It wasn’t. May as well have been for the endless loop of “your harddrive is failing and it’s all your fault” advice online. Ditto advice that you just store data on drives not use them, which is… something. Ditto the goal shift from having a back up in the cloud and physical to now something like five redundancies- way to embrace inbuilt obsolescence. Nope. It was just the last connector in my power cable to it. The second to last one is fine. Silence. Speedy. Luckily the manufacturer builds in a beep that power has been lost but it sure does sound like a failure. It didn’t seem to cause any errors, it just meant each time there was a waver in the supply it had to retry.

So that’s brilliant. I did though learn all the ways both the OS, and browsers alike keep accessing it. Oh yes. The latter is ostensibly to check for software conflicts, but that’s pretty invasive. I caught it live only because of the noise- and the noise is due to multiple attempts to read/write. I doubt it would be easy to spot it otherwise. So that’s good. I was worried my PC was on her last legs, I even have an entirely new set of power cables.

But I’m just so physically shattered by the stress. As in biological stress. Sure other stress, but think about how you physically tense core muscles when you’re trying to focus and trying to be alert. There are superficial and deep muscles alike and for me these are the muscles that make my fibro start yelling at me. Very loudly. Well maybe not the muscles themselves but all that fascia around and between and particularly just under the skin do. Yes, it was assumed the fascia only transfers pain signals, doesn’t actually generate them. Turns out it very much does. And that matches my experience better than if fibro was in muscles.

That or yes, it’s heavily in the smooth muscle fibres in skin. These are the ones that you can feel when you get goosepimples. When I get them now? It hurts. I can feel them slowly contract. It’s very creepy. But it’s probably also why even before I get to that point that a warm shower hurts. It feels like having a warm shower after being sunburned. So when people talk about the pain of fibro, yes, it includes actual burning sensations, not the burning of inflammation- though I get that too and prednisone can quite often knock that back. It’s not supposed to. But it does for me. Maybe because my RA is active enough that knocking that back is upstream of the pain of fibro.

And while I know I’m not actually burned, it doesn’t actually stop the pain. And a hot shower is really beneficial for my RA and fibro for the same reason it’s beneficial for anyone. It soothes sore muscles.

So here I am. With the source of stress gone. But now left trying to recover from it.

Still. We are here and it is now. A quick fly by post, now off to have that shower I’ve put off. Hah!

But if I can get my body to stop yelling at me I can actually work on those embroidery projects I keep having to put off. Pink Diamonds, Elissa, Elsa, my pearl work.