Street Fight: the Street Always Wins

So back in 2013 I took a spill on my bicycle on the ice while I was commuting to Thomson Reuters.  Rude Bicyclist Day as I called it then. This year, fortunately, no spill... yet.  But last Saturday I was letting the neighbor's Corgi relax on my lap while we were dogsitting. The fur and dander started to give me a serious headache. Nothing new there.  Pet leavings have always been a problem.  It's why I have animal free zones in the house where I work and sleep.  What was new was that I decided I would take two Aleve for my headache.  I knew I had an ibuprofen allergy per that prior post, but I had taken Aleve a few times since then [e.g. maybe six pills over almost a decade] without problem.

Apparently that's changed.  I look like I'm in mugshots below after some street fight and this is 48 hours after I realized I was having a problem.  It took almost 96 hours for everything to settle back down for the most part. I had to go camera-off for Zoom meetings for two days. Not because I didn't want to scare people more than usual, but because I didn't want to extend meetings with discussions about whether I'd been in a fight. 

Swelling, nearly scratching my remaining hairs off my head, and a few hitches in my breathing.  I could tell I was getting swelling in my throat.  I'm probably crazy for thinking it was more interesting than dangerous each time it sort of glitched for a moment.  Jen got up to hang out with me while I watched some late night television to ensure I wasn't going to die in my sleep. I'm conscientious that way.  I'd rather people found my body propped up on the couch right away in the morning then got their day started only to find me lying cold in bed at some point when they already had plans in motion.

It's interesting how much more impacted my left "eye" is, although maybe that's a trick of the camera and the angle.  But that's the brow/part of my face that:

• has swelling from this allergy event
• has scaring from when I was hurt in the Mustang [minimal, you'd have to know to look for it, but it's there]
• has the scar from having the birthmark removed when I was younger [contrary to what I told my father in the law the first time I met him about how it was from a knife fight]
• was all droopy from Lyme's related Bell's Palsy, not once, but twice [1987 and probably 2019]

Even when I'm not all puffy, that side has a noticeable wrinkle to it compared to the other.  I applaud it for simply not giving up and sliding off my face.

Anyway.  In the future,  no Aleve.  No Advil.  Tylenol and Benadryl are still alternatives, although I haven't taken the former in a decade, so who's to say what the situation is there.

Bus Ride

Below is a picture of me reading short horror stories during the express bus ride into Minneapolis in the morning.  It still hasn't been the coldest I expect.  I'm not looking forward to that.  But the average ride is about half an hour one way if I don't screw around.  A little longer if I walk to the stop and walk home from the park and ride.


That's how I started my day.  I finished my day by getting ill by having an allergic reaction to prepackaged fish.  I don't known when they changed their ingredients, but my wife says the fish tastes different with the new packaging, and I agree; so we both suspect they did.  This is the second time I've had a reaction to the tilapia, so I'm pretty sure that's what's causing it.  The reaction follows a pretty consistent pattern: 1.) sleepy and back hurts (diaphragm spasming), 2.) stomach problems, lots of belching, probably precipitated by the spasms, 3.) ride my bike or exercise to try and blow through the worst of it unless my back hurts to much from the spasms or I belch so much I can't really breath, 4.) feel like I have to take a big dump, not because of the food allergy and my bowels, but because of the spasms.  It's what I traditionally get from fresh tomatoes and certain casks (particularly rum) as well.  The fish nonsense is completely new.  Maybe I'll slowly become allergic to a few new things a year until I'm sitting around eating nothing but ice cubes.