I'm back

My pancreas is responding to diet and rest. My internet connection seems to be responding to technical intervention.

For the last couple of weeks, in addition to pancreatic inflammation, I've had badly intermittent internet connectivity. While it never comes close to the advertised speed (and never has), it has been going from a decent connection to suddenly timing out on four browser tabs at once.

This was annoying at first but as it became the norm I got more upset. It would be down for an hour or more, several times a day, even after doing a hard reboot of the modem by disconnecting the power supply,

I took my cute little 4" Crescent wrench - ideal for cable connectors - and checked all of the connections, starting at the modem, then at the splitter outside the house, and finally at the satellite dish. A few connectors were finger-tight but loose to the wrench; I tightened them. None of this improved the connection problem.

A tree next to my driveway could cause interference, but that would not explain sudden changes to connectivity when the wind is calm and the tree is not moving.

Yesterday I opened my browser and went to the modem's home page. A soft reset did not help, but after a hard reset via the web page, the modem spent a long, long time running diagnostics and updating its software. Once it finally came back up, it worked fine, and has done so ever since.

On the health front, my gut feels a lot better. Last week I was able to have a two-night weekend for the first time in three weeks; the rest helped a lot. I've resumed eating, but no meat whatsoever right now. No mayonnaise, no ice cream. Yesterday I threw out some milk that I hadn't touched for a week and bought a pint at the nearest store. That sat well with my guts, so today I bought a loaf of bread and a half-gallon of 2% milk. I should have 1% or fat-free, but I take what I can get. My lymph nodes are still noticeably swollen but I feel much better.

When I saw my shrink last week, she told me that I need to do a few things. One of those things is getting a lesion looked at; I'm pretty sure it's a basal cell carcinoma. She asked me to promise to get it looked at, for her sake, because I obviously haven't done so for my own sake. It has been there since about 2008 and didn't change for years. Since Lisa died, it has been changing in size and configuration, though it is still quite small. What really makes this odd is, basal cell carcinoma is generally associated with sun exposure, but the lesion is below my belt on a patch of skin that has almost never seen the sun: above the pubic arch but below the belt.

Oh well. I'm not afraid of death but don't wish to court it either. Especially slow and painful varieties of death. That's why I worry about my pancreas. A heart attack could be quick, but the pancreas always takes its painful time killing you.