coffeebarconfessions

I know a woman whose fourteen-year-old son is dying of cancer. He was diagnosed at age eleven and has fought an insane battle, but isn't winning the final round. Of course it goes without saying that the impact on the entire family has been utterly devastating. His mother is a gifted writer who provides incredible insight into the reality of their nightmare, and she recently wrote a post that utterly moved me. It was about the changing stages of hope. Four of them, to be precise, coinciding with the advancement of her son's cancer. It started with the natural hope that a person so young would beat the disease and sail into adulthood to live a full and rewarding life. But by the time she reached the fourth stage, it was all about hope for courage. More precisely, the courage to watch her child die. Needless to say I was incredibly humbled. And ashamed. See the last six months have been living hell for me. I got really sick again and had to quit my job. I didn't realize how s...

I've spent the last two week laying around doing nothing. I shouldn't consider it nothing, considering I'm desperately trying to rebuild my health. But instead of saying, "I've spent the last two weeks laying around healing," I fault myself for such a monumental lack of productivity. I feel guilty for not doing the laundry or putting on makeup or going to the grocery store-- things a normal woman my age should do as an afterthought in her thriving, busy life. Yet when I do venture into the land of normal, those simple activities comprise my entire day and usurp all my energy. As I watch my muscles turn to mush and tummy fat muffin-top over my jeans, I wonder if I'll ever be able to return to the gym. And for the love of all things holy, I pray I'll someday gain enough confidence to even glance at the book I bothered to write, let alone try and sell it. Rebuilding from the splatter of hitting bottom is hard. It wasn't until I accepted, again, that t...

I always assumed the process of turning from a caterpillar into a butterfly wasn't a painful one. Sure, it seemed like a lot of work to spin that silken cocoon to wrap up in, and getting out seemed a bit tricky, but I never gave much thought to what actually happens inside there. I guess I thought it was a womb-like transformation-- where awareness doesn't exist and growth just happens. Turns out I was wrong. Inside the chrysalis the caterpillar digests itself by releasing enzymes to dissolve its own tissues. Then a group of surviving cells rearrange into a butterfly. Ouch. As a person whose own pancreas has tried to digest itself four times (pancreatitis), I only pray some opiates are mixed in with those enzymes to dull the poor caterpillar's agony. Right now I'm picking myself up from my biggest fall in five years. It's been three months since I last blogged. In that amount of time I've been to hell and am hopefully halfway back again. Again. But every time I ...

On Monday I took my dogs on a mile-and-a-half walk around the neighborhood. Our morning walk is the final grasp on daily exercise I haven't totally dropped yet, and I rely on it greatly to create normalcy in my life. A life that is by all other accounts, sliding off the rails. Monday's walk itself was uneventfully wonderful, until I stepped off the curb to return home, and rolled my right ankle. Later that day I woefully reported to a friend, "I twisted my ankle and it's mildly swollen and minorly sore--and I really need this to get better by tomorrow." Full of determination to not let yet one more lame-ass problem screw up my life, I iced it, took Advil, and wrapped it up in an Ace bandage. By Wednesday the bruise was still quite pronounced, but my range of motion was pretty much fine.  But on Wednesday between my flare and med change, and the fact that I hadn't slept for two nights, I woke up crying. Emotionally raw and too sensitive to exist with the world,...

Doctor. The mere mention of the word sends me into a panic-induced tail spin. Needless to say, I don't have the best track record with doctors. Not only does seeing one usually mean there's yet another thing wrong with me, but they frequently ain't all that nice to a girl with so many unexplainable health problems. See, I'm crazy and they can't help me, so we usually leave it at that. Which is absurdly ridiculous, seeing as crazy people get help all the time. But my unwillingness to concede that the pain in my body is caused by unhappiness in my head, well, that puts me into the category of "unhelp-able crazy," which has left me to figure out how to live with this illness all on my own. Hence the panic-induced tail spin I've adopted as my default whenever the D word is uttered. Did I mention I have a hard time going to the doctor? But as it goes, yesterday I had to see a new doctor. So with no hope in my heart, no desperation, and asking for very littl...

I did something when I created the protagonist and mentor characters in my novel, something I just gained incredible insight into. I gave you a woman who has triumphed over unfathomable hardship and prevailed, and a girl who thinks the worst is behind her but has no clue how hard life can get. And it was while walking my dogs this morning that I realized this illness is precisely how I was able to accomplish that. See right now I'm the girl--only I'm midway through my journey into "how hard life can get." So how I was able to create a character who's triumphed over jack squat is a total mystery to me, considering I feel as successful as a cyclone in keeping my life together. That's when I thanked fibro. See those brief moments of triumph I spent years working toward fueled my mentor character into existence. Would I have truly grasped her sacrifice, her dedicated efforts to keep going on her own terms, and her relentless determination to succeed, if I myself h...

I'm stumbling around like a zombie who feels like she's on the verge of getting the flu. That's what I feel like--a sick zombie. Lucky flippin' me. Somehow in the middle of my brain-stem driven level of functioning, I realized I have to sleep or I cannot exist. It's that simple, and that dramatic. Otherwise I feel so awful, riddled with anxiety and such severe pain, all I can do is drink to escape my misery. Needless to say, the after affects of a bottle of Burgundy only further serve to enhance my zombie-like, anxiety-riddled state. So I am now back to drugging myself to sleep. And the dance begins... To medicate or not to medicate is an overwhelmingly controversial topic. Not enough, and functioning isn't possible. Too much, and functioning isn't possible. Then there's that whole "two strokes as a side-effect of a very popular antidepressant" thing I went through six years ago. So needless to say, I try and medicate as little as humanly possi...