Password Rant

Karen McCullough Posted on by

My bank recently demanded that I change password. I know that it’s a good practice to change passwords periodically, so I understand why they did it. It’s an annoyance but an understandable one and I go along. But then they posted this on the password change page:

Best Practices for Stronger Passwords

Use:

  • A unique password not used anywhere else.
  • UPPER and lower case letters along with numbers and special characters
  • (@,%,&,#).

Don’t use:

  • Your username or email address.
  • Personal information (your name, phone number, etc.).
  • Common words or phrases in your password.
  • A password you’ve previously used with us.

Avoid:

  • Writing down your password.
  • Sharing your password with anyone.
  • Saving your password in a browser.”

Can you see the problem here? They want you to create a unique password that doesn’t use anything that’s easy to remember, then they tell you not to write it down or save it in your browser.

Excuse me? At my age it’s hard to remember my own birthday – and it happens to coincide with a major holiday! They think I’m going to remember a long password full of strange characters with no logical relationship to each other? Worse yet, every other one of the hundred or so sites I log into periodically insists on the same thing.

So—major confession here—I write down my passwords. They’re in a small notebook that lives in my desk, though not in an obvious place. And I work from home, where I live with just my husband. I figure if someone steals my password book, even if they can figure out my system and my handwriting, I have more serious problems than someone getting into my online accounts.

Even back when I worked in an office, I wrote down my most important passwords and kept them on a piece of paper in my wallet. I guarded it closely.

Obviously we need a better system.

Two-factor authentication is one approach. I find it annoying, but it does provide some extra security. A password keeper like LastPass is also an option, but, honestly, I have a trust problem with all of the companies that provide the software. After all, one hack into their system exposes everything!

Biometrics (like the iPhone’s fingerprint or facial recognition for login) is even better, but it has to be built into the hardware and we’re a long way from that across the board.

So for now, I use long, complicated passwords to foil would-be brute-force attack hacks. I write them down because I can’t remember them, and do my best to keep the written copies secure. I hope someone can come up with a better and more secure system to protect us.

Long Haul Covid – Pulmonary Rehab

Karen McCullough Posted on by

I’m a few weeks into pulmonary rehab, which was the main recommendation of the pulmonary doc I saw back in May. All of my tests came back negative for Covid-related damage, which seems to be common with Long-Haul Covid, even though I was still having trouble with breathing and stamina (also common among Long-Haulers).

The intake nurse for the pulmonary rehab did a long questionnaire and got my vital signs at the orientation interview. She told me that they’ve gotten very busy over the last few months with post-Covid patients and now had almost more referrals than they could manage in the program. After reviewing my symptoms both at the time of my illness last March and those that still remain, she told me that despite the lack of test results, she had no doubt I’d had Covid-19. My symptoms matched so many of the other post-Covid patients that they were seeing.

The program uses a multi-pronged approach to rehab. Most of the time is spent on cardio-type exercises, including a Nu-Step stepper and a treadmill. However due to my having severe osteo-arthritis in one knee, they don’t want me on a treadmill, so I walk a track around the main gym for fifteen minutes each session. They also have everyone do a set of upper body strengthening exercises with elastic bands and then some cool-down stretches.

They’ve taught me a few breathing techniques that help when I feel my breath getting short. I’ve seen a lot of improvement in the shortness of breath over the past few months, from times last summer when I could barely walk around the block to now when I can manage over a mile at a time. Hills are still a problem, but even that is getting better. The “pursed-lips” breathing technique has helped me regain control when I’ve starting getting huffy and puffy after scaling what is really not a very long or steep climb.

A nutritionist on staff reviews each person’s diet with them and makes suggestions to improve it. She’s extremely practical and good at starting where people are to try to alter some habits. For me, an unfortunate bug in the family gene pool means I’ve had high blood pressure and high cholesterol pretty much all my adult life, so I long ago cut out salty and fatty foods from my diet, except for some special occasions. When we reviewed my diet, the only flaw she could find was that I might not be getting enough protein, so she suggested adding protein shakes to the routine. When I’ve tried them in the past, I’ve found them nasty-tasting, but she recommended a couple of brands and flavors that are actually pretty palatable.

At this point a combination of time and therapy (and possibly getting vaccinated) do seem to be having a pretty positive effect. My last relapse happened about a month ago now and it was not as severe as previous ones. I hate to say this too loudly and publicly because Covid is sneaky and can knock you back just when you think you’re improving, but I’ve noticed that my shortness of breath is receding, and my energy is returning. I’m not all the way there yet, but I’m in a much better place than I was six months ago.

Goals update – End of June 2021

Karen McCullough Posted on by

At the beginning of the year I posted a few goals for the year. You can find that post here.  In the interests of accountability, I’m posting an update to keep myself on track.  As of right now (half way through the year) I’ve written 3 new short stories and have one currently in progress (of the 5 I set as a goal).

I’m at 30,000 words of No Time for Mistakes, one of the two novels I want to finish. This will be a fairly short novel, around 45,000 words, so I’m at two-thirds of the way through it.  It’s due to the publisher on August 10 for publication sometime in September. I’m on track with that one.

One thing I didn’t make a goal, but has since become one, is to start working on my Long-haul Covid status. I don’t know if I can ever recover completely the energy and stamina I had before Covid changed my life, but I’m going to do what I can. After a bunch of tests and consultations, I’ve been doing pulmonary rehab for a few weeks now. I’ll do a post on that later, but right now I can say that there has been clear improvement in my condition (finally, 16 months post-Covid)!

Collecting On The Beach

Karen McCullough Posted on by

Fossilized shark’s tooth, found by my sister-in-law.

The beach is a wonderful place for people who like to collect interesting things. When I’m out walking on the sand, I often see people carrying bags or buckets of shells. The shore offers an enormous variety of sizes, colors, and shapes, along with the possibilities for all sorts of craft projects.

Several members of my family like to hunt for fossilized shark’s teeth, and a “hunt” it is. They’re surprisingly numerous but difficult to spot because small black chips of shells can look remarkably like the. Spotting a shark’s tooth takes a trained eye, considerable time, and extraordinary patience. I’ve never mastered the trick of it, possibly due to lack of patience, but also likely because my poor eyesight makes it difficult to discern the right shapes in the sand.

I do have an interest in sea glass, but a nice piece is a rare find these days, probably because more people are looking for it and fewer glass bottles are being used. If a relative does happen on a nice piece they’ll save it for me, and I even found one myself a year or so ago. I don’t spend a lot of time hunting for it.

In fact, I don’t really try to collect anything on the beach other than ideas and experiences. There are tons of treasures and I take pictures to remind me of all the interesting things I see. Some of them spark ideas for stories. Some of them just spark awe and amazement. All of them give me a unique pleasure in just contemplating them, but I don’t need to keep them. Below are some of the most interesting things I found and saw on the beach during our week’s visit.

(You can click on the pictures for larger versions.)

Shell bed

Pen shell. An ordinary, very plain-jane shell unless it’s wet and has the sun shining on it when it glitters like a Christmas ornament.

Jellyfish that washed up on the beach

The way the foam from the ocean blows around is fascinating. This only seems to happen at low tide.

The receding water carves interesting patterns in the sand. This, too, seems to happen only at low tide.

These fishermen caught a Bonnethead shark. It’s actually fairly common to catch “Bonnies” there. They removed the hook and tossed it back into the ocean.

More info about the Bonnethead shark: Bonnethead – Wikipedia

More info on Pen Shells: Pinnidae – Wikipedia

 

 

 

 

Shell be

Beach Retreat

Karen McCullough Posted on by

Not too long ago I went with my family for a week on the beach at Edisto Island. Twice a year, late spring and early fall, we do a coastal retreat. We all need some time out after the stresses of the previous year, and for me it meant a break from thinking about Covid and working on my recovery. Fortunately, I was in pretty good shape at the time, several weeks past the last relapse and functioning well. I was up for those long walks on the beach, even if they’re not as long as they used to be pre-Covid.

Edisto Beach is a quiet, family-oriented place. Unlike many other nearby beaches, it has no amusement parks, no live entertainment, no real events other than a few local arts and crafts fairs, only a few restaurants, and very little night-life.

What it does have is the ocean and a wonderful beach. We make our treks there on the shoulders of the main season, sometime in May, and again in late September or early October, and at that time, the beach is rarely too crowded. The space between water and dunes narrows at high tide, forcing people together more, but there’s still plenty of room and quiet. The weather can be a question mark, sometimes too cool and too windy for comfortable walks. But picking those almost off-season times lets us afford a house right on the ocean-front.

The fall trip can be dicey. A few years ago a hurricane devastated the island, forcing us to cancel the trip. Several times hurricanes, recent or predicted, have made it questionable whether we’d be able to go. But it’s worth the wondering for the times we can get there.

The island has intriguing biking and hiking trails, a few gift stores worth exploring, a small but nicely curated local bookstore, and suppliers of locally sourced fresh seafood, which on its own is enough to make the trek worthwhile.

We go primarily for the sound, feel, and sights of the ocean, for walks on the beach, for quiet periods to read and meditate, time with family, and for the food. Fresh shrimp is always on the menu at least a couple of times, along with whatever fish is available. There are usually several good options.

We all take our laptops and make sure we rent houses with Internet connections, but we don’t spend all day staring at them. Checking email and news aside, we leave work, worries, complications, and most of the myriad tasks of daily living behind.

It’s a time to relax, catch up on reading, renew the acquaintance of family members and just give the brain a break.

Long Haul Covid – Talking to the Pulmonologist, Test Results, and What’s Next

Karen McCullough Posted on by

I’m late in getting this posted and I don’t really have a good excuse other than that I got deeply into my fiction writing for a while and didn’t want to come out of it.

But the battle with Long-haul Covid is still on, and I’m still fighting.

I had the appointment with the pulmonologist a couple of weeks ago now. Basically, all my tests have come back mostly normal.  The pulmonary function test results are within normal parameters. The six-minute walk showed nothing too alarming. The CT scan indicated some minor, probably non-Covid-related damage that shouldn’t interfere with anything. As far as the tests go, I appear to be quite healthy.

But the pulmonary doctor does realize that I’m not. Unfortunately, other than treating the symptoms there’s not much they can do. He was sympathetic as he explained that there appears to be something more behind a lot of the Long-haul Covid symptoms people are experiencing, but they don’t know what that is yet, which means they don’t know how to treat it beyond trying to mitigate the symptoms. Those are different for different people, so he considers each case individually.

I do like this man quite a bit. He takes me seriously and is trying to look at the big picture, which hasn’t always been the case with some of the medical people I’ve consulted. I know from being on forums with other long-haulers just how rare and valuable that is. Too many have had their varied symptoms dismissed as just depression, anxiety or hypochondria.

The doctor had already referred me for pulmonary rehab. I have an inhaler and a prescription for steroids, should I need them. Along with monitoring my condition and calling him if I have a serious setback, that’s the sum total of treatments recommended based on results from the tests.

Next I’ll report on the pulmonary rehab.  I’m hopeful it can help.

Long Haul Covid – Testing, Testing

Karen McCullough Posted on by

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve had a CT scan of my lungs, a pulmonary function evaluation, a neurological evaluation the orientation for pulmonary rehab.

I won’t know the results of the pulmonary function evaluation or the CT scan for a couple of weeks when I have my return visit to the pulmonologist.

The neurological evaluation was interesting and somewhat reassuring. It involved all sorts of tests of various facets of memory, expression, and reasoning. Reinforced what I already knew – I’m not a verbal learner. Read me a list of 15 words and ask me to repeat them I may be able to do 6. Maybe. I do much better with remembering things I’ve seen. In discussing the results, the neurologist said the tests indicated no sign of cognitive decline. Considering my age (and the fact that I’m currently at the exact same age my father was when he started showing signs of dementia), I find that very reassuring.

It doesn’t help explain or provide any way of dealing with the occasional bouts of brain fog. That seems to be a problem mostly during relapse phases and can interfere with my ability to write. I’m not sure there is any cure for that, so I mostly roll with it, as irritating as it is.

The last thing was the intake evaluation for pulmonary rehab. They did a bunch of standard tests, including taking my blood pressure several times, testing oxygen, grip strength, and ability to walk for six minutes. They talked about the kinds of exercises I’d be doing and taught me one interesting breathing technique (pursed lips breathing) to try when I was having trouble.

Like several of the other docs, the people I talked with at the Pulmonary center felt that their rehab program would help me get back into shape, at least as good shape as possible. Over the past few weeks I’ve been feeling increasingly better, so I’m hopeful. I may never be able to walk the distances or at the speed I used to, but if I can get to the point of being able to walk several miles without collapsing, I’ll be grateful.

Unlike some of the other docs, I’ve talked with, the nurse and the therapist at the rehab center were entirely sure (based on my symptoms) that I had had Covid last year. The things I was telling them about my condition and issues matched very closely to what they’d been hearing from many other Covid19 patients. They can’t offer a cure but they do feel like they’ve been able to help some of those others.

I’ll report back after I’ve had the next appointment with the Pulmonary doc. But in the meantime, it still feels good to be tackling the problem and doing what I can to get back closer to normal.

Long-haul Covid – An Appointment with the Pulmonologist

Karen McCullough Posted on by

After talking with my Primary Care Doc a couple of times and a visit to the newly set up Covid Long-Haul Clinic in my area (neither of which was much help), I got an appointment with a local Pulmonologist who has a special interest in post-Covid care.

As an aside, let me say that there are times when I feel like a fraud as a Covid Long-Hauler. I can’t prove that I ever had Covid-19. Testing wasn’t freely available when I’m pretty sure I had it in March, 2020, so I never had a positive test. My primary care doctor said the symptoms sounded like Covid-19 but that’s the closest I’ve ever gotten to a diagnosis. An antibody test done five months later was negative. But I do know I had something remarkably like Covid-19 last March and a year later I haven’t fully recovered from it.

Dr. M., the Pulmonologist, read through all my written notes about my symptoms and the timeline of my illness, and I could tell from his questions that he took it seriously. I told him that I was looking for a way to get back to myself, the self who could and did sometimes walk for hours and hours a day without getting short of breath or collapsing from exhaustion. He was honest in return, telling me that medicine has no real answers for long-haul Covid at this point. But he would help me try to sort out the problem and do as much as we could toward a solution.

To that end, he scheduled me for a pulmonary function evaluation, a CT lung scan, a neurological evaluation, and pulmonary rehab.

At this point I suspect the problem with my breathing and energy probably isn’t really in my lungs, but the PFE and CT scan should help sort that out. Of course, if there isn’t an actual lung problem, that leaves an issue that’s harder to understand and deal with. But at least I’ll know and maybe it will help shape the approach to a solution.

The neurological evaluation should get some perspective on my episodes of what others call “brain fog.” That doesn’t really describe my problem, which is more that I find it hard to concentrate at times. It’s not constant but happens often enough to be disturbing. And it really bothers me when I’m trying to work on the next novel, and all I can do is stare at the computer screen, unable to make myself write the next sentence. It’s not exactly writer’s block because it’s not that I don’t know where the story’s going next or what to write. It’s more that my brain just refuses to do the work to get the words together, even when I know what I want to say.

I’ve had a couple of the tests and others are coming up. I won’t get results from the breathing tests until my next appointment with Dr. M, which won’t happen until late May.

In the meantime, the last relapse has passed, and I feel mostly okay. I still have to be careful not to over-exert myself, to prevent a collapse that will take me out for at least the rest of the day and sometimes into the next day. Oddly, even trying to force myself to concentrate on a task for too long will bring on that kind of collapse, though it involves no obvious physical exertion.

And though I know that there are likely no easy answers for my problem, I’m happy to be doing something to tackle the issue. I’m not good at sitting around doing nothing.

BTW: I apologized to the doctor for the two pages worth of written notes and timeline I’d brought as I thought it might be an over-abundance of information. (I’m a writer, after all.) But he thanked me for it and said he wished more of his patients would do something similar. It gave him a much better picture of my problem than just a few questions in the office could do.

The Fight to Get Back to Myself

Karen McCullough Posted on by

I’ve talked before about my suspected case of Covid-19 in March, 2020. I say suspected because I’ve never had a test to confirm it. Testing wasn’t available at the time unless you were in the hospital and I wasn’t that sick. An antibody test done six months later was negative. So I can’t prove I’ve had it. I wrote about it at the time here.

But I know I have had Covid-19, just as I know I now have Long-haul Covid, current officially designated as PASC (Post Acute Sequellae of SARS-Cov-2). I’ve blogged about that as well here.

I’m more than a year post-Covid now and I’m not back to what was normal before. Worse, I’m not really any closer than I was two weeks post-acute-Covid. And I’m tired of it. Literally and figuratively. I’m tired of being tired too much of the time. I’m tired of having to be extremely careful every time I go out for a walk to be sure I don’t go too fast or too far, lest I bring on a collapse that will make me useless for the rest of the day and possibly the next couple of days. I’m tired of the relapses that bring on another round of coughing, pain, extreme fatigue and set me back to square one on the recovery process.

I’m tired of trying to nurse myself along, thinking that I’m making progress, only to have another setback push me right back to square one. After a year of trying to recover myself, I’ve realized I need help.

Which is easy to say but hard to put in practice. The search for medical help has been frustrating. I’ve been to my regular doc twice now when symptoms were bad. He was sympathetic but really had no idea how to help.

When I heard that my local hospital system was starting a dedicated clinic for Long-Haul Covid, I was thrilled and set up an appointment right away. Sadly, the visit didn’t go well. The person I saw seemed to concentrate entirely on my symptoms at the time. I was in a relapse phase and had a cough but did try to make it clear that I wasn’t really bothered by the cough itself. It would go away once the relapse cleared again. (As, in fact, it did.) But I came away from that visit with a bunch of prescriptions – most of which I didn’t get filled or didn’t take – and, thank goodness, a referral for a pulmonary evaluation.

The person I saw didn’t even think it was necessary for me to come back for a follow-up exam. That’s how seriously they took my problem.

But I do believe that pulmonary evaluation referral is going to prove extremely helpful, even if the Covid clinic wasn’t. Stay tuned….