So I’m still here. It’s been a bit, I know. I’ll try to be better about it in the future. Right after the new year we had to titrate my meds again (more crazy makes me need more meds) and that takes a bit to get used to. Plus I also had some sort of sinus stuff that tried to eat my face off. Sinus stuff + new meds = broke down worn out Vox fit for nothing more than forcing herself to go to the RealJob and then coming home and sitting on the couch and crocheting granny squares until her brains fall out.

But now I’m better. *twitch*

Anyhoo, since this blog is all about saying things that I want to say (other than those that will scare horses and permanently scar the family members that I like) I thought I’d review the opening themes of two anime series that I enjoy.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: anime, commissions, crochet, illness, medication, medicines

I woke up this morning and felt a bit of trepidation; I’ve got two commissions about 90-95% done, and one just started… and I need to have them all in the mail in 10 days or less. I CAN and WILL do it, but I do admit the impending deadline has me perturbed.

So I did what I always do when I’m nearly down to the wire: I cleaned like a mad woman. Today I’ve picked up, sorted, stacked, put away, wiped, washed, thrown out, and made up.

It started with organizing and moving things off our coffee table. Then I decided to pick up the floor around the table so that the husband could vacuum later. Then I started throwing things away that we don’t use often or that were damaged or beyond date. Then I picked up the books that need to go back on our (already overflowing) bookshelves to organize later.

An hour or so of hazy madness later, I have a surprisingly clean house.

I apologize if this entry’s a bit scrambled; I keep seeing things that I could adjust/organize/throw away and I interrupt my writing to do it.

All my stuff’s up off the floor; I’ve gotten rid of two bags of crap I wasn’t really needing. I’ve got a stack of books ready to be integrated. I’ve got things more organized than ever. I’m so domestic I’ve got a crockpot of no-peekie stew simmering on the counter, and I’m seriously considering making my family’s brunswick stew recipe (at 1/6th the volume; they used to make it for church lunches).

The husband’s been such a big help, as he always is. It’s so odd to have a partner who will clean and organize alongside me. I’ve just about worn him out with some serious labor today and I love him more than ever.

I do have to watch out for a tendency towards hoarding. The members of my family are prone to holding on to random and meaningless stuff, although we give different reasons for it. “Collecting.” “These might be worth something someday.” “I can’t throw it away now; I might need it down the line.”

Even a vague sense that we *are* our things. I know I once had that feeling.

When I was little I kept my room in a glorious state of clutter. No real trash and absolutely no food leavings, but my belongings were spread over every square inch of floor and horizontal surface. Even the bed was a zoo of stuffed animals.

Part of it was loving to see what all I had, to be inspired at any moment. Colors of toys or combination of light and shadow could send me off into a fugue, dreaming about everything and nothing in particular. Part of it was security device; if anyone wanted to bother me they’d have to do it over a mine-field of various slippery, sharp, pointed, loose objects.

I remember when various family members would come into my room and clean it. I remember sitting on my bed crying broken-heartedly as they patiently organized, removed, repatterned. To me it was an attack, an invasion and an assault. Other people… touching my belongings. Putting them back in an order that meant nothing to me. I wouldn’t be able to find things that I wanted until my fantastic haphazard filing method reasserted itself.

I recognize some of this as the start of mental illness.

What with better medication, better understanding of my own mind, and the love and support of someone saner than I am (or at least differently crazy) I have had only occasional clutter.

And now I don’t have even that. I have a Clean House.

There’s an Orange Clove candle burning on my coffee table. There’s the lovely smell of home cooking in my kitchen area. I’m a happy hooker.

Tags: cleaning, courage, hoarding, illness, life, medication, medicines

My psych, who is a lovely crusty old dame of about 70ish, gave me some meds and said “Take these if you have an anxiety attack or insomnia; but if you have to take them at work you’ll need to go home. They’ll knock you out.”

Yeah.

I’m beginning to believe she’s a mistress of understatement.

As in, I took it at 11PM one night, thinking it was supposed to be back out of my system in about 8-9 hours. I had my alarm set for 8. I wanted to get up and do work on the commissions in my oh-so-copious free time. Instead I was woken by my husband at 10 AM, who had to *shake me to get me to wake up*, and for the rest of the day I felt like someone had slipped me a ‘lude. Hard to get anything done when that happens. The only upside was that I had a ton of weird and vivid dreams. As it was, I spent all day in an utter fog, feeling as if I hadn’t slept at all.

Guess it’ll be the last time I mess with that. Being a fibromyte means that my sleep is a touchy and special thing. I need a specific type of sleep, and a certain length of sleep — and if I don’t get it, life is difficult and sad until I do.

Medicines have always hit me oddly. They gave me morphine in the emergency room once; I still don’t understand why some people take it for fun. It acid etched my veins before it knocked me unconscious. Thinking back I can still feel that awful sensation, in arteries I didn’t even realize I had. It was a frissioning boiling feeling, a very uncomfortable trip.

Percocet, however, has been a godsend for me. It’s the only thing that really cuts through the pain, with no side effects that I’ve been able to notice it. I can use it sparingly because it is effective. I don’t have to stack eight or twelve or even 16 ibuprophen and do some unknown amount of damage to my innards.

The biggest medication to affect me was Metformin. I was put on it because there was a possibility at the time that I had Poly-Cystic Ovarian Disease, or PCOD. My general practitioner let me know that there was a severe side effect called lactic acidosis but it was so rare that the likelihood of me getting it would be very small.

A week later I went back to my doc with a complaint of acute chest pain and all over muscle soreness. I asked my doc if there was a possibility of this being the rare side effect. They gave the answer of “Oh no, it’s much worse than this.”

Two months later and they were right — it *was* much worse!

Lactic acidosis is part of what happens to the body during the process of rigor mortis; in a way I was living and dead all at once. (A very novel feeling, but I do not suggest it to others.) It felt like my lungs and chest were turning to stone and set on fire and wrapped tightly in barbed wire at the same time. My muscles hurt all over; I was taking four and five percocet a day just to sit upright. But a day after stopping the Metformin, the symptoms began to fade and in four days they were gone.

Lactic acidosis has a hilarious fatality rate; I feel that I came very close to dying because of several misdiagnoses of the situation, and numerous doctors who failed to listen to me and my appraisal of my symptoms. Later that year I got a tattoo because of this experience — a human heart wrapped tight with barbed wire, with phoenix-wings of flame shooting from it. It got it out of my head and on to my skin, where I didn’t have to think about it so often.

Ever had a medication give you a higher effect than you were told it would, or a horrific side effect that causes you harm?

Tags: courage, dead, illness, medication, medicines, sleep

This is not a city for depression.

The beginning of a depressed state starts almost like a bad horror film. Everything goes flat and two dimensional; events around you are simultaneously less important and more painful. Time draws out into slow motion. Movements are profound but lacking real meaning.

There’s no escaping it, this self-involved masochistic trip. The mind in its dull desperation seeks to blame others, but there really is no one else. This is a walking Purgatory. This is an ambulatory Hell.

You watch other people move through this flat paper-doll world. You envy them their normalcy; you as three or four dimensions of solid melancholy are covered in ten thousand papercuts, oozing.

Sounds so incredibly emo, I know. But that’s because it’s in words, and language for all its usefulness is no more than trite in the end. Words don’t press into the reader’s mind the feelings described; words don’t put you into my shoes.

If words could do that, a fair amount of people in my past would be far more understanding than they actually were.

Voices blend. More than one person talking at once turns into a meaningless susurration; a vibe edging towards menace.

Sometimes the phobias rise up. One gets suddenly very mindful of how many people touch the bathroom doorknob, the time clock, the microwave. The food stalactites in the microwave left by other careless humans begin to terrify — each one is a little dagger of contagion waiting to plunge into your harmless lunch. There are things left in an office refrigerator that have evolved to join the Old Ones, sleeping in long strange ages, hopefully unmindful of the light from the door.

You can hear the coughing and sneezing and snorting and hacking and sputtering of those around you. You can smell the stale reek of cigarette smoke on their clothes. You have no choice; you must be here in the plague pit with the plague victims and eventually be physically assaulted by the plague virus.

Your stomach churns. The burn from the acid, from the anxiety and melancholy made manifest, gives you flashes of hot and cold. Maybe the over the counter medications in happy manic shades of pink calm your guts for a few hours.

Maybe the Fear is too much.

Somewhere there’s an island for me. There’s a beautiful place with warm weather, and a wonderful empty beach as far as the eye can see. There’s caves with plenty of shelter, and an inexplicable supply of safe food, food that I can have. And there’s the husband, and some cats, and the Yarn.

So. Much. Yarn. More yarn than a woman could crochet in ten lifetimes.

And there’s nothing to do on this island but eat and walk and love and crochet. And there’s no one else on this island but those that cause no harm.

My body’s in the City; my heart and soul are on the Island.

Tags: bless me yarn art, depression, medicines, The City

I started the year being poisoned, and it’s pretty much continued that way.

All of 2008 was good; I don’t think I was glutenated even once that year. I was rarely sick at all. January of 2009 I did start some new supplements — an omega 3, I do believe.

This taught me the lesson: “Don’t buy cheap supplements from LocalMart.” The bottle was on sale… woe betide me for looking to save a few bucks. I thought it was serendipity but my little voice inside was trying to warn me. It didn’t say whether or not the pills themselves have gluten in them on the bottle. The manufacturer’s website didn’t have this specific type of product on it. Not to mention the website itself looked kinda sketchy.

The skin pain, the ongoing cold that never quits, the deep pain in my upper arm muscles and the bones/tendons of my hands, the tenderpoints — and the moods. FUN!

February and March of 2009, I caught the stomach flu on the beginning and the end of its cycle through my office. Let me tell you, that was HILARIOUS.

From April through August, because my immune system was so buggered, I had a bacterial sinus infection. My genprac said “Oh, we usually only see those in people with very compromised immune systems, like AIDS patients or people undergoing chemo.” Yeah, really? I said. I don’t have AIDS (I promise), I don’t have cancer (that I’m aware of) — but I do have Fibromyalgia, most likely caused by celiac/gluten intolerance.

And then, I discovered (from Friday’s excitement) that one of my new meds was glutenating me. I quit that yesterday, and woke up feeling better than I had since… since, well, Thursday.

And I promptly went to the RealJob(TM), all prim and proper.

And while there, I ate a cup of yogurt. It said “May Contain Traces”.

What do you know, it sure did!

Yah, I’d been a bit foolish in thinking that a “trace” of gluten would be okay, and that I could gamble with it. Vox is occasionally an ignorant and naive Vox.

Gods, I came home and it was awful. A short list of my symptoms today, thirty minutes after THE GLUTENING:

hot and cold flashes
acid stomach
bile/mucus in throat
IBS
back pain
sinuses running
headache, mini-migraine size
face numbness
“Fibro-fog”
gas (burping)
depression and irritation
light and sound sensitivity
eyebrow hairs falling out easily

But, the gods of luck had glanced in my direction — for, as the husband and I were returning from the clinic ($20 and some runaround but finally convinced the nurse on duty that YES, I am experiencing this, YES, I do know what it is, NO, I am not going to break out in hives/swell up and suffocate/burst into flames, etc), we find a box containing Glutenease in our mail.

Now, I’m not going to say that this little bottle will enable me to eat at Long John Silvers (my secret unreachable food lust is a 3 chicken plank dinner with fries and crumblies, yumm), but it did deal with about half the symptoms of the glutening. So I’m not going to start eating regular toast and pizza, but at least I’ll have something to help when the awful thing happens.

So that’s where I am right now; still feeling like microwaved poo, laying on the couch under a blanket and two cats. Maybe I can work on some stuff for Finished Object Friday. Here’s to trying, even when laboring under what is *still* a mostly invisible disease.

Tags: gluten, illness, medicines