Cranky Fibro Girl

Harnessing the healing power of snark

Spiking A Ten On The Pain Scale

By 2 Comments

Dear irritating little man in front of me at the drug store, holding up a line of 8 people waiting to check out because, BY GOD, you were not leaving that store without your inalienable AARP right to $0.03 off of a $2.00 can of mixed nuts:

When you turned to the rest of us and pretended to be sorry for holding us up, as you caught my gaze, the young woman in line behind you who was obviously in agonizing pain, and who was there to purchase a cane, did your entire life flash in front of your eyes? Because it did for me.

I hope you go back to that store and thank the lady at the photo counter for opening up a second check-out line. She is the sole reason that you continue to be alive today.

And This Is Why God Made Husbands

By 3 Comments

It’s hard enough, dealing with this chronic illness on days when I am spiking a 9 or a 10 on the pain scale. But often I find myself grieving for the little things this illness has taken away from me.

My hands used to be my favorite physical feature, petite and elegant. Now they are constantly swollen so badly that I can’t remember the last time I was able to wear my engagement ring.

I used to have a great walk, confident, graceful, and easy. Now it’s more of a shuffling, lumbering limp.

And along with my hands, my feet are also really swollen, so much so that they no longer fit in my Birkenstocks, which meant that now I officially had zero pairs of shoes I could wear that would not hurt my feet.

I was crying about this in the bathtub last night, when my husband came in to see me. I told him about my shoes and he immediately said, “Well, baby, why don’t we adjust the buckles to make them a little looser?”

So he did.

And then I had my favorite shoes back again, and can now walk with a little less pain.

And then world became just a teeny, tiny bit brighter.

When Crankiness And Pop Music Meet

By 4 Comments

So this week has pretty much turned out to be the week when it has become necessary to change around almost every single one of my (numerous) medications. Some were no longer working, some were working well in one way but were also causing some unpleasant side effects, and some needed to be added as various diagnoses were fine-tuned.

I feel like I’m in a circus and I’ve been asked to learn how to juggle three different colors of balls. And, after MUCH trial and error, and effort and energy, I have. But just at the moment when I was able to perform that routine smoothly and professionally, the ringmaster came in and told me that I had to change out all my yellow balls for orange (without stopping the juggling, mind you), oh, and by the way, you also need to ride this unicycle while you’re juggling, and, oh, we also think it would be great if you could hold onto this pole with your teeth and balance all of these spinning plates at the same time.

So I’m pretty much just waiting for the whole shebang to come crashing down at any moment, and am only hoping to escape the crash without experiencing actual decapitation or loss of limbs.

Naturally it was necessary for me to visit all of my doctors again, and as I believe I’ve mentioned here before, none of them are close to me, or close to each other. So I’ve been spending A Lot of time in the car this week, and to help the time pass more quickly I’ve been listening to kicky, upbeat pop music as I drive.

That worked great for a while. But then I reached a level of frustration, uncertainty, and despair yesterday that caused me, upon opening my mailbox and discovering its contents to yell, “You SUCK! I reject you! You do not even deserve to be brought into the house to be thrown away. I’m just gonna leave you RIGHT HERE!”

Yes, that’s right-I punished my mail by giving it a Time Out.

That was the sign that I’d finally reached my own personal Tipping Point, and now the songs that had, only hours earlier, been giving me such joy to listen to, just caused there to be more yelling. Especially this one song, whose catchy lyrics stated, “I don’t care if the bills are paid/as long as she is with me, I don’t care if my soul is saved, as long as she forgives me.”

And I found myself arguing, “Uh, you will TOO care! Because she’s about to break up with your ass! Because if you don’t pay your bills, then you won’t have any electricity, and she’s not gonna stick around very long if the only kind of date you can offer her becomes, ‘Sitting Around In The Dark In My Empty Apartment, Because All My Furniture Has Been Repossessed and The Electricity’s Been Shut Off. Oh, And You Can’t Use The Bathroom, Either, Because There’s No Water.’ Not to mention the fact that you are no  longer able to shower, and so you constantly smell like ass. Wake up and make some damn money, for crying out loud!”

Obviously my mail is not the only thing that needs a Time Out.

Wherein I Must Once Again Unfortunately Revisit The Subject Of People And Their Dumbassery

By 9 Comments

Although first I would like to say thank you to anyone who has continued to visit me here, despite the fact that I haven’t posted anything for a week and a half.

The good news is that the blog is FINALLY UPDATED! And it is so pretty! And clean! And did I mention the prettiness?

The bad news is that after 6 days of editing 550 posts, and then presenting my husband with a list of “back end” tasks which ended up taking him 7 hours last Sunday, neither he nor I could even think about my blog without wanting to punch something.

But happily that time has passed, and I am now able to continue my discussion of People Who Have Obviously Never Experienced Pain So Debilitating That They Have Actively Wished For Death, And Who Therefore Act Like A Dumb Ass Around Those Of Us Who Have.

So last week I was listening to a radio show on the internet where the hosts were discussing strategies we could use to help us follow through on the work of our dreams, once we had figured out what our dreams actually were.

A man called in to the show to discuss how he had successfully written and self-published a book. He said he set a deadline for when he wanted the book to be available for purchase, and then he just worked backward from that point, planning out and then completing each task until the entire thing was finished.

He didn’t say anything I hadn’t heard before, but what irritated me was the tone in which he said it, which was somewhere along the lines of, “Uh, DUH! How can you NOT know this?!”

You know the kind of person I’m talking about.

[Read more…] about Wherein I Must Once Again Unfortunately Revisit The Subject Of People And Their Dumbassery

Life

By Leave a Comment

Having fibromyalgia, which needs to be treated with Lyrica, which drastically reduces your pain (AWESOME!), but which also causes quite a bit of swelling (LESS AWESOME), which causes quite a bit of pain (NOT AT ALL AWESOME), which necessitates fucking with tweaking the Lyrica, which could take you all the way back to square one, which truly makes you question the idea that there is any kind of benevolent force in charge of the universe AT ALL.

There seriously needs to be some kind of Universe Official whose nuts you can punch on days like these.

I Can Haz More Medical Problemz?

By 3 Comments

Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

When my brother and I were growing up, my mom used to joke that he ought to have his own Frequent User Pass to the emergency room, since she ended up having to take him there so often. That’s how I’m feeling right now about every single one of my personal health care professionals, because I have to spend so much time in their offices these days. It’s a good thing I only have 2 tutoring clients right now, because managing my health care situation is a freaking full time job.

Fortunately, I have found really good doctors in all of the areas in which I need assistance. Unfortunately, none of them are near me, and none of them are near each other, either. So if you imagine Georgia as the entire Southeastern United States, then, say, on Monday, I will be seeing a doctor in Florida, on Tuesday I will have to go over to Tennessee, and on Thursday I will need to be up in North Carolina. If I could figure out how to get some kind of “frequent driver miles” deal, like people have with their credit cards and airline miles, we’d probably have enough points for round trip tickets to Hawaii by now. Not that we could actually go, since I can’t really travel much farther than my own living room right now, ON ACCOUNT OF ALL MY FUCKING HEALTH ISSUES!! It’s a vicious cycle.

So anyway, I had to travel to Metaphorical Alabama yesterday, since my left knee apparently thought it would be a good idea to spend the past week turning itself into a liquid pool of raging fire, and my pain management strategy of stabbing it repeatedly with a very sharp knife really wasn’t working all that well for me. So I went in to be seen for my knee, and I came out with…a diagnosis of high blood pressure. Which was weird, but kind of a relief, since I’d spoken with my doctor the night before and he’d mentioned the possibility of “aspirating the knee”, which I made the mistake of googling, and which turns out to mean something like, “sucking out the offending fluids with a syringe.” Which is attached to a needle. Which HURTS. But taking a pill? Hell, yeah, that’s easy. I’ve actually done that once, or twice, or eleventy thousand times before.

The high blood pressure thing wasn’t totally a surprise-it’s been slowly creeping up on me over the past couple of years, and there’s a long history of it in my family. But it still sucks. And after I recovered from the giddiness induced by Not Needing To Be Stuck In The Knee With A Giant Needle, I started contemplating how this new medical condition just provided further evidence of my epic failure as a human being. Because that’s what I do. Because deep, deep down inside I know that if I could just figure out how to “be better“, then none of this stuff would have happened to me. Because, as we all know, fibromyalgia, and sleep apnea, and high blood pressure are all questions of morality, and are personal judgments on your particular worthiness as a human being. And a heaping scoop of inner-directed loathing, topped with some intense self-hatred makes everything better.

It doesn’t help that I weigh more than is healthy for me, and so it’s easy for me to go off into the magical thinking that says that, if I could’ve just figured out how to stay thin, then I wouldn’t have any health problems. So I was hanging out in this story yesterday when, much like Saul of Tarsus, I was knocked to the ground by The Blinding Light Of The Universe Laughing Its Ass Off At Me. Because, HELLO, HAD I FORGOTTEN WHO I WAS?! I have always had health problems, since the moment of my birth. They started with a belly button that refused to heal and eight weeks of colic, and have continued apace right up until this very moment. As a matter of fact, I believe I spent all of grades 1-4 in my pediatrician’s office, being treated for one, unending ear infection.

Which doesn’t make this any easier. But it did at least snap me out of longing for the Imaginary Good Old Days of never being sick, and allow me to start pondering what’s next: finding out if there possibly is such as thing as low-salt salt.

Why I Love My Husband So Much: Reason 4

By 2 Comments

Image courtesy of Free Foto.

He is quite the Renaissance Man.

He can receive the following text from me:

“If I’m asking myself, ‘How much pain should I be able to tolerate before I take any meds?’, is that a sign that I should be taking some meds?

Also: BUNNIES!”

and be just as happy to hear the one (that I am asking for help in taking care of myself) as he is to hear the other (signs of the return of spring).

It’s The Most Suckiest Time Of The Year

By 6 Comments

Image courtesy of Free Foto.

I really, really hate this time of year.

Specifically, I detest December 26 through the Monday in January when everyone goes back to work and school. Just like agoraphobics break down in the face of wide, open spaces, I am paralyzed with anxiety when I am forced to endure great swaths of unscheduled, unstructured time.

I found something on Wikipedia that makes a lot of sense to me. When talking about the cause of agoraphobia it says, “Research has uncovered a linkage between agoraphobia and difficulties with spatial orientation.[8] [9]Normal individuals are able to maintain balance by combining information from their vestibular system, their visual system and their proprioceptive sense. A disproportionate number of agoraphobics have weak vestibular function and consequently rely more on visual or tactile signals. They may become disoriented when visual cues are sparse as in wide open spaces or overwhelming as in crowds. Likewise, they may be confused by sloping or irregular surfaces.[10] Compared to controls, in virtual reality studies, agoraphobics on average show impaired processing of changing audiovisual data. [11]” (emphasis mine).

I think that is what happens to me when not just I, but the whole world around me, is taken out of our everyday routine for this extended period of time. No one is where I expect them to be. No one is doing what I expect them to be doing, when I expect them to be doing it. And I am unable to get in my necessary 150 hours of solitude per day that then allow me to briefly interact with other living beings without having a nervous breakdown.

Added to these difficulties is that fact that one symptom of fibromyalgia is that it amplifies all sensations, to the point where literally it can be painful to have air touching your skin. Speaking for myself, I can be in a situation that most people wouldn’t think twice about, say, having dinner at someone’s house, and suddenly I will be overwhelmed with sensory input-the sound of people’s voices, the smell of the cleaning products the host used in the dining room, the way the overhead light shines off the table, the odor of dinner cooking-and my system will just get completely overwhelmed, be unable to process all of this sensory information, and just crash-into migraines, anxiety attacks, severe digestive problems-anything that will allow me to go off by myself, into the quiet and the dark, and completely withdraw into myself until my system can rebalance itself.

I feel like such a baby, and like such a retard. Like, “Oh no, I’m sorry, but we can’t come over to your awesome New Year’s Eve party because Jenny is currently unable to tolerate sound.” I hate that my sensitivities sometimes limit what my husband does. I hate that I really do have so many special needs. It makes me feel like some bitchy, selfish prima donna who will only condescend to eat green MnM’s which are fed to her one by one by a pair of nubile servant boys while sitting on a gilded throne and being fanned with the feathers of specially-raised peacocks.

It also doesn’t help that the weather seems to be experiencing a severe bout of Alzheimer’s and has confused Atlanta with Seattle, meaning that we’ve had a total of approximately 17 seconds of sun over the past six weeks.

My husband, on the other hand, loves this time of the year-LOVES IT! I am completely unable to comprehend how he could possibly feel that way. Not even under the influence of copious amounts of mind-altering, highly narcotic substances would that even begin to make sense to me. Because for one thing, he is pretty much forced to spend this time with me when, to put it kindly, I am not exactly at my best.

When I asked him yesterday how he was enjoying his vacation he said that he was having a great time, but he felt that I had been “brooding around the house.”

I was all, “Yeah. You’re right. I have been. And?”

And…he decided that there would be significantly less hostility for him to deal with if he went back to fighting the crazed zombies on Resident Evil 4.

So basically, between the horrible grey limbo of the weather, and the horrible grey limbo of this “in-between” time, and the absence of my normal everyday routine, and all the stories/expectations out there which tell me that I should be LOVING this time even though it makes me want to curl up into a little ball and weep, and everything involved with the holidays, and having been around my husband pretty much non-stop for over two weeks now, the strain of being able to pretend that I am someone able to keep my shit together is really taking its toll.

Maybe I am a horribly selfish person, a burden on the lives of those around me.

Or maybe, just maybe, I am someone with a pretty severe anxiety disorder who’s doing the best she can during a really challenging time.