I saw the allergist a few days ago. He found no obvious evidence of an infection but gave me a prescription for nose drops that he said would be more aggressive than the flonase I already use at night. I am to use both, along with the saline spray, twice a day. It is a tedious routine. Spray Med A in each nostril, wait one minute, repeat. Wait 10 minutes, spray medication B in each nostril, wait a minute repeat. The new medication, no matter how carefully I spray it, winds up in my throat and I can taste it. It has a powerful ability to breach tissues. After two weeks, I can cut the routine to once a day. And then I am to see him again. I don’t know if I will. Also, I don't know about you, but when I have to wait minutes to do something, I get distracted from doing it at all. So I am setting a timer.

My take on the whole thing at this stage, is, yes, I am being plagued with a low-grade something that makes me feel awful, but the reason I am struggling is that my hormone imbalance due to stopping HRT is messing me up. I will look into that more.

I am very slowly getting better, not so headachy and unsteady in the morning, but flu symptoms still present in the afternoon and I am still too easily tired. I have stopped all aspirin and now take one Tylenol around 2 p.m. and I might try to walk today.

Meanwhile, I am living life sort of hadphazardly, doing things as I see them, which means interrupting what I am doing at the moment, and then trying to remember to go back and finish the earlier stuff. I have always done things somewhat this way, but was training myself to have a better focus. That's harder now, for some reason. And this morning I unloaded the dishwasher, not realizing I hadn’t run it, so when my brain finally caught up with me, I had to take everything out of the cupboards, hoping I had not missed anything, return to the washer and start it.

Ed’s literacy student, to whom he has become a mentor, is having a difficult time and he said if she had to move out of her current situation, she could stay with us. He checked with me first. She is very likable and that is not the issue. But having a guest and having an open ended live in present different problems. Quite frankly, I don’t want to give up “my” bathroom without an end date in sight. And storage for her things is a problem because all of our spaces are brimming and we already have stuff in the garage that has to be re-stored because it is a terrible place to keep things that will suffer from extremes of temperature. Ed is also not considering how he loves to walk around with little on and now he’d always have to wear pants. And there is the question of will she contribute to the food budget.

But Ed said it might not come to that. She and her fiancé, who is originally from Nicaragua and is an immigration lawyer, are supposed to be married this Thursday. They have been living together for several months and he has told her he will marry her to preserve her resident status (she is divorced from her European born husband with whom she shares a business visa and must remarry soon to avoid deportation). But now her fiancé is having paranoid thoughts. He had a bad marriage and doesn’t want to “lose” financially through another bad decision. He had his lawyer write a pre-nup that would chill Atilla the Hun. He helped her buy a car and she is making the payments on her nurse's aide salary, but it is in his name. She is also going to Florida Gulf Coast University when she is not on her 12-hour hospital shifts, because she wants to improve her ability to get a better paying medical job.

Now the fiance is suggesting she live “somewhere else” for a while, even if they are married, and they could "date", sort of testing the waters of does he really want her. If she lives elsewhere, it will severely drain her limited resources. They have to be married three years before they can divorce without her losing resident status. She is miserable because he can be supportive and caring one minute, and squeezing her dry the next. It’s a rock and a hard place. She doesn't have the luxury of telling him to get lost.

I expect we'll meet him eventually. I am thinking of something interesting to serve him.

xx, Teal