Tag: knitcats Design

The Saturday Update: Week 25

What a week this has been. I have a new kitten, we broke a heat record this week, and then there were a couple of days of cold and rain. The garden came through all of it in good shape. The kitten has already wrapped me around her little paw. The Covid-19 pandemic is calming down in my state, but the states around us are experiencing skyrocketing numbers, making me feel like we are in the eye of the storm. This is the  evening of the summer solstice; the shortest night of the year. Momentous days continue.

Knitting

During the cold days last week I struggled to stay warm, especially my arms. I cleaned out the yarn room and kept looking at the left over yarn from the Sweet & Tartan socks that I made. Gee, I really liked those yarns while knitting the socks. You know that I had to make arm warmers…

I decided to just stripe the yarns instead of making the tartan pattern using the two main colors of the socks. I added the bright pink I-cord to the socks after casting off. My Ravelry notes are here.

The pattern for these arm warmers is Armelitas  by knitcats Designs. I have to be honest: I didn’t hunt up the pattern this time but just went with the general memory of the pattern and kept making adjustments as I went. I tried to write what I did into the notes on my Ravelry page.

The finished arm warmers are a big hit with Hannah…
These arm warmers are longer then others that I have made. I can pull them up above my elbow or just let them bunch up around my wrists. Either way, these will be warm and really handy later on when I’m cold.

Do you see the knitted Maya cat that I’m holding in my arms? She was there for the picture because I’ve been working on her adding fluffy fur to her the last couple of days while listening to my audiobook.

She needs her new fur brushed out, but I’m trying to not handle it too much until I’m done so that I don’t pull too much of the mohair out. She is getting really furry, don’t you think? The original cat is extremely fluffy!!
Garden

Things are exploding into bloom all over my garden!! A couple of years ago I bought a few 6-packs of some bedding plants to put into the front flower bed along the walk up to the front door. They bloomed, and were okay, but amazingly they survived the winter and came back looking bigger and better last summer. This year they are back again looking just stupendous!! Ladies and gentlemen, let me present this year’s Dianthus and Dusty Miller combo.

Obviously these are perennial plants!

My roses are looking pretty good, too. I’m so happy that they are making such a good come back after the late hard freeze and high wind events of this spring.

My Cinco de Mayo rose is looking great. I just love this color.
The rose that is just thriving and covered with blooms is my Princess of Alexandra of Kent rose. Look at how many buds are surrounding this bloom. I usually don’t like pink roses, but this one is the perfect color.

The front roses are also blooming like champs, but how many roses can go into one post? I have to save some for next week. 🙂

Books

I am back to reading The Mirror & The Light. I’m not done yet, but I am entranced by the language and the building story. It is finally dawning on me that this book is about a great transition and upheaval in the power and social structures of England through the machinations of King Henry VIII and his right hand man, Thomas Cromwell.

I am finally at the heart of the story: Henry is the Mirror and the Light above all other princes, and Cromwell draws some power by existing in the reflected light. The corrupt practices of the medieval church are being overturned and the bible is being translated into English. The new churches will provide registries of all births, marriages, and deaths so that common people will have a recorded history. The roads will be improved as jobs are given to the needy. A comprehensive plan for the defense of England is being set in place. There is a big, over-reaching plan in motion here, and Cromwell is very aware of his limits. He feels the history of his time all around him, is burdened by ghosts everywhere he goes, and he is deliberately building the infrastructure, human and physical, that will need to be in place after his passing.  The past, present and future are continually coming together as Cromwell reflects and acts in the service of his and Henry’s vision for the nation. This is bigger, much  bigger, than I expected. I’ve been avoiding the end of the book because, well, things don’t end well for Cromwell, but now I’m kind of thinking that maybe they do…

 

Were you wondering how Hannah is doing? She follows me from room to room, and when I’m working downstairs she has found a little niche for herself on the bookshelf.

Hannah is turning into the easiest kitten ever to raise. She wants to be with me as much as she can, and just now is starting to play with toys in another room as long as she knows where I’m at. She sleeps through the night. She already has a favorite toy and rockets around the house with it in her mouth or tosses it around while she’s playing. She calls for me if she doesn’t know where I am. She is a huge chowhound and I have to be very careful when opening the refrigerator because she wants to climb in.  So far she hasn’t caused much destruction, but I have discovered that she can sever yarn with one chomp of her little kitten teeth, so knitting is happening really carefully. Luckily she naps a lot!

Have a great week, everyone!!

Read a little, knit a little, and garden like your heart can’t live without it.

 

The Scleroderma Chronicles: Year 3.6 There is a 911 call…

Yep. It finally happened.

Upset cat
These scary firemen came to the house and took mom away.

It has been kind of a hard six months. I’ve been dealing with a serious flare of my Sjogren’s Syndrome: dry mouth, eye problems (retinal detachments in BOTH eyes), brain fog, and horrible fatigue. Seriously, off the chart fatigue. Bad Sjogren’s, bad!!

But I think that my systemic sclerosis (scleroderma) has been chugging along as well. My chest feels tight, and when I do anything at all I start to breath hard as I catch my breath. Okay, there might be some panting… Sometimes I get dizzy and I have to put my head down. Vacuuming is suddenly a horrific task, but just coming up the stairs or washing out a pan at the sink can also set me off. Sometimes my lips are blue…

Arm with edema.
Check out my edema:  Can you see the details of the quilt that my arm was resting on?

One of the problems with being chronically ill is that you just keep taking things in stride. After all, it isn’t like this is the first time I’ve seen edema like this, or noticed that my lips were blue. I get out of breath all of the time, and I’ve been telling my doctors about all of this for the last 18 months. But somehow, things seem a little worse now. I have heart palpitations and there is a constant pressure in the middle of my chest. I have developed a headache that just refuses to go away, and my muscles and joints are behaving even worse than ever.

So, Friday while I was resting up in bed after the ordeal of making my morning coffee (yep. I go back to bed to recover from getting out of bed…) I decided that I would call the pulmonologist’s office to ask for an appointment. As usual, thinking that I would be on my feet for only a limited amount of time, I planned several little chores to do while I was going to be up.

Arm Warmers
I took this picture of my incredibly cute new arm warmers. This is the Armelitas pattern by knitcats Design, and here are my Ravelry project notes.

Aren’t those the cutest armwarmers? I put them on, and then started the dishwasher, got a load of laundry going, and then pulled on some more warm clothes (ahem… my Cactus Flower socks and Marfa is a Black Elephant shawl over some fleece pants and a denim shirt) so I could sit at the computer downstairs to make the phone calls.

So, I was out of breath when I made the call. I got ahold of the nurse at my pulmonologist’s office to ask her if I should came in for testing right away or if it would be best to make an appointment. As I talked to her my breathing got worse… I just couldn’t catch my breath and I was now outright panting. I began to feel faint.

The nurse called 911.

I ended up sitting on the floor by the front door with the phone on speaker in front of me waiting for the paramedics to arrive. In just a few minutes they had bundled me up and were whisking me out the door leaving a visibly upset MacKenzie watching from the top of the stairs. It was snowing outside; I didn’t have a coat, but I had managed to hang onto all of my knitted items. The paramedics attached me to all of their sensors and then rebundled me in blankets and knitted items afterwards (okay, my hands turned blue. They hadn’t ever heard of Raynaud’s, but they becaume instant fans of wooly warmth when presented with fingers that matched my denim shirt…) My armwarmers were popped back on over the IV line and the oxygen sensor on my finger. They used the shawl as an additional blanket. I never got my breathing back under control, and was still panting up a storm when I got to the hospital, but I was better equipped than most to cope with the cold. I like to think that I was pretty darn fashionable, too.

Into the MRI machine I went, rocking my armwarmers, as once again the doctors went on a blood clot hunt. Every one of my health emergencies has involved blood clot hunts; it’s a scleroderma thing. No blood clot. No pneumonia. No heart attack. After 2 hours sitting on the gurney in the ER my breathing was under control again and my O2 was fine. My best friend Deb arrived with knitting in hand to sit with me. My son arrived in time to take me home again with instructions to not let me drive or stay home alone.

“This is something that needs to be treated by a specialist”, the ER doc tells me. “You need to call your pulmonologist’s office first thing in the morning to get in to see her. You need additional tests that can’t be done here in the ER”.

You think?

It’s hard to not be stuck by the irony of this. I’m back right to where I started. It is kind of known in the scleroderma community that going to the ER is mostly useless because they don’t have the knowledge and experience to treat your condition. I’ll be calling my pulmonologist first thing Monday morning, but this time I will be calling from bed in a well rested condition.

Grooming cats.
with my latte and the cats!

For those of you who don’t know all of the details of my autoimmune bad-boys, here’s what is going on:

  • I have the limited form of systemic sclerosis, which is a subset condition of scleroderma. I have thick skin on my lower arms, legs, face and neck mostly, but the damage is also affecting several of my organ systems. I am considered a classic case with all of the CREST components.
  • I also have Sjogren’s Syndrome, which is fairly common as about 15% of systemic sclerosis patients also acquire this sidekick condition along with the scleroderma. It’s serious in its own right, but not usually life threatening.
  • Systemic sclerosis has a whole basketful of complications: Raynaud’s Disease, interstitial lung disease, pulmonary arterial hypertension, and kidney disease along with the almost universal digestive tract complications. I have all of these, but in my case the words that are used to describe how I’m doing are “mild, early, and moderate”, which are nice descriptors to have if they are being used in the context of lung,  heart, and kidney disease. I’m kind of guessing that one of the heart/lung conditions has taken it up a notch.

Today I’m camped out with my son waiting for Monday to arrive. I’m knitting.

Do you know the great Elizabeth Zimmerman? Her famous quote, one that I bear close to my heart on days like this, is: “Knit on, with confidence and hope, through all crisis.”

Knit on, my friends, knit on!