Cranky Fibro Girl

Harnessing the healing power of snark

Blog, Blahg, BLAARRGGHH

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So you’ve probably noticed that it’s been kind of quiet around here lately. Even though I’ve been moving through so many different situations at what seems like the speed of light, for the first time in my 35 years, I seem to be out of words to describe what’s currently going on in my life.

I haven’t really known how to BE in this place, because always before, even if everything else fell apart, I could always fall back on a cushion of words to soften the blow. So I turned to one of my tried and true coping strategies, namely; “When in doubt, freak out.”

Because I am nothing if not generous, not to mention an excellent Drama Queen, I decided to share the freaky love with my coach during one of our sessions.

“GOD,” I announced, in my best, quivering, innocent-victim-of-the-universe voice, “God has taken all my words away! The one thing I most loved to do in the world, and now He’s taken it away from me for no reason!”

In what can only be described as a Superhuman Exercise Of Will which most likely led to severe internal hemorrhaging on her part, not only did my coach NOT laugh at me, but somehow she was also able to ask me helpful, non-mocking coachful questions to help me work through this issue.

“Well,” she asked, “does everything you write on your blog have to be funny?”

“Uh, DUH! YES!!” I replied. (Aren’t I just a dream client? Don’t you want to coach me too?) Fortunately she has raised two children, so she never takes snottiness personally.

“OK,” she replied, recognizing an Intractable Brick Wall Of Stubbornness when she saw one, “think about this. You had a plan for your blog when you started it three years ago. But you’re not the same person you were three years ago. Think about everything that has happened over the past year. So what if you could allow your blog and your writing to change, and reflect who and where you are now?”

She makes a good point. Especially given the fact that, if I had to give it a title, the theme of this past year would be,

I have hurt, in some way, every single day, for the past eight months.

Eight months of sickness, trauma, my life being completely out of my control, and pain.

One day last October I lost my health. Not because of anything I did or didn’t do. Not for any logical, rational reason. Just ‘cuz.

Overnight, I lost the ability to be the person I had been, and do everything I’d been doing up to that point.

This is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to deal with.

I never knew pain could hurt like this.

And even though I seem to have reached a place where the original illness is gone and the side effects are more or less managed, who’s to say they won’t show up again one day, out of the blue, for absolutely no reason at all? My body, my mind, my emotions, they are all tied up in knots and braced against more pain. Because I remember the pain. And I don’t know if I could bear to go through it again.

This was, and continues to be, a huge trauma for me. And I really don’t know how to be with it.

But I am still here. I do show up every day, even if all I do is open my eyes in the morning and acknowledge that I’ve arrived at the beginning of another day.

And maybe, just maybe, that’s enough.

Update

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I’m sorry I haven’t been on here much lately. I’ve been having a lot of health challenges.

The good news: No problems with C DIF since I finished my medication in December, and they didn’t find anything wrong on any of my blood work.

The bad news: The reactive arthritis is still going strong, and could be here for 12-18 months.

They gave me some steroids last weekend to help with the inflammation, and that helped bring the pain down from a 9/10 to around a 1 or a 2. But being in near-constant pain for the past 7 months has just really ground me down emotionally and mentally, as well as physically. It’s hard not to go to the dark place in my thoughts when I feel so bad for so long.

So I’m currently spending all my time trying to figure out how to waterproof my computer, my knitting, and all my books so I can live in the bathtub, as the water helps take all the pressure off my joints.

Any good thoughts would be much appreciated 🙂

I’m Not Dead Just Yet

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You may have noticed that lately, I appear to have dropped off the face of the earth. Unfortunately, this is due to my having had a pretty major relapse in my recovery from The Autumn Of Illness. Thankfully, there has not been a return of The Hostile Alien Bacteria. But everything else-the arthritis, the fatigue, the feeling like I’m being pulled naked across asphalt all day long-that’s all back.

I finally had my first pain-free day in about a month last Sunday. And I’m tentatively optimistic, because I’ve now had 3 in a row.

So hopefully I should have a little more to say around here. I appreciate everyone sticking around while I’ve peeled myself up off the floor yet again. 🙂

Yesterday

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I found out that I have another stupid cavity.

“Well,” said the hygienist, poking me with a very sharp stick, “you have a pit that we’ve been watching for a while, and now it’s developed into a cavity.”

Hm, really? Well, thanks so much for sharing that information with me, when it can do me absolutely no good whatsoever.

“But it’s only a little cavity. And it will only need a little filling.”

That did not make me feel any better.

But it did make me wonder; is that anything like being just a little pregnant?

Still Suffering, After All These Years

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Every so often I toy with the idea of going back to school and getting my Ph.D. in Spanish. But I never do, and I think I’ve finally figured out the reason why. Apparently, I’m already doing a post-doc in Suffering and Doing Things The Hard Way. Or, to be more accurate, I’m doing extensive research into how to unlearn this.

Back when I was about to turn 29 and I saw the rest of my life stretching out before me as an endless procession of unhappiness and dissatisfaction, I decided that I had had enough, and by God, I was GOING TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO BE HAPPY! So I hired my very first coach and got to work.

Now, 6 years later, I have completely transformed myself and my life. And what’s more, I’ve gotten really good at no longer staying stuck in anyplace where I’m suffering emotionally. This is not to say that I never have hard times or never feel anger, sadness, disappointment, and the like. But now I know how to feel what I’m feeling and just let it be without making up all kinds of stories about What This Means, and I have lots of support, and resources, and skills, AND I know that if there’s something I can do to help myself feel better, I can do it. So I’ve gotten really skilled at navigating the flow of all of my emotions.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for those times when I’m facing any kind of physical suffering. Anytime I’m faced with physical pain, it practically takes an act of God for me to realize that maybe, perhaps, there might be a way for me to do things differently and actually feel better.

And apparently the Universe has decided that it’s finally time for me to “get” this, because it’s bringing up those final few places in my life where I’ve had trouble really getting things to work well, and they are all somehow tied into some kind of physical issue.

[Read more…] about Still Suffering, After All These Years

The Word Of The Lord

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Since January 1st of this year, Marianne Williamson has appeared on Oprah and Friends radio each afternoon at 3 pm to teach A Course In Miracles. I first went through the Course about 5 years ago, and I thought it would be a really neat experience to go through it again under the guidance of Marianne Williamson, whose work I really admire.

I’ve been doing the daily exercises, as well as practicing applying the principles to my everyday life. Yesterday was a hard day, because I was dealing with a lot of health challenges-AGAIN-and it was making my arthritis flare up-AGAIN.

So I prayed, “Dear God, please help me. I need a miracle.” Then I got really quiet and listened.

I felt guidance and support come in, and I could tell that it was God because it was loving, kind, and gently amused with me.

“Dude,” it said, “take some pain medicine.”

Oh…right.

The word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God.

Again With The Poo

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So today I had to go to the doctor for, um, we’ll just call it a lady problem. This concerned me because I knew I needed antibiotics for this particular problem, which I’m not supposed to be taking on account of they could reactivate the Hostile Alien Bacteria, in which case I would have to hurl myself into oncoming traffic, because there is just NO WAY I can be that sick again right now.

Happily there is another, safer, kind of antibiotic I can take, although my doctor did tell me that there is another treatment option we could try for C DIF, should the need ever arise. But when he told me what it was I thought that I might still choose the oncoming traffic, because the next level of treatment involves a stool transplant.

That of course is really too horrifying to even consider, which I told him, to which he replied, (and I SWEAR I am not making this up):

“Hey, the healing power of stool is legendary.”

LEGENDARY.

I really had nothing to say to that, but I didn’t have to because while we were on the subject he told me about this company which allows you to send poo through the mail to whomever you wish, in order to convey the message that, “Dear My Congressperson, You are full of …it.”

Happy Tuesday!

The Wall

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Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

Every so often my life leads me to a place that I think of as The Wall, which I know are places within myself where I am not yet able to act from love. I can tell when I’ve reached another one, because I feel exactly like I’ve hurled myself headlong into an extremely solid brick wall at about 120 miles an hour. Then I pick myself up off the ground, dust myself off, and do it all over again.

I usually bash around quite a bit before I am able to find a more gentle, easier way to get past my latest wall. My first response is always to go for the sledgehammer, without even stopping to ask if there’s another tool that could possibly get the job done. I just get so frustrated whenever I am stuck in a pattern of thoughts, and I can’t find another way to see a given situation.

Sometimes the “sledgehammer method” does help me to release my frustration, but it is a pretty brutal method of navigating through life. So over the past few years I’ve started to ask if maybe there’s another way I could approach these situations in which I feel so stagnant and stuck.

Of course the Universe loves it when we ask questions like this, and so it was not long before I was inspired to pick up Martha Beck’s book on The Joy Diet. In addition to giving us 10 practices for creating a more joyful life, she also talks about Bill O’Hanlon and his suggestion to Do One Thing Differently. As in, if you find yourself having the same argument over and over again with your spouse, the next time you have the argument you have to Do One Thing Differently, like put on a hat, or have the argument while lying in the bathtub.

It sounds silly, but holy cow does it work! I guess committing to take some kind of action opens up a space for new thoughts to come in.

So I decided to apply this strategy to my latest wall, and over the weekend my inner guidance started talking to me about Pema Chodron. I saw a quote of hers on a blog I read, and suddenly she was all I could think about. Suddenly they were replaying Oprah’s radio interview with Pema Chodron on the afternoon I was listening to XM’s “Oprah and Friends” channel. Suddenly I found myself reading the descriptions of all her books on Amazon. And this whole time my inner guidance was chanting, “Get thee to a bookstore,” so I finally went, if only to get that little voice to shut up.

At the bookstore I found a little volume titled, When Things Fall Apart, which is perfect for me because that is exactly how I feel about my life right now. I feel like everything has broken open and spilled out, and maybe I can catch a few grains over here, and mop up a few drops over there, but I can’t change the fact that there’s a great big mess on the table in front of me, at least in my mind.

Pema Chodron describes her own “falling apart” in this way:

“What happened when I got to the abbey was that everything fell apart. All the ways I shield myself, all the ways I delude myself, all the ways I maintain my well-polished self-image-all of it fell apart. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t manipulate the situation. My style was driving everyone else crazy, and I couldn’t find anywhere to hide.

I had always thought of myself as a flexible, obliging person who was well liked by almost everyone. I’d been able to carry this illusion throughout most of my life. During my early years at the abbey, I discovered that I had been living in some kind of misunderstanding. It wasn’t that I didn’t have good qualities, it was just that I was not the ultimate golden girl. I had so much invested in that image of myself, and it just wasn’t holding together anymore. All my unfinished business was exposed vividly and accurately in living Technicolor, not only to myself, but to everyone else as well.” (p. 6,7).

What has come to light for me during these months of sickness and recovery is the issue of self-compassion. I can practice it up to a certain point, but then once I’ve decided that I “should” be better, and I “should” be running at 100%, and I “should” whatever, but I can’t, because I’m still physically rundown and need more time to heal, then I turn into a slave driver and constantly drive and abuse myself mentally. I would never treat another person as meanly as I’ve been treating myself. But I apparently have no problem tyrannizing myself internally to the point of despair.

So I guess it’s finally time for me to learn how to do this differently. I’m not happy about it, but I’ve reached the point where I don’t really have any other choice. Well, I guess I always have a choice, but I’m tired of repeating this same cycle of self-abuse. I guess that I have finally suffered enough. I would really like to start feeling better, and I’ve been doing this long enough now to know that in order to start feeling relief, I need to learn how to change my mind about this situation. So, okay Universe, I’m finally listening. I’m ready for a shift in perception so that I can see this situation differently. And if possible, I’d really like this new view to be sledgehammer-free.

And Then Suddenly, Your Entire Day Can Just Turn Right Around

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So this day kind of started off badly at about 5:30 am when I had to get up and take some medicine because my migraine had come roaring back.

Unfortunately it was still in full swing when my tutoring client arrived for her session.

We were working on an exercise which required her to translate a conversation between Sara and José discussing what kind of movie they wanted to go and see, when she got to the following line:

“¿Adónde quiere ir Sara?”

which means, “Where does Sara want to go?”

So my student began translating the words aloud, and I heard her say,

“Where do…you want…to DO…Sara?”, with absolutely no realization of what she had just said.

And I, rising to the occasion as the mature, responsible adult I am, burst into peals of laughter and almost fell off my chair with glee.

And suddenly, my whole entire day just turned right around.

Take My Mind, Please

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Today I am very grateful for my coach.

When she heard about my severe sleep apnea her first thought was, “Wow. Imagine the amazing things she’s gonna do when she’s rested!”

That was really nice to hear, because when I got the results of my sleep study, my first thought was

I

have

not

slept

for

thirty

five

years.

Thinking that thought was a lot like kicking a tiny pebble and accidentally dislodging an avalanche.

Suddenly it was as if I’d woken up one day, and everything was wrong with me.

If I could, just out of the blue, contract a serious intestinal bacteria, then what else could happen to me?

If suddenly my sleep is all wrong, then what else could go wrong with me?

If Heath Ledger could drop dead in the blink of an eye, then I could too.

Suddenly, all I could see was evidence for being weak and sickly. But that’s not what my coach saw.

She said, “Look at everything you’ve done, even though you’ve been completely exhausted!”

This is true. Even if I haven’t really slept for the past thirty-five years, I have done an awful lot of amazing things. I do have a pretty fantastic life.

She said, “You’ve had relatively good health over they years, given how impaired your sleep has been. To me, that is evidence of how strong your body is.”

Also true.

She said, “Once you get your sleep apnea treated, world domination is just around the corner!”

That sounds good to me.