Checking in for 2023-10-12:

• Had my Epoetin alfa (nee: Procrit) shot this morning. I woke up late so I didn't get to do much of anything prior to the shot, and the blood draw prior to it kind of upset me out a bit. My hemoglobin is critically low (under 8 is considered really, really low. Mine was at 7.4). Prior to getting my shot the medical assistant asked me if I wanted to get a blood transfusion. Transfusion? Um, no, and I didn't feel like that was something that lil' ol' healthy me needed. Then it hit me: I'm not lil' ol' healthy me. I am sick. My blood numbers are indicative of someone who is sick. That realization colored my day a bit and tossed me into a bit of a funk. I don't like thinking of myself as unwell but the reality is that I am going through some serious shit at the moment.
• Even better, I'm planning on getting vaccinations tomorrow and the questionnaire asked if I had long-term anemia. Define "long-term"? I'll need to ask them about that tomorrow. Also my plan of getting all of the vaccinations tomorrow might not be the smartest (I'm due for the latest COVID, Flu, and Hepatitis B. Might need to curb that a bit).
• I spent a lot of time in bed today thinking and not working on anything. Part of that might be the Procrit shot and part of that is just me trying to get myself in the right head space to think about my disease and its treatment. I came to the conclusion that I'm just going to keep doing what I can with the same vigor that I can and to hell with the numbers. The less that I pay attention to these things the better off I'm going to be (within reason, of course).
• Today feels like such a counterpoint to yesterday where I finally upgraded an Ubuntu 16.04 mail server to a more current LTS release. I was afraid to upgrade this machine for the longest time in the fear that I would somehow break it. For whatever reason I decided that it was time and I ran do-release-upgrade several times. Things broke but I was able to fix them as needed (DKIM broke, SASL broke, but those were simple fixes). Also I have to give a big shout-out to Debian and Ubuntu for making these upgrades not only painless but also easy to understand what changed (backup files are your friend, especially when you decide to use the maintainers version because you don't remember what you changed in your version).

That's all for now. More as I know it.