A Saturday Health Update
Content Notes: medical procedures, IV attempts/needle sticks, chronic illness, weather-related danger, grief and loss, financial and food insecurity stress, medical frustration.
Welcome to The Crippled Cryptid.
Disability, chronic illness, service dogs, and survival without the performance.
If you’re new here, hi. I’m Sky.
Professional cryptid.
Unwilling amateur cyborg.
Medically complex enough to make my chart a jump scare.
I cope with sarcasm and snacks.
Most days are lived in a haunted meat suit with a questionable warranty and a long-standing feud with my nervous system. I spend a lot of time in Bed Jail™, but I’m rarely alone thanks to Luna, my medical alert service dog.
Guardian. Enforcer. OSHA violation prevention officer.
There’s also M&M.
My Player 2. My soft place to land. The one who shows up when I can’t.
This space is for chronic illness without inspiration porn.
Disability without apologies.
Love without pretending it’s always neat or easy. (Or covered in dog hair)
If you’ve been here before, welcome back.
If you’re new, you’ll find your footing.
Welcome to the Lunatic Café.
On Today’s Menu: Saturday Health Update
This is not the kind of Saturday health update I like to bring you. I prefer the ones where I tell you I’m doing okay. Where there weren’t many appointments, not many episodes, and the week passed quietly.
But this week, I’m coming to you with eight more holes than last time.
If you remember, on Wednesday I was supposed to have a PET scan of my heart.
Well.
That didn’t go well.
Here’s what I can tell you.
I followed the rules. No caffeine within twelve hours. Including chocolate. No food. No water within six hours. I was allowed to take my regular meds with a small sip of water, which I did. (See, I can behave.)
By the time we arrived, none of that mattered.
Because nothing was going in or out of my veins.
This isn’t me blaming the staff. I had three genuinely good techs. Kind. Patient. Communicative. And one… less great. But that’s not really the point.
When they explained the process, I let them know they might want to hold off on the blood pressure cuff until after they found the vein for the IV. A PET scan requires IV medication, and my veins are notoriously uncooperative.
They were confident.
I wasn’t.
I joked that M&M and I had made a bet beforehand about how many sticks it would take to get an IV.
They asked what we bet.
I said my number was eight.
M&M guessed four.
What I didn’t say out loud was that we didn’t think they’d get it at all without the portable ultrasound. I had called ahead. I warned them the day before. Apparently, they thought I was exaggerating.
I was not.
Eight sticks later, the test was officially called off.
No PET scan.
The tech I liked the most walked me back to M&M. They told her that I was allowed to have coffee, Death Wish if that’s what I wanted because I looked like the human equivalent of clingwrap leftovers. I was mummified in ACE bandages.
She felt bad for me so she made me Costco tempura shrimp when we made it home.
Outside, Illinois was doing what Illinois does best in January.
The kind of cold where the state laughs at you in a font that suggests Hell isn’t made of fire at all, but ice. Sharp. Vicious. Personal.
There was a weather advisory warning people not to be outside for more than five minutes at a time. Humans or pets.
Which means Luna’s trips outside are strictly business. Potty. Back inside. Warm up. Butt under blankets. We do not play with pet safety in this house. Especially not with beloved service dingo safety.
A gentle reminder, especially for fellow spoon-counting creatures: extreme cold isn’t just uncomfortable, it’s dangerous. If you can stay in, stay in. If you have to go out, layer more than you think you need, charge your devices, and keep trips short. For pets, potty breaks are survival missions, not strolls. Warm them fast. Watch their paws. If it feels brutal to you, it’s brutal to them.
There’s also been grief humming quietly in the background this week. If you follow Luna’s Friday Takeovers, you already know about the fire at Reese’s Barkery. I won’t rehash it here. I just want to name that some losses don’t come with neat edges, and they still take up space even when they aren’t the headline.
One of the techs told me the doctor would call sometime this week to discuss next steps. Possibly rescheduling the test.
That idea isn’t sitting well with anyone involved.
Between EDS and slow healing, the fact that nearly everyone in the office already tried and failed to get an IV, and the reality that I’m not a candidate for a treadmill cardiac stress test, there aren’t many good options on the table.
I have CRPS in my left leg.
I’m still in a BREG boot.
We don’t know the status of the fractures from October.
And we won’t until the retained DRG leads are removed for me to get an MRI.
At some point.
In the future.
I wish I had more information.
Because I was also supposed to have a CT scan that same day to locate those leads. But the PET scan and CT scan were in two different towns. By the time they were done digging around in my veins, I wouldn’t have had one left for the CT.
That, and we ran out of time.
Given the weather, it’s probably not a surprise that we won’t be going to the food bank this week.
Again.
That’s something that has me stressed beyond belief. But many of the food banks near us aren’t open over the weekend anyway, and the conditions being forecast are genuinely dangerous.
Zero visibility.
Power outages.
Roads that become traps instead of transportation.
If I’m being completely honest, I would rather people stay home and be safe. I don’t want anyone stranded. I don’t want anyone hurt. Especially when plows may not even be running.
If something here hit close to home, you’re not alone.
If you stayed anyway, thank you.
You don’t have to earn your place here.
-Sky
© The Crippled Cryptid
Disability. Honesty. A little chaos.
🔗 https://linktr.ee/skylanarissa
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If you want to support the long, unglamorous work of survival and mobility:
💜 https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-skys-journey-to-health-and-mobility
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