Yesterday was a garbage day, and that's Ok; Part 1) CW: computer failure hell
So, yesterday morning we woke at about 3 am to two kinds of hell.
The previous morning, we'd awoken to the power out, and when it came back, our computer mysteriously had several updates including an install of Copilot. Uninstalled that, didn't think anything else about it. Yesterday morning, Windows Update apparently decided it was time for another update, rebooted the computer... and into a BSOD bootloop. "Critical Service Failed". From what I could pick out from the attempted self-repair logs, it somehow managed to corrupt three critical service EXE's (power loss maybe caused this?) and *also* corrupted their backups in the recovery store. And then after a bit of tinkering and running diagnostics in safe mode, it stopped being able to even boot into safe mode.
Partner helped us, made a win10 install USB to use to attempt to recover things... and it apparently destroyed the install further instead of attempting to fix it. Great, fantastic, guess it's time for a flatten + reinstall. Lost everything but also didn't really lose anything, all the important stuff is recoverable from my aggressive habit of uploading everything I care about multiple somewheres just incase of this sorta thing. Finally got it up and running after about 12 hours of headache.
But, that was only half of the hell...
Yesterday was a garbage day, and that's Ok; Part 2) CW: Medical Scare,
While we were fighting our computer, we also very quickly realized something was wrong with our body. We were desperately hungry, but any attempt to eat anything only resulted in Bad Things.
This sort of sickness/body malfunction we take ***incredibly*** seriously. If we can't hold even liquid down, we will dehydrate incredibly fast due to other medical issues - they had to take our colon out nearly 12 years ago now, so we're always riding a tough balance to keep ourselves hydrated. And unfortunately, ever since they took our colon out we've been at extra risk of... intestinal blockage, which is a miserable experience and this showed all the signs of being another potential blockage. 12 hours of this later, it was time to go to Urgent Care - turns out the local hospital system opened a new urgent care walk-in clinic incredibly close to our house, and we were really glad to discover this because it made the "get this checked out" decision easier.
Got to the Urgent Care and their response was "We think this is a bit beyond what we can properly diagnose, we're transferring you to the ER". Which, is honestly, exactly what we probably expected to happen, but we wanted it to be Urgent Care's decision and not ours incase we were overreacting a bit.
Also, because our body really really wanted to spite us apparently, we started getting the classic first sign of a migraine for us - spots in the center of our vision, floaters, almost look like rainbow lightning bolts the way they flash across our vision. Makes it hard to see and tells us we've got maybe an hour before we've got a screaming migraine. Good thing we're headed to the ER anyway, tbh, since we wouldn't be able to use our normal migraine meds while unable to hold anything down.
Yesterday was a garbage day, and that's Ok; Part 3) Things start looking up
IV Fluids were ordered, and anti-nausea and migraine meds were administered through the IV. Migraine meds knocked it out near instantly. Thank, heck. I was able to fall asleep for the first time since that early morning, and ended up napping a significant portion of the ER stay away. CT scan was ordered, and came back clean. No blockage. Diagnostic tests indicate this might be my gallbladder acting up - I've got a referral to a surgeon to discuss possibly yoinking that before it causes any further trouble. We've had gallstones for several years now, so this isn't a surprise - although this would be the first time they've actually caused Trouble for us, if they were the cause of this.
With us feeling better they had us drink some water to see if it would stick this time and sure enough, we were finally able to handle it. So they discharged us around midnight, with our symptoms managed and enough proof that we weren't in any serious danger of them cropping back up immediately.
We're fortunate and privileged enough to live near a hospital system that does take us seriously when we say we're at high dehydration risk, and the fluids plus actually being able to function actually put us in a really good mood when we got home and we spent several hours getting our computer further restored while we made sure we were no longer ill. Finally went to bed about 3 am, after a heck of a 24 hours. Got some phone calls to make next week to get some follow-ups. I'd been putting off looking into the gallstones because it seemed not urgent, but they may very well have caused this... or we had a blockage that cleared itself (that does happen). Either way, we're on the mend and doing well, and we're refusing to let that day keep us down.
Thank y'all for being lovely supportive creatures while we were a bit freaked out yesterday. Figured a full rundown was the least we could do in return.
Food and mental health musings
One of the biggest signs our mental health has been getting better recently has actually been cooking. We've been having trouble cooking anything more than basic pasta meals for a decade now... but last night we came home, and despite that garbage day were like "oh hey, we thawed some porkchops the pantry gave us a couple days ago, they're thawed enough to cook, let's clean the skillet and cook 'em up.". Would have been an impossible task, energy wise, even a few months ago. It's amazing how much things are looking up.
