Chronic Rants

Maybe it wouldn’t bother me if I was out of the house more. It certainly could be a whole lot worse. But no matter how you look at it, I miss my laptop.

I’m lucky that I had access to a computer at a young age. When the pain in my wrists was so bad that I couldn’t hold a pen, I could still usually type with a few fingers on my left hand. It was slow, but it allowed me to more or less keep up in my classes.

Then the internet appeared. That was interesting. Email was fun for sending letters to my grandparents (yes, my awesome grandfather was an early adopter!) And slowly, the computer became more integrated in my everyday life.

Now I’m like many others: email, Facebook, and a lot of other web sites are daily activities. But I use my laptop for so much more. My to do list, my health records, family photos, my daily symptom log, my finances, and a lot more is on that machine. Quite a lot more. I’m on it every day.

And on the days I don’t feel up to leaving the house, it’s my connection to the outside world. I see what my friends are doing on Facebook. I connect with other chronic illness folks on Twitter, I email my mom.

Some of this can be done on my smartphone, which I’m also very lucky to have. Some of it can’t. And some of it can theoretically be done, but not by me. I can do lots of typing on a laptop but I can’t do that same typing on a tiny smartphone touch keyboard. There’s a text-to-speech feature, but that’s not the same. For me, it doesn’t work at well.

And that’s why I’ve wanted to write a post all week but I’ve been waiting. I can’t imagine trying to do this on my phone!

A week ago I was having a perfectly fine evening when I got that image above. Twice.

Not good!

Thanks to sage advice from a couple of friends, I brought my laptop in to a repair shop. My hard drive was failing. Ugh.

I bought a new hard drive, which has now been installed. They’re just transferring all of my backed up files, and then hopefully in a few more days I’ll have my laptop back!

For now I’m using my previous laptop. It’s not in great shape. I can’t do much on it, but at least I have a browser. A connection to the outside world. It’s not perfect, but it’s something.

I’ll have a lot of work to do next week. I need to reinstall all sorts of software on my laptop. But that’s ok. At least I’ll have my baby back.

And then I can breath easier. Relax. And finally put my latest blood test results into my personal tracking spreadsheet.

P.S. If you’re a computer user, make sure you back up your files! I’m so glad I did!

This entry was posted on Friday, December 9th, 2016 at 4:51 pm and is filed under Expectations, Isolation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.