can look through them first. The aardvark doesn’t mind if you catch him dancing a jig, but your toes might. And for some reason the goldfish mind if you catch ’em playing poker.

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                    1. If you walk in on the bulldogs playing poker, here’s a word of advise: their tails wag when they’ve got a good hand.

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                    4. Where do you find the really old Freefall comics by the way? I haven’t seen some of them, but I really like the strip.

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                  2. My “Uncle” Martin used to do that but I never caught the knack.

                    Very frustrating. I used to get sooooo angry about it. Mrs. Livingston would caution me about losing my temper.

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                1. Why should I howl at the Moon when I can fly there? [Big Dragon Grin]

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                  1. So that the man in the moon can know you’re coming, thus opening a bottle so the wine has time to air?

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                    1. Wine? Nope, the Old Man in the Moon has a dragon-sized keg of Old Tillman waiting for me. [Very Big Dragon Grin]

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          2. The easier way would be to build it fun. Rather than trying to prevent any of us from escaping (a task I’m not sure any engineer is up to), put us in a wing with our laptops, our books, and all our friends, and make sure we don’t WANT to escape.

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                1. Well, so long as it’s a good sturdy building, with all the amenities and a good lab, we can take it over. We’ll trace the monitors, and record a good long loop, so they think they’ve still got us under observation, then start customizing Hun Headquarters.

                  You know, we need to hack their system early, get in on the design stage, so the structure can take the acceleration. Because, you know that’s going to happen.

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    2. Reminds me of this.

      I still wonder how Mr. Watterson got an eyeball on my childhood. The Transmogrifier was totally a thing. And I still believe most adults are weird (and categorically deny that I might ever become one of them).

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        1. Yeah, we had to restrict Calvin and Hobbes: seems the boys took them to be instructional manuals.

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    3. Inside looking out, I totally get that. Plus the befuddlement at how clueless so many of the other operators around me are.

      As for the tiredness your procedure was way more invasive than mine, but I still hit points where the carcass sez, ‘OK, done now,’ and shuts down. Really annoying when that gets between me and something that needs doing. But it’s getting better slowly and it will for go too once you don’t have to set yourself a three person workload….

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      1. I swar ah thinks most of the fleshbots around me are on autopilot, with their spatial recognition circuits cut out!

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  3. You are feeling sleeepy….

    Yeah, it’s probably not because one of the cats learned hypnotism. Unless they’ve been looking really content and you’re wondering where the milk went.

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    1. So do I. Em’s doing better but the whole sleeping through the night thing is still not happening yet.

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        1. You’ve been running on fumes. And when people are over-tired and keep carrying on they do damage to their muscles because the normal feedback mechanisms are no longer noticed
          I think what you are in dire need of is a few days of no hard physical labor and only light activity.

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  5. giggle

    A rescue party into Plato’s cave. . . hmm. . . hmm. . . . I’m even working on a story where I might use that, as part of the backstory. (A couple of amoral and extremely superpowered beings like philosophical experiments. Plato’s cave doesn’t work very well because they do not, in fact, have things of transcending wonder to put outside it.)

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    1. I just had a mental flash of a couple of fire teams prepping to enter a wide-mouthed cave, with the k-9 handler checking the entrance for booby traps…

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  6. You are coming back from years of suffering plus surgery plus manhandling two houses, not just surgery. If Brother Donkey is now balking, he probably is demanding a day off.

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  7. Hmm… Visualizing oneself as being inside one’s head and controlling the body from there…

    As a programmer, that represents a major problem. Unless I visualize myself as a disembodied brain (that is controlling the body, causing it to be an embodied brain), then I am forced to imagine the little person inside having a little person inside controlling them. This leads to an infinite recursion, causing a server crash.

    On second thought, maybe that’s my problem…

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      1. You know, that regression ad nauseum thing is what my fever-driven hallucinations were driven by for years. Now it’s just spiders. I can handle those.

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          1. Bugs, Mr. Rico! Millions of them! I’m burning them down!

            Starship Troopers works for so many things…

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          2. I can’t use the passenger-side door of my pick-up because of spiders. Heck, the neighbors think I’m nuts because when I go out first thing in the morning, I use a hiking staff to knock webs down, or flail my arms around so I don’t go face-first into a web. I despise late summer, I really do.

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            1. Yeah, when I go through anywhere there might be a spiderweb, I try to carry a stick and wave it in a big circle in front of me. I’m that guy who turns into a karate master when I walk into one.

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            2. I moved the tomato plants to either side of the entry stairs, since it has sun and I’d never seen any spider webs anywhere near a tomato plant.

              Well, it sort of worked… now I only have to avoid a half-dozen on the tomato plants when I harvest….

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          3. You can compose a happy synthesis of the two: Fractal spiders! No well enumerable set of legs, no well defined boundaries. The best you can do is draw a box within which is contained some percentage of the fractal spider (to some iterative precision).

            Sweet dreams. >:)

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    2. Might be why I could never catch a ball as a kid. :-P The person inside ( the person inside ( the person inside ( the person inside ( …..

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    3. Where did I put that back issue of Analog with the aliens who were totally fascinated by the human viewpoint, especially of superb athletes, as they felt like puppet masters operating their bodies?

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  8. Tiredness is SUPPOSED to be your body’s way of telling you that it needs rest. Which you keep defeating.

    Yes, it’s annoying. But you might remember most healing is done while you’re asleep, and that the world won’t end while you’re healing.

    Priorities, woman. If you extend the period when you’re not healing, you will regret it later. Go back to bed.

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  9. I’ve been suffering occasional fits of tiredness recently, and I don’t have the relevant parts present or parts removed, and I just assumed it was the heat (though it says something about humanity or just me that I’m complaining about a summer that’s a tenth as unpleasant as summer in Piedmont North Carolina.)

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    1. …that’s a tenth as unpleasant as summer in Piedmont North Carolina.

      Tell me about it. We are certainly having a summer this year, hot and humid. To get my walks in I have to start as soon as the parks opens. (I walk at a pair of nearby park because there are trees and that means the all important element: shade.)

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      1. Yay for the cold front that came through last night; it’s only expected to get to 89 or 93 F, depending on whose weather report you believe / where you are exactly.

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        1. sigh I should appreciate the cooler weather, but when a front passes through and you get stygian clouds and rumbles of thunder and visible lightning — and not enough rain for the ground to get entirely wet.

          Lugged out the hose and watered the garden after. Again.

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            1. Because his invention allowed politicians to stay in DC year round. [Evil Grin]

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              1. Exactly. Resulted in no end of malicious mischief the critter could do. It also rendered them even more disconnected from their constituents.

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            2. If you gave him one, you’d also have to give one Norman Borlaug, one to the fellow who invented cargo containers, and one to the guy who did instant ramen.

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                1. Another difference is building materials. If you build from poured concrete or solid stone, with walls a foot thick (large swaths of Central Europe), things tend to stay cooler longer into summer and warmer longer into winter. OTOH, once they do heat up or cool down . . . And they do seem to forget that if they build glass-n-steel American-style buildings they need American-style climate control to go with. I was in the Rhineland when it hit 100 F one July. You don’t want to know what it was like inside the regional bank – a smoked glass cube.

                  I’ll take a little A/C when I need it and opening windows when I can, thanks.

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                2. Who here recalls the year a heat wave coincided with the vacation month in France. I recall that it resulted in so many sick, dying and dead elderly there was not room in the hospitals and morgues. This could have been prevented with air-conditioning.

                  It’s not just the energy prices that Europeans can’t deal with. Most of Europe doesn’t begin to have a mental grasp on the climate ranges in this country.

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                  1. I was just thinking of the blogging I read a few years ago by an American in Italy, whose husband had a well-paying job, yet they couldn’t afford to air condition their small (by American standards) apartment.

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                    1. Oh yes. When people are chopping down trees in the parks because they can’t afford to use their electric heat, you have a problem. Ditto air conditioners. I suspect the Germans at least are going to be re-thinking their plan to cut the numbers of power-plants any farther.

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                  2. *hand raised* It was a horrible combination of culture and weather. And interestingly, down in the Languedoc they had far fewer deaths, in large part because more people were taking care of their relatives and neighbors.

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          2. You got it on the rain, the plant life around here would really appreciate a good soaking rain or two, and sooner rather than later.

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      2. Horrible hot weather rushes in from the coast, slams into the Appalachian mountains, stumbles back and collapses onto the Piedmont.

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    2. We’re having humidity, and highs in the low 90s. Which is better than the low 100s like last year except that the lows are around 75 or so. I’ve been even more hermit-like than usual. Although I did get my parents’ buddleia trimmed back this morning. And whacked more of their fennel, although you’d never know it (except the downwind half of the block smells like anise.)

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  10. In fact, he says, the whole apartment thing is a nuisance, because he should be able to just send his mind over to attend classes, of course.

    And how, then, would he manage dissection or other hands on labs?

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  11. So you were working 12 hours a day on the old house

    and the question is why you are so tired?

    uhm….

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        1. She may be correctly identified as an immigrant to the country and The Evil Space Princess but she is not, try as she might, an immigrant to the planet and Superwoman

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  12. My remodeling project is still ongoing. In the last few years my energy level has dropped sharply; I now define four hours as a “workday”, and sometimes I can’t even make that.

    I’ve also noticed that heat bothers me a lot more than it used to. Coupled with the humidity and the allergies, it pretty well sucks the life out of my day before I get much accomplished.

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      1. No. But EKG is no longer used much as a diagnostic; it’s just a checkbox on the way to a heart catheter procedure, which is where all cardiac testing winds up in the end.

        With out new “affordable” deductible, higher co-pay, and the expanded list of random items that aren’t covered at all, the cath done on my wife two years ago cost us about $7500 out of pocket; since that’s a sizeable chunk of our annual income, we’re still paying on it, with substantial interest charges.

        We’d suck it up and have it done for me… but four hours on the table and two consults after running every cardiac test known to Man supposedly showed seven nearly-blocked arteries and a severely defective valve. When the surgeon went in, he claimed there were only three averagely-blocked arteries which he grafted before closing.

        With this, plus some anecdotes from others, my trust in the entire diagnostic procedure approaches zero.

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  13. Worse than having to haul around a meat puppet is the realization the meat puppet may be just a transport mechanism for a microbial bioculture. The degree to which one’s gastrointestinal flora affect personality is humiliating.

    This personality isn’t mine, it’s just a construct of the meat ship.

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  15. And if the Soul could fling the Dust aside,
    And Naked on the Air of Heaven ride
    Were’t not a Shame — were’t not a Shame for Him
    In this clay Carcass crippled to abide?

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  17. When I had my first crisis in 2003 (it was a huge one… almost died) I learned that my body controls my mind as much as my mind controls my body. It was very disconcerting. Get some rest.

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  18. I have always, always, spoken to my babies when they wake up as if they and their bodies are separate entities. “Oh, Baby’s back. I see you in those big brown eyes, there you are.”

    I assume it’s the part of us that is soul that makes us feel distinct from our bodies. Are there people who do not feel this disconnect?

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  19. Back when I was in Weight Watchers, some wag posted a little note beside a scale one week: “Oh that this too too solid flesh might melt!”

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    2. I have a demotivator-type picture I grabbed from somewhere that reads (in large print): I ate too much again today.

      In smaller print at the bottom, it reads: That’s 6000 days in a row.

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      1. FWIW: The last frame says

        But everything’s just signals in my sensory cortices! How can I be sure they correspond to an external world?!

        I’m sorry, but we can’t send a search-and-rescue team into Plato’s cave.

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    3. Yeah, I figured it was either Pale Moon (my browser) or noscript. Small price to pay for all the other work they do.

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  21. Get a full thyroid workup, including Hashimoto’s antibodies. I can’t emphasize this enough. Your list of symptoms is long and obvious. If at all possible, find an endo willing to use natural hormone replacement (most people do better than on synth).

    About 80% of people over age 50 have some degree of thyroid dysfunction, typically reduced T4 to T3 conversion. (25% of necropsied elderly show some degree of goiter.)

    Unwarranted tiredness, pain (especially for no visible reason), psoriasis (often mistaken for arthritis, eczema, or both), weight gain no matter how you eat, that’s more than enough to diagnose.

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  23. I had a knee restructure in Feb and the Dr says every thing looks good. So why do I need an occasional 800mg Ibp

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    1. What I’m getting is a message for the blog owner to contact tech support. Anyone whose got Larry’s e-mail should send him one.

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      1. Went over to Larry’s Facebook page and apparently the blog software is being up-graded but it may take a while.

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      1. I know that at least one person mentioned that she was voting– because it reminded me to do it, since I hadn’t known you could start and then leave the vote half-done up to that point– so this MIGHT mean that someone is looking at prelim numbers and flipping out again.

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    1. This observation from National Review’s David French is a useful reminder:

      The mere act of engaging the Social Justice Warriors is a win. Your words have the chance to persuade, and their overreaction has a chance to repel.

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          2. Let’s see if I remember: 8 feet or so of 5/8 inch rope (1 inch, or 2.54 cm, would be more comfortable and might be what we use at Ft. Jackson); double it, then around the waist, then the tops of both thighs, then put the D-ring clip on the front and tie a knot. Wait, that’s not quite right, is it?

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    2. What is it with authors and ancient terrors this summer? Apparently Jimmy Buffett is attacked by a pteradon in the Jurassic Park movie. (Not that I’m complaining if GRRM fell afoul {or ashark} of Mother Nature, mind. Poetic justice for the end of “The Sandkings”.)

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  26. One of my surgeons told me, until all scars have turned white, someplace in your body is still healing. Four months isn’t very long. Truly.

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    1. Oh, yeah. I was definitely easily tired and sore four months after surgery — that would be February of this year.

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      1. I waited until the week after getting an all-clear from my c-section to take the kids to the zoo. I thought I was taking it easy, because I mostly let them play and we watched one of the education/propaganda shows, but it wiped me out. Just about dang died pushing the stroller back up to the van.

        I figured I’d just gotten out of shape with the pregnancy and all, but…..

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        2. Oddly enough, when I went Christmas shopping a couple of weeks after the all clear, I easily walked ten miles and wasn’t even sore afterward.

          It wasn’t doing stuff that triggered it.

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          1. When getting major surgery in November, try to get a lot of your Christmas stuff done early. I was RUSHED in December.

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