Pain of the Month Club

This morning all my health issues ganged up on me. Woke up an hour and a half before my alarm, wheezing. Not a lot, but enough to not be able to get back to sleep. Got up to try to install the new backup drive, but it decided not to stay online on the eSATA connection for more than 10 seconds at a time, and as I was changing that out to a firewire cable, my back added its two cents, which felt more like a wooden nickel. Major pain, no change of posture or position helped. Then came the difficulty breathing, which, along with the wheezing, is a symptom of a heart condition which rarely rears its ugly head. This brings on a mild panic attack, and I have pills for that downstairs. While I was down there I checked my blood sugar level and it was a little low. That tends to exacerbate the panic symptoms. Took my blood pressure, which was higher than I had ever seen it - that's from the panic thing. Took a panic pill, took a couple of industrial strength ibuprofen, and my regular daily meds. Went back upstairs and decided not to fight the hard drive any more, shut down the PC, showered, dressed, applied some benedryl gel to the insect bites, hauled my baritone horn to the car and drove to work.

The panic pill wore off around 3 pm, symptoms all gone. My back started hurting about then, so I took a couple more ibuprofen. Now I feel fine except for the insect bites. Almost time to go to band rehearsals.

It was a busy day at work, checking a list of bugs against three different models of the same brand of blu-ray player, all allegedly based on the same chip. I expected to be testing a TV today, but the boss decided the DVD players were more important. Fine with me. The bug regressions are less tedious than the routine tests.