coffeebarconfessions

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...

I feel like a ship floating out at sea. I exist but don't belong. Nor do I know where I belong, or where on earth I've been. The only thing I know is I've been here before. On a vast, void-less planet lacking shape, clarity, or direction. Land and sea have not been separated yet. Once again I exist, but I don't belong. Picking up the pieces of my life is proving a much harder task than I thought it would. At first I just thought I needed to sleep for a few weeks and would get right back on track. Then fibromyalgia laughed in my face once again. It's taken me a few weeks to even start sleeping at all. I keep thinking about the woman I was before I went back to work last March. In the skewed hindsight of my memory she was a happy girl who had her health managed and was living a pretty productive life. But knowing me, I was bitching about the same things I'm all bent out of shape about now; I was just in a lot less pain and exercising a lot more. That's when I ...

Yesterday I almost lost my resolve to stop emotionally reacting to my health, circumstances, and life. I had an extremely painful infected cyst on my back I had to have drained by a surgeon. Then I got a cold. And having slacked off so much on my exercise while completing my commitment to gainful employment left my muscles tight, sore, aching, and all together screaming in pain. And have I ever mentioned I suffer from insomnia? Being this sick for this long makes me crazy. I try so hard to not let it, but am really just one woman being swept into a sea of afflictions and am sometimes just not that strong. And it's okay. I don't have to be strong all the time. In fact, as long as I don't sabotage myself in reaction, the whole experience is really quite human. Quite normal. And quite possibly one of my biggest triggers. See, I spent years furious with myself for getting so bent out of shape over 1) how sick I was and 2) what that sickness was doing to my life. So once again i...

One day while driving down the street I forgot where I was. Mind you I just left Target and was headed toward home so had certainly been there before, but in that instant I couldn't have told you where I was on the planet if my life depended on it. I had to pull over and cry for a while, gnashing my teeth and pulling my hair over the fact that I was thirty years old and becoming so sick with something so unfixable, I was literally losing my mind. Flash forward a few years to when I had settled into the reality of living with fibromyalgia. Working retail was a painful necessity that was quickly running its course, so I set about trying to figure what on earth to do to earn a living. Naturally, this required me to take a Spanish course at the local community college. Not because I wanted to earn money off my non-existent Spanish 1 skills, but because I desperately needed to know if my brain was capable of learning and retaining new information, and I took French in high school.  I wo...