Cranky Fibro Girl

Harnessing the healing power of snark

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.

Classified

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Ironically, just as I was in the middle of writing yesterday’s post I got a phone call from the nurse. I was really excited to hear what she had to say, which unfortunately turned out to be: a whole lot of nothing.

After an awful lot of hemming and hawing, she told me that my sample had been located, and it had been analyzed, but no one was allowed to know what the report said.

So apparently I was wrong; my poo was not on the run. It was actually in the witness protection program.

Apparently the secrets it contains are so valuable to some (what was the effect of the drug on my illness) and so dangerous to others (actually, dangerous to the same people, as apparently releasing any information about my sample would unblind the study, thus causing the earth to crash into the sun and bringing the end of life as we know it) that it is being highly guarded in a secure, secret location. And I don’t have a high enough security clearance to have any further contact with it.

Well alrighty then. Now I understand how Sydney Bristow felt when the FBI wouldn’t tell her how they were planning on taking down SD-6.

Seriously, I Could Not Make This Stuff Up

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So I’m two and a half weeks past the end of the kick-ass antibiotics, and I’m happy to say that I am starting to feel like myself again. So much so, in fact, that every day before he goes to work my husband sits me down, looks me in the eye and says,

“Remember. You are still recovering from a serious illness. You are not well. You need to take it easy today.” Otherwise he will come home to discover that I’ve re-shingled the entire roof and added an extra room to the back of our house while he was gone. And I’ll be upset, because I didn’t get around to repaving the driveway as well.

The people in charge of the study still call me once a week as a follow up, and last week I asked them if they had the results from my final stool sample. The nurse said she didn’t have them at that moment, but that she would call me back this week.

So I heard from her on Tuesday, only to learn that, “We’re having some trouble tracking down your sample.”

Apparently my poo is on the lam.

If I had to guess I’d say that it committed an act of violence against Science, and then escaped to some Latin American country which has no extradition treaty with the United States. It is bilingual, after all.

Today

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Today I am feeling every single moment of the three months I’ve been sick. I think now that the infection is gone and I’m off the medicine, I’m settling into my body and just feeling things out; okay, this is what has happened, and this is where I am right now.

I’ve been taking an inventory: okay, this is how my knees feel; hm, it still hurts to walk and wear shoes; wow, my jaw is tight. It’s almost like I’m getting reacquainted with my body. I have to get to know myself again after all that I went through in the fall.

And if I was tuned in before to people and situations that were not a good match for me, now I am super-sensitive in those areas. I know right away if an opportunity or a relationship is not going to work for me, and I literally cannot rest until I take the action I’m being prodded into by my inner guidance.

Mostly that has meant, once again, learning to be okay with disappointing myself and other people. I’ve had to rearrange some tutoring clients to better accommodate my needs, rather than fitting myself in around their lives. I’ve had to let go of being able to manage our entire household, and instead pick just one thing to do, like keeping the kitchen clean. I’ve had to learn to speak up and say, no thanks-please don’t tell me about the C DIF research you’ve been doing on the Internet, or all the illness horror stories other people are sharing with you, because that makes me feel worse, not better.

Today I’ve had to learn how to be all right with the fact that I feel bad-Just. ‘Cuz. There’s nothing to investigate, and nothing to blame. In my recovery, today is just a day where I don’t feel good. Today the best I can say is that I was here, and I showed up for this day. And eventually, this day will pass.

Thank Goodness For Accountability

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in the form of my husband.

Today before he left for work he looked me in the eye and said, “Remember-you are still recovering from a serious illness. You are not well.”

And it was a good thing he reminded me, because I’d already begun to hear the siren song of a little voice in my head that said, “You know, I bet it would be totally fine for me to vacuum the entire house today all by myself.” And I believed it.

What is that-that part of me that has absolutely no connection whatsoever to reality?

I really don’t know.

All I know is, that part of me will not be vacuuming today. Lying on the couch and watching NCIS on DVD is probably a much better option for me.

Goodbye 2007

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So I had this big plan to write a whole “2007 In Review” post today. But I’m not, because I don’t feel good.

I’ve treated it pretty lightly here, but the truth is that I’ve actually been really sick for the past three months, and am probably looking at a few months of recovery and recuperation.

Fortunately I was told about this great website called CaringBridge, which is a free, nonprofit web service that connects family and friends to share information, love and support during a health care crisis, treatment and recovery.

If you’d like to check out my page, read a little more about my experience with C DIF, or sign my guest book, you can find me here:

Jenny’s CaringBridge site

Here’s to a happy, healthy 2008 for us all!