Canasta with Papa and Open Door alone

August 24, 2023:

Ok today started by having my medication at 6:17am with two 6g fat yogurts, flavored peaches & cream and mangoes & cream. Then I had a meeting with a Mayo dietician and we talked about the medication requirements. She actually told me that she’s had patients on my drug before, and knows of similar drug requirements too, so I didn’t have to explain it to her too much. She also told me that she’s not sure if I have to be so obsessed with getting the fat count exactly right, like I've been doing in the past, I’ve just gotta make sure I don’t take the meds with a cheeseburger and fries or something like that. Then, after I finished that appointment, I walked to the store to buy some cinammon for me to try when I’m drinking oat milk with my meds. I also had told the dietician about doing that sometimes, and she said it was a good strategy to use when I don’t want to eat too much extra with the meds.

Then I had my appointment with Whitney. We talked about the idea of doing a “fake it til you make it” thing. I talked about how I used to try to make my Instagram look like I was having enough fun, and that maybe doing that was actually making me have more fun, so maybe I should go back to that a bit. What I did after the appointment, was I went over to Papa’s house and we shared some 6$ sushi from Lunds. I wore my blue BLC shirt there. We also played a nice round of Canasta, and at first he was winning, but then I came back and won by quite a bit. While we were playing, grandma stopped by too. She’s the one who took the photo of us playing.

Then, I went into Open Door for my 4:15pm shift. There, one of the better parts of my night was the conversation I had with the communications person Mikell when I walked in. Mikell had really appreciated the photos that I’d taken at the 5K event, even though I hadn’t thought they were that good. Then, at Open Door tonight, I helped a bunch of people, including some people from Venezeuela, who left their country for obvious reasons. I also talked to the pantry manager Sean a bit, and he even gave me some headache medicine because I had a bit of a headache in the middle of my shift. At Open Door, I also got through like 15 voice mails on the Spanish line, which was clogged up again because the Mexican volunteer Lourdes who usually deals with them is out of town.

Then, at the end of the night, I realized that I’d taken a useful screenshot of a virtual game night event for brain injury survivors, from Love Your Brain. I'd had it on my calendar before, but I hadn’t had a link to join it. Now that I’ve signed up, I have the link. I should also mention that I managed to take my meds 12 hours apart from each other today. I brought a 13 grams of fat Indian meal to Open Door today, and cooked it a bit after 6pm, so I could have the meds with the right fat content at 6:17pm, like I’d done it this morning.

Grateful things: The black cherry pomegranate fizzy water at Open Door was good, it’s nice to have the back lot repaved at my apartment building, and I’m grateful to have received the first draft of my schedule from Elianna for my work at the BLC.