space and the wheel

Posted on August 24, 2014 by C. M. Condo

Today is the beginning of a new experiment. Last night, I went to a party and stayed out very late. I haven’t stayed out that late in nearly a year; I’m not even sure what I was thinking when I decided to do it.  I was tired early in the evening, as I always am, but I ate a little something and rallied; I even had enough energy to dress up in a strapless top and a skirt, with some smoky eye make-up, to boot.  Around 10 PM, I ventured out, availed myself of my friend’s driveway as a make-shift handicap parking space (certainly, I’d be leaving long before anyone else did), and walked in to a house darkened and teeming with friendly, happy people. I myself was giddy the whole time I was there.  I could not shake the feeling that I was doing something very naughty, like sneaking out after curfew.  It was more fun than I could remember having in a long time.

Now, a little ill-advised fun is all well and good, but I didn’t leave until almost 1 AM, and didn’t get to bed until after 2.  This is problematic, as I’m almost always awake by 6. My body kindly allowed me to sleep until 6:45, but after that, all I could do was doze, more or less, until around 9 when the stiffness and discomfort finally forced me up and around.

That is not enough sleep for me when I’m healthy, and it is definitely not enough sleep for me in my current state of disrepair.  Still, I don’t generally feel the psychological effects of too little sleep the very next day, unless you count a little spaciness, a natural state of being for me nowadays thanks to the meds. It’s not until the second day that the fatigue crashes down and a stifling crankiness sets in, and my fuse and my tolerance for fellow humans shrinks to about zero.  Today, mood-wise, I’m fine.  Tomorrow… well, luckily, it isn’t tomorrow yet.

The physical effects of not enough rest, however, don’t give any such twenty-four hour grace period. I am, as is to be expected, in an impressive amount of pain this morning. But instead of remaining as prone as possible, as I normally would, I’m going to try to go about my business anyway.

(Yes, I am, Momma Ape. Really. Stop laughing.)

Lying around all day is sickeningly depressing. It makes me feel worse, not better. I hate it, and I hate myself while I’m doing it. I want to see what happens if I do some light chores instead. Maybe even bake a batch of cookies. Limit my pain concessions to a few thirty minute sessions of getting horizontal with an ice gel.

(Erm, that last sentence didn’t come out right. But it’s amusing so I’m going to leave it that way.)

I’m down to about 2/3 my normal tramadol dosage. I want to keep going down, but my past experiments in that vein have not gone well, so I’m suppressing the impulse to cut out more pills. After all, it’s only been a few days; I should wait at least a few weeks before taking the next step down. But I’m itching to get on with it. I want to see how much pain I can handle and still function.

Of course, when I write it that way, it sounds like a pretty stupid thing to do. In fact, if it were anyone but me saying this, I’d probably make a pretty firm assertion to that effect. But it is me, and I’ve been in a lot of pain for a long time.  Me and pain, we’re intimate pals. In fact, pain has been doing most of my thinking and nearly all of my planning for as long as this has been going on, and to be perfectly frank, I’m getting a little tired of it. No, I’m getting a lot tired of it. So I’m kicking it out of the driver’s seat for a while. I may regret that choice later, but for now, I want to see what happens if I just ignore it and take the wheel myself.

And what is the worst that could happen, anyway? A pain level of 6, 7, or even 8? So what? It’s not like that’s anything new. It’s not all bunnies and rainbows, to be sure, but it hasn’t killed me yet. It also hasn’t made my condition – whatever it is – any worse, nor has the subsequent rest made it any better.  As far as my numerous tests and scans have shown, there is no physical or physiological problem with me or my shoulder that can be worsened or improved by anything I do. Or at least, nothing that can be seen with the current level of medical technology.

Nearly all of the time, pain means damage. That’s why it exists. It is there to inform us that some part of us has been hurt and needs attending to. Pain serves a vital function; we vertebrates would have died out long ago without it. It induces a whole host of adaptive responses designed to address the source and/or result of that damage that have remained largely unchanged for hundreds of thousands of years, if not millions. Evolution and natural selection [usually] don’t keep stuff around for that long unless it works.

Sometimes, it helps us get away from the source of the damage; often before we have realized that we have been hurt, as in the automatic response that causes one to yank one’s hand away from a hot stove. Other times, it will recruit muscles to tense up and guard the area to prevent making it worse, as in a sprained ankle or a broken arm. It can be intense, crowding out all reasonable thought, or mild, an annoying reminder that something isn’t right but isn’t a major issue. It can be physical or psychological, and it is often both.

But the pain signaling apparatus in my shoulder appears to have gone haywire. Whatever small amount of tendon damage caused the cascade that resulted in the nerve compression, it spiraled into a pain cycle that went on unabated for five months, until my doctors had no choice but to completely disable the nerve in question. Only then did the muscles stand down. Only then could the physical therapy start to work. Only then could I start eating, sleeping, and breathing normally again. Like a computer trapped in a blue-screen cycle of death, the only solution was to unplug it and reboot.

This isn’t to say that nothing is wrong with my shoulder. There is, apparently, some small amount of damage to my labral tendon resulting in my particular injury presentation. But that’s all it is: a small amount of damage. It isn’t enough to warrant the searing, all-encompassing, does-your-pain-chart-go-to-eleven kind of pain that characterized those first awful weeks and months.

Moreover, the MRI that showed that small tear was taken several months after the initial pain onset, which means that in those intervening months, whatever I did or didn’t do didn’t affect it.

So from what I can tell, the pain in my shoulder is only tangentially related to the actual damage therein. The nerve ablation has enabled the muscles around the offending nerve to stop guarding and relax, and the anti-inflammatories and cortisone injections have freed up some more room for it as it has grown back in. It’s still making quite a fuss, no doubt about it, but it’s no longer screaming all the way to 11.

And if that’s the case – that my pain is not directly connected to my injury – why bother paying attention to it at all? That nerve has been crying wolf for months and months, but no ravenous lupines have been sighted, and the village has retained its full complement of pigs, sheep, chickens, and annoying children.  I think it’s time to put it the pain in time out; see how it likes sitting in a chair at the back of the room by itself for a while.

Rest assured, I’m not going to assume that I’m just fine now and act as such. There may very well be something that does need fixing in my shoulder. Just because no-one has been able to find it doesn’t mean it isn’t there; absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. One of the reasons I’m even able to consider reducing pain medicine is because I have learned how to limit my activities and give myself enough time to recuperate between them.  But I can’t keep making myself crazy worrying about whether or not my few remaining physical tasks are causing more invisible damage under my scapula. Whatever is wrong with me may not have gotten any better, but it also hasn’t gotten any worse.

Of course, I probably won’t be in such a calm and resilient frame of mind when the fatigue from last night’s sleep deprivation kicks my ass in tomorrow. But it’s so rare that I can write a post that doesn’t make Momma Ape want to camp out in my apartment to keep an eye on me that I really wanted to get this one written down and published before the next storm rolled in.

So for today, I will feel the pain, but I won’t follow it.  It’s just going to have to get along without me. I’m going to go and enjoy this space.

Posted in Aspect II | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

aspects

Posted on August 24, 2014 by C. M. Condo

My regular readers may have noticed a new categorization in the side bar, called Aspects. This is because I feel as though I’ve entered a new phase in this experience, and it seemed important to make some sort of acknowledgement of that.

The phases of the moons can be referred to as aspects. The word denotes a different face, or a different view, if you will, of the same celestial body. That’s what I feel has happened since I decided to put a halt to the diagnostics. I am now seeing a different aspect* of my condition, a condition whose reality I have finally, slowly absorbed over these last several months. I should add that this process that might have taken a lot longer if it weren’t for this blog, and more important, those who read it.

I write out a lot of my pain on here, as much psychological pain as physical pain, if not more. But despite what my posts might imply, I’m not morose every day, or even all day on the days that I am. Being able to write about my thoughts and feelings – the desperation, the fear, the swallowing darkness – keeps me from being alone with them in the round room of my inner consciousness.

When those thoughts and feelings are clattering around in my head, or even when I’m screaming them at the ceiling, it doesn’t feel like anyone is listening. But when I write them here, I feel like you are listening, whether you are a regular reader or just passing by. And it’s oddly reassuring, to be read and heard, even if it’s by only one other person, and even if that person is a stranger.  It gives the experience credence and a strange state of purpose.

Pain is invisible, and it’s all to easy to believe that since no-one can see my pain, no-one can hear my cries. But you hear them. And I feel better after sharing them with you. And that means more to me than I could ever say, in a thousand posts.  So thank you, to those who have been reading faithfully thus far, and welcome to those who have just arrived.

The first aspect (Aspect I) was about learning, admittedly reluctantly, how to assimilate my condition into my self-concept. What follows this post is the second aspect (Aspect II), in which I imagine will be about discovering what my life will be like as I integrate this new self-concept into the world around me, learning new fences, which realms I can no longer visit, and which new ones have opened up.

And so here we go… space and the wheel

*I also like that “aspect” has the word “ape” in it.  🙂

 

Posted in Aspect I, Aspect II | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

done and next

Posted on August 23, 2014 by C. M. Condo

Another visit to the pain management doctor. Another handful of prescriptions, after another diagnostic scan that showed nothing. Nothing. I received a detailed MRI, called an arthrogram, of the entire underside of my scapula and surrounding tissues, and it revealed precisely zero structural abnormalities in the muscles, ligaments, bursa, or scapula itself. As in, nothing to explain my pain. Not one single thing.

I should have been crushed.

But I wasn’t. I am so used to suppressing tears in doctors’ offices that I automatically searched for them, but there were none. I wasn’t even upset. It felt predictable. I might even go so far as to say it felt normal. You did a scan and it didn’t find anything? What else is new? But my response was anything but. I actually, strangely, felt as though somehow, somewhere, a door had cracked open through which I could just barely perceive a thin needle of light.

The doctor has decided to pin the tail on the labral tear, proposing that referred pain from that injury, likely brought on by the swimming, could very well explain my symptoms as well as suggest an explanation for why the cortisone injections and anti-inflammatories improved my range of motion but didn’t stop the pain. He gave me a couple of new prescriptions to try and a note for the university’s health department for me to submit for my medical parking pass. I walked out of there in a better mood than when I walked in.

I feel as though I am slowly waking up from a nightmare and discovering, to my relief, that the world around me isn’t so bad as that nightmare had led me to believe. I have a diagnosis which is plausible, if not provable, and I’m going with it.

I’m done. Done with the searching. We’ve done all the searching we can do. I don’t have to keep looking. It’s over. We can stop. I can stop. I can stop.

The scavenger hunt is being officially suspended. Night is falling, and it’s gotten too dark out here in these woods to be able to find anything useful – if we find anything else at all. There’s no point in continuing to bark up tree after tree only to keep finding them empty. It’s time to call off the dogs and send everyone home. Including me. Especially me.

The alarms have stopped clanging. I still have pain, but I’m so used to it at this point that its occasional decrease is more noticeable than the pain itself. I also have a motley crew of side effects that have now attained the distinction of being more troublesome than the pain itself. I said as much to my doctor as I sat in his office yesterday, pressing myself upright in a straight-backed chair with a lumbar support behind me. “So, about the tramadol…it really only takes the edge off…”

“So you want to stop taking it.” He doesn’t play around, this guy.

“Can I? Can I stop right now?” I was surprised by how eagerly I agreed. I did want to stop taking it. But until this moment, I hadn’t realized how much.

Unfortunately, I can’t go off of it cold turkey, because my current dosage is so high. But with the addition of an anti-depressant that also reduces pain, I can start stepping down, if I want to.

And I do want to. I really, really, really want to. I don’t care about the pain any more. I do care that I have been stuck in this displaced state of being not-quite-in-touch with the world around me, flaky and forgetful, disconnected not just from other people but sometimes even the thoughts in my own head, for ten months and counting. I do care that I can’t just eat what I want. I do care that my skin is a mess and my mouth is so dry that I have to chew gum all day long. And there are other side effects, too, not the least of which are the effects on my GI tract (that I will spare the general public from) which have been extremely unpleasant.

If I’m to have pain, then fine, I’ll have pain. It’s a small price to pay for getting my brain and body back. I want to get back to my life, or any life, at this point. Whatever I can get is fine with me. I’ll complain about it later, but at least I’ll have one to complain about.

There’s a subtle difference between giving up and moving on. I’d been afraid of giving up too soon, and it’s still possible that I am. But in order to do the latter one must first do the former. They’re two adjacent steps in this (more or less) linear progression that I’ve littered with leavings and tears. And I have a sudden clarity about the one thing I’ve been simultaneously hoping for and fighting against for so long.

As long as I kept searching for a solution, a diagnosis, and/or a treatment, I could not get to where I am now, which is – dare I say – something like acceptance. But with this last MRI, another dead end and turn around the cul-de-sac, I finally feel like I can give myself permission to let it all go. I and my accumulated medical practitioners have looked everywhere and tried everything.  There’s nowhere else to go.  There’s nerve pain, but nerve ablations fix that, and with no physical cause found to explain it, further diagnostics seem pointless. I’d rather just take stock of my existing treatment options, pick what works best for me as best as I can tell from the inside of this body (whose treachery I am finally beginning to forgive) and discard the rest.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been on paved road. Last October I swung off into a ditch and have been struggling through tangles of weeds and unkempt trees ever since. But I can see pavement ahead. I caught a glimpse of it out of the corner of my eye in that doctor’s office when he told me the MRI arthrogram was normal.  Now, with new resolve, I’m making my way towards it.

I don’t know where it goes and I don’t know whose it is. I’m tentative to call any road “mine” any more, since I’ve not had much luck in sticking to one. But I have a direction again. I have a goal. I’m going to make some sort of life out of all of this, knowing what I know, what I feel, what I can and cannot do. I’m going to use my recent education, both the B.S. degree and the life lessons so rudely thrust upon me at this relatively young age, and start laying a new foundation to replace the house I lost so many months ago.

I’m sure this brief period of clarity will soon be replaced my usual resentment and frustration at the world and at fate for doing this to me. But for now, I’m fixated on that piece of asphalt I caught sight of and I’m working my way towards it. For the first time, I don’t care if I’ve left some piece of this wilderness unexplored. I’m done with being thwarted and teased at every turn, with being heedlessly pulled through the uncaring wilds with no idea where I’m being pulled to and wondering if there’s even any purpose for it at all. I’ve slipped the harness and I am getting the hell out of here, for good or for ill, the sooner the better.

And who knows what will happen next.

Posted in Aspect I | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

open letter to god

Posted on August 19, 2014 by C. M. Condo

Hey there, it’s me, your favorite kicking can T.G. Ape. I know you know what’s going on with me down here, so there’s probably no point in a recap. Suffice it to say that it’s been pretty crappy, for a pretty long time, and by the way, yes, I have noticed.

I know – I know – that life was never designed to be fair, and that good guys don’t always win. But I thought – maybe I shouldn’t have – but I thought I was finally pulling myself together, finally getting close to being able to stand on my own two feet, after having to rely on other people for financial support for so long.  And then, ten months ago, this happened.  And all of my efforts since to try to hold together some semblance of an independent existence have been casually and callously thwarted.

I don’t understand why you keep taking opportunities away from me. I don’t understand why I keep getting knocked down. I don’t understand why, as soon as it looks like something good might be happening, and as soon as I start to think that something will work out for me, it all falls apart. I don’t know what you expect me to do in the face of all this. I don’t know why I have to suffer like this.

Of course, I’m talking about this shoulder business, but honestly, it started even before then. I tried career after career, pushing past obstacle after obstacle, but inevitably, the obstacles became so large and so numerous that I was forced to turn back. I tried to do the right things, but it doesn’t seem to have mattered. I tried to be a useful, happy person, but no sooner did I manage to find a little piece of happiness, you came along and took that away, too, like a bratty little kid slapping a plate of cake out of my hands on to the floor. Not because he wanted the cake; just because he didn’t want me to have it.

When do I get to have some cake? When will this relentless, soul-crushing ordeal end? I know you don’t punish people – I know that’s not how you do things – but it’s hard not to feel like I’m being punished. I had a decent life, plenty good enough, anyway, and now nearly all of it is gone. It’s hard not to worry that what little remains will be taken away from me, too, and then I will be truly destitute, with nowhere to go and no-one left to take care of me.

God, I’m so lonely, so desperately lonely. I was searching through my phone for people to call yesterday (until the touchscreen stopped working, and thank you for that, because I was really hoping to get to spend $250 I don’t have to get another phone) and I realized that most of the numbers in my phone are for people I don’t talk to any more, from a time when our lives were on similar tracks, until I was rudely bounced off of mine and into oblivion. They’re all still motoring along, succeeding in their lives, but not me.

My life came to an abrupt and unceremonious halt last October, almost ten months ago. No explanation, no veritable cause and effect relationship, no downward spiral that needed to be arrested – no reason at all. Or so it seems, because if there is one, which I am seriously starting to doubt, it’s not been revealed to me.

Well, I want to know. The only thing worse than dealing with everything that has happened to me is the uncertainty and unpredictability of it all. What’s next? What else are you going to take from me? Are you even going to let me finish my second college degree? Are you going to provide any opportunity at all for me to work? Are you going to give me some sort of social life at some point, more than the vanishingly few friends I have left, or, heaven forbid, a romantic partner? Or am I going to be alone forever, a pathetic, disabled, single woman, incapable of supporting herself, invisible to everyone else, unable to accumulate anything other than dust bunnies and cats?

Please, God, please tell me what I’m supposed to do. I can’t keep going like this. It’s going to be a year pretty soon, a whole year of my life stuck in the quicksand of this chronic injury, and you haven’t thrown me a single rope that hasn’t broken as soon as I grabbed a hold of it. You know that I can do what I’m told. I’m a good soldier. When is it my turn to be in your grace again? Because I can’t live the rest of my life like this. Some days, I don’t even know if I can handle another day of it.

Please, just tell me when this all is going to end. I don’t care if I don’t get back to the same physical capability I had before. I don’t care if I’m disabled and/or in pain for the rest of my life. I just need to know when you’re going to stem the tide of horrible things that keep happening so I can finally pull a life, or some semblance of it, back together and start progressing again.

I mean, you’re GOD, for heaven’s sake. If you can’t do something about all of this, then who or what can? Although I suppose you don’t want to tell me that, because then I’ll go over and pray to whatever that is, and ditch you and all of the sadism you’ve visited on me over the last several months.

Because I’m done. I am really and truly done, as of right now. It’s pretty clear that you haven’t done a f***ing thing for me and I’m over it. All you have been willing to do is to release me to the whims of whatever demon comes along that wants to take a swing at me, and probably just laughed and laughed the whole time. I am sick at being at the business end of your malevolence.  

I’ve been waiting and waiting and waiting for things to start going my way.  It’s my turn, goddamit.  Stop throwing fairy dust everywhere but here.  My needs are pretty simple, when it comes right down to it.  And I’m willing to work for good fortune. And even if I weren’t, it seems like the least you could do was give me a leg up.

Because if this is what your protection and care is like, then thanks, but no thanks. I’d be better off fending for myself, letting things happen at random, than continuing to roll snake eyes on the weighted dice you keep handing me. Because even you have to admit that if this were all truly random, the likelihood of this particular cascade is vanishingly small.

So it’s time you start holding up your end. Stop sitting on your hands up there and do something. Because I don’t feel like you’ve done anything for me, not one single thing that could come close to putting a dent in all of this suffering. I feel like you’ve abandoned me. And you haven’t given me a single reason to think otherwise at any time in the last ten months.

And if you can’t, or won’t, help me, then the least you can do is stop hindering me. Just go away. Leave me alone.

-TGA

Posted in Aspect I | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

stasis

Posted on August 11, 2014 by C. M. Condo

I woke up this morning with the same pain I went to bed with last night. Yesterday, after a couple of hours on the beach, it was so bad that all I could do was lie on the recliner in the condo with a frozen elastogel strapped to my back and stare at the ceiling, waiting, breathing, unable to either cultivate or suppress the tears that were leaking out and down my temples.

I spent over a half an hour like that, before the pain finally receded enough to allow me to push myself slightly more upright so I could watch TV.  And that was as good as things got. This whole trip, the pain has been relentless. It feels as though someone has wedged a butcher’s knife under my scapula and is alternately pressing in and sliding back and forth. I wish it were a real butcher’s knife, and that someone would come along and slice the whole damn shoulder off.

There is a type of body dysmorphia where a person will focus on a single part of her body; its length or breadth, its curve or muscle tone, and judge the acceptability of her entire shape based on that one single place, be it the neck, or a calf, or her ears or fingers. She directs all of her efforts towards the improvement of this one body part, and yet is unable to see it for what it really looks like. Her brain takes over her visual processing and inserts an unacceptable image that perpetuates this behavior, no matter what lengths she has gone to to change its appearance.

My world has dwindled down to my right shoulder. I don’t spend attention on anything else any more; this injury has bullied in and pushed it all aside. I wasn’t in a relationship before this happened, but I’m sure my pain would have shoved that away just as callously as it divested me of the rest; independence, energy, strength, hobbies, physical activities, classes, work, career. All I have left in my life now is my family, my sanity, and a handful of close friends. All of the color has been leached out of my existence.  Which is all I have now – just existence.  All of the things that made it come to life, that made it interesting, or fun, or special, or something to look forward to, all of that is gone.

It’s eating away at what little fortitude I’ve been able to maintain. I can’t see the forest for the trees any more; whatever goal I might have deceived myself into having has slipped from view. When someone has the audacity to say to me that something good is bound to come of all this, it breaks something inside me and I can barely get away from her fast enough before my eyes start to fill. I can’t even physically take care of myself any more, never mind financially. What the hell good could come of that?

Maybe I would be better able to accept the sentiment if something was working; if I could mark some noticeable improvement, some particular exercise or procedure that was moving me in the direction of more functionality.  Instead, all I have to show for all these months of medical treatment is the few days or weeks of partial relief gleaned from injecting or disabling something underneath my scapula. I lie awake at night too uncomfortable to sleep and can think of nothing else, imagining I have an alternate presentation of body dysmorphia, where no matter what I or anyone else ever does to my shoulder, the state of disorder will never change.

And so here I am once again turning a critical eye towards the only thing I can control, which is my medications, with their underwhelming pain management and overwhelming stomach problems. When Momma Ape showed me pictures on her phone that she had taken of me and Sister Ape on the beach a few days ago, I was horrified. Standing next to my healthy, normal-sized sister, I [still] looked skeletal, not to mention quite unwell. I’m not just trapped in this injury; I’m also stuck in a pain- and medication-induced state of ill health that has established itself over the last several months as my new homeostasis.

I’ve been like this for so long that I don’t see it when I look at myself in the mirror any more. I am so accustomed to my sallow complexion and shrunken frame that I don’t even bother re-imprinting the information when I see myself reflected; I just slot in whatever I expect to see and move on. Perhaps it only appears normal because there’s no-one standing next to me to serve as a point of reference, but whatever the reason, it allows me maintain the fiction that things aren’t so bad. Confronting anew how far removed from fact that fiction is, it’s no wonder that I want to meddle in my treatment regimen, it being the only thing left in my life that I am capable of influencing in any way.

The pain in my shoulder has been so unremitting lately that it has prevented me from daring to exert myself or do anything else to disturb it. I have slowed my walking pace so I can concentrate on holding my back erect. Each morning, I look at the things I would like to do that day, pick one, and discard the rest.  This one region of my body, my right scapula and posterior thoracic, is controlling everything I see and everything I do.

I sometimes wonder if I felt that pain everywhere, would it just become normal, like the view of my troublingly underweight self in the mirror? Would that make it easier to do away with all of the medication and diagnostics?  Would I be able to reference the pain instead of encountering it anew every time my mind wandered?  Could I memorize the boundaries and just go from there?

Thought exercise aside, I know I couldn’t.  Right now, localized as it is, my pain still takes up most of my functional and subconscious awareness. It won’t let me focus on something else for more than a handful or minutes, or a half an hour, if I’m lucky. I stare into the same microscope and see the same swollen and distorted view, just like the one in the mirror, of my body, my shoulder, my life, hour after hour, day after day.

On top of that, the endless search for a cause and a remedy is wreaking psychological havoc. I’ve been ping-ponging back and forth between hope and despair for so long that I don’t remember what the center feels like. My pain is already physically and mentally exhausting; holding out hope of an eventual diagnosis is exhausting my spirit, too. I don’t want to give up too soon – quitters never win, they say – but what they don’t say is that a lot of people who don’t quit don’t ever actually win, either. How long is long enough? How many doctors, how many procedures, how many different pain medications, before the consensus view is that we’ve thrown everything we could reasonably be expected to throw at it and it’s time to give up and send everyone home?

Momma Ape has never given up, even as the injuries and disorders have piled one on top of another such that her treatments resemble nothing so much as a game of medical whack-a-mole; batting one thing down only to have two more pop up somewhere else. She was able to work part-time for much of the past twenty years, but even that fell by the wayside a little over a year ago. If I am to continue to have this limited store of physical energy, I’m not sure I’m up for continuing to invest it in an open-ended and unsupervised scavenger hunt.

I don’t want to spend the next however-so-many months (or years) like this, with my shoulder so large in my life that I can’t see anything else. I already feel like I’ve been frozen in this place for too long, my gaze fixed and focused on the same wall in the same room that I’ve been in since last October. Every time I meet someone new, be it a friend, doctor, therapist, or whatever, I respond like a plastic doll with a string in its back, expressionlessly reciting the same spiel and responding to the same questions with the same answers every single time, usually in the same order, no less. I could probably record my response and just press play whenever someone new comes along to pull my string. At least, I wish I could.

Because it’s all grown past tiresome. It’s flattened me out and left me faded, like an oddly-shaped paper doll waiting for someone to finally cut out a dress that fits properly so she can be reanimated into whatever farce of a life has been drawn for her on the paper-book pages. I am sick of waiting for the right dress. I don’t care if it’s the wrong dress any more, so long as I can pin it in a few places and make it work. I want to be reanimated so I can get on with my life, whatever farce of it has been laid out in the pages for me.  But whenever I do try to venture out – cut back on pain meds, clip on an ill-fitting dress, and go about some semblance of my business – pain stomps right in and lays me out. I’m down for a day, or lately, two or three, and then I resume a subdued version of whatever I was doing until I chafe at the limitations and throw them off again.

I had promised myself – here on this blog, in fact – that I was going to make every effort to stay in the moment because doing otherwise inevitably led to disappointment. But I’ve been at it less than two months now and I already can’t handle it. I am in constant anxiety about my future, unable to conceive of any path to independence that could be found in living the rest of my life this way. Even though my injury has defied scheduling up to this point, I still cling to the unsubstantiated hope that I just need to find the right ratio of activity to respite that will enable me to compartmentalize the pain so I can go about whatever small activities I am able to thereby manage.

I keep waiting to get something back, or barring that, something new, to look at, to feel, to experience. I still have this feeling, deep down, that if I could just put the pain on autopilot and focus on resurrecting a life from the ruins, I could infuse some purpose into my existence to enliven it again. But because no-one can definitively tell me what is actually going on with my right shoulder, never mind how long the going-on will be, I am reluctant to even attempt to build anything at all.

And so I’m stuck here, the large and deciding feature of my life that butcher’s knife at my back, with nowhere else to look, and nothing else to see even if I could turn away from the microscope to see it. Nothing in my life but my pain, my mind, and the few brave souls around me sticking it out for the long haul. No color, no diversion, no goal, no purpose, and no change. Nothing. Frozen. Stasis.

Posted in Aspect I | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

bitten

Posted on August 6, 2014 by C. M. Condo

Well, we’re on day four here at the beach and my busted wing has finally settled back down to its pre-trip pain level; a four or five in the morning, up to a six or seven by the evening, depending on the amount of time spent in a sitting position. I’m holding at a five right now, despite the car trip with my sister to the urgent care clinic this morning for tetanus shots. Amusingly, we both needed one – her for a nasty cut she got opening a can and me from getting bit by a dog.

Yep, you read that right. I got bitten by a french bulldog in the elevator last night on our way out to dinner.

It was nowhere near the worst bite I’ve ever gotten. During my years working with domesticated and research animals I’ve sustained countless scratches and bites from a variety of species. Administering health care to animals is a bit like giving it to toddlers, except the toddlers have claws, canine teeth, and exceptional muscle strength. Every so often, an animal decides he’s not communicating his displeasure effectively enough with the struggling and vocalizing and lays his teeth onto you.

But all of my training in that arena conveniently failed to surface, of course, as I bent down to let a couple of strange dogs sniff my hand in a crowded elevator. The first one was quite friendly, and I thus was unprepared for the second to snarl, leap at my outstretched hand and hit it with two warning bites in quick succession. It was only then that the years of experience kicked in, and I stayed where I was, leaving my hand in the dog’s mouth. Not feeling any resistance and having effectively halted my approach, the dog let go instead of biting down, and we moved away from each other, neither of us much worse for the wear.

This all happened in the space of less than a second. The owner was less apologetic than he should have been, but it was so fast, it’s entirely possible he didn’t even realize I’d been bitten. Either way, he should have said something before I knelt down to introduce myself to his pets, but then again, I’ve been around animals for too long not to have thought twice about thrusting my hand into the face of a strange dog trapped in the corner of a full elevator.

I surreptitiously checked the dogs’ collars as we spilled out into the lobby, and each had a colored rabies tag clinking merrily against a silver ID medallion, indicating a recent vaccination. I had been doubly lucky, then, in that it was a a vaccinated dog that had dispensed with my proffered pleasantries. The bite was so minor, in fact, that I didn’t even realize it had broken the skin (barely) until the man and his furry pals were long gone.

My family, however, not having the same animal experience as me, made a much bigger fuss, my father threatening to have “a word” with the guy when he came back from taking the pooches for their evening walk. I reassured them that not all dog bites are the same and that this one really was no big deal, showing them the curve of bloodless indentations in my hand as proof.

That would have been the end of it, except that it’s been so long since I’ve worked with animals that my last tetanus was at least a few years ago. The family insisted I go in for a booster the following morning, and I took one look at my sister’s hand and advised her to do the same. So off we went, driving into town at 9 AM to spend a little quality time in the vigorously air-conditioned waiting area of the local clinic.

While I had intended to spend some extra time with my sister this vacation, chatting in the lobby of an urgent care facility wasn’t exactly what I’d had in mind. Nonetheless, it was a chance to catch up, and we decided we might as well go for pancakes afterwards, too, since we were out and about anyway. Ensconced in the booth of a nearby diner, we sipped coffee as she talked about her family, and her as yet unrealized desire to add a dog to it, my recent run-in notwithstanding. I took the opportunity to thank her for driving us to the clinic and vent my frustration at my complete and total uselessness with regards to the whole vacation.

She wasn’t having any of it. “It’s not your usefulness that makes people like you,” she cut in. “We like you for you, no matter what.”

“Yes,” I agreed, “but it’s my usefulness that makes me like me.”

And there it is. Other people like me just fine, useful, useless, it doesn’t matter to them. This obsession with wanting to be something besides scenery on our vacation is all on me.

Here I thought the lesson from this injury was supposed to be my utter powerlessness over the things that happen to me and my inability to control the world around me. But it seems that I am also being tested on how well I learn to like me just for me; not because of the things I do, but because of who I am. As another friend reminded me last week, “This,” she said, gesturing towards the outline of my body, “this is just an envelope. Everyone has a messed-up envelope. It’s what’s inside that matters.”

It’s the truth. Despite the fact that the houses for our souls are living, breathing entities, and that our existence would be impossible without them, many of us think of them as separate from “who we are,” and it’s often to our benefit. It’s only recently, since my personal house took a major hit to the northeastern wing, that I’ve realized how much I identify myself by the broken frame that carts me around. I still can’t escape a feeling of shame about it, as though it were a car with a busted fender that I just hadn’t bothered to fix, despite the cracked plastic and strange scraping sound every time I make a right turn.

To be fair, progress has been made. I’ve figured out how to distill my injury into a few sentences for interested parties without minimizing. Phrases such as “chronic pain,” “seventh doctor,” and “nerve injury,” are enough to satisfy the politely curious, where as “they don’t know,” is a suitable reply for the impolitely curious inquiring what it is, how it happened, and/or if it can be fixed.

Furthermore, I’m getting used to casual observers seeing me as a physically impaired person. I’m no longer self-conscious about using a handicapped parking space and hanging the red handicap tag from my rearview mirror. I’m able to ask a stranger to get something off of a high shelf in the grocery store or hold open a door for me as I go about my business. I’ll take a handful of pills in public if I happen to be in public when it’s time to take them.

So I think it’s fair to say I’ve adjusted to the outward appearance of my present disabled state. But the most important parts, the inner rooms, are still decorated for a different owner; a physically well owner; someone who can run and jump and swim and throw herself into lots of activities. That owner doesn’t seem to realize she doesn’t live here any more, and still frets at the changes and doubts the new truths that have come to be revealed. Like the fact that she and I are one and the same, and the trappings don’t matter nearly as much as either of us thinks they do.

How to convince myself of this? I don’t know. If I did know, I could probably write a book about it and sell billions of copies. I do feel as though I’m getting closer, but there remains an uncomfortable sense of fumbling around a dark room with poorly placed furniture. Is this the right chair? Or was it the one I just tripped over? Or is this a chair at all? Am I even supposed to be looking for a chair, or something else entirely?

Animals don’t carry around this kind of baggage. They see a situation, reference their prior experience with it (or lack thereof), and take action accordingly. They don’t hem and haw. They don’t go back over the situation time and again and try to figure out how it would have gone differently if they’d done something else. And they certainly don’t spend hours fretting about what the other participants in the situation might think about the action they took.

I need to be more like the animals I used to work with; just accept my response to a given situation as my best option given the information at hand, and move on. My response to this trip has been a lot of maintaining a horizontal position while things go on around me. However I or anyone else might feel about that, that is my best option given the information at hand, which is that if I try to do any one thing for too long, I will exhaust myself and the pain in my shoulder will shoot up from annoying to unbearable.

There’s no point in trying to figure out what would be happening if I tried to ignore the pain and fatigue and do more pitching in with things like unpacking and running errands. There’s nothing to be gained from worrying about what my family might be thinking behind their protests of concern and willingness to go out of their way for me. And there’s certainly no reward to be found in trying to see if I can change their thinking in any way, because, as I have [hopefully] already learned, I can’t.

The only person’s thinking I can change is my own. The people and animals around me are going to think what they’re going to think and do what they’re going to do and it doesn’t matter how – or how long – I think about it. If I applied even a fraction of the energy I spend worrying about such things to my own mental state, I might be able to enjoy the recognition that on the inside, I am a good and likable woman, whether or not I perceive myself as being helpful to anyone.

I may not have the blessed simplicity that comes with claws and teeth, but I have self-awareness. It’s not supposed to be a weapon, even though we bite ourselves with it more often than not. It’s a tool, and I need to start using it on this home improvement project I’ve been working on for the last several months. Me and that version of me that used to be well; we’ll work on it together.

Posted in Aspect I | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

wherever you go

Posted on August 4, 2014 by C. M. Condo

I, and my pain, are now at the beach. Momma Ape and I drove separately from the rest of the family yesterday, leaving an hour and a half early so we could could take a few long breaks and still all arrive at the seashore at the same time. And thank goodness we did it that way, or I wouldn’t be here. There’s no way I could have driven the car, or even sat in the car, for any longer than forty-five minutes at a stretch.

By the time we arrived, I had a hazy awareness that I was in none too good of a shape, but I was happy to have been able to get here, so I resolutely set that awareness to the side. We joined up with the rest of the group, and I was able to perpetrate a decent facsimile of OK for just long enough to follow the group to the rental condominium. After that, there was no more perpetration, and I was forced to arrange myself in a horizontal position on the recliner with an ice pack while the rest of the gang got themselves situated.

It’s quite a production, moving the ape clan to a different location for two weeks. Momma Ape’s condition requires a lot of amenities, and this year, we got to add my condition’s amenities to that list, making for two fully laden SUV’s worth of stuff, and that was just for her and Big Daddy Ape and me. The rental unit is basically someone else’s home that we’re staying in, so we have to bring everything we will need while we’re there, such as towels, sheets, and groceries, in addition to our personal belongings.  It’s a lot of set-up, rearranging, and unpacking, and of course, running around to get things we didn’t bother to bring with us.

As the only childless adult, I usually used to shoulder a lot of that labor, and between me and Big Daddy Ape, we would have everything done by the time he drove to the sub shop to pick up dinner. But this year, I had to lie on my back and seethe while he handled things by himself.  I glumly realized how helpful I must have been as it became clear that he wouldn’t get everything done by the end of the day. Worse, there wasn’t a thing I could do about it; the 150-mile drive had rendered me useless. Even pulling myself up into a sitting position to join everyone for dinner last night was almost more than I could manage.

I was in slightly better shape this morning, and took a short walk when I got up, both for the exercise and because I knew no-one else would be up for at least an hour and I needed something to do. But by the afternoon, there was a sword fight going on under my scapula, and I couldn’t find a comfortable position. I was already exhausted just from the walk, cooking breakfast, and reclining in the sun for a couple of hours with my sister.

I wanted to cry, but I didn’t have the energy. Even with Momma Ape in the next room, I felt desperately alone. Out the sliding glass doors that open onto the balcony, I could see the ocean front densely packed with umbrellas and blankets, with lots of people swimming and running around. It felt as if the scene had been specifically engineered to upset me as I huddled inside the rental unit, nursing my shoulder with a gel wrap.  There was a group of slender, bronzed teenagers playing frisbee, trying to prove to each other and the surrounding adults they were interested in doing something besides flirting with one another, quaintly unaware that the surrounding adults couldn’t care less.

A frisbee is about the only thing I ever learned to throw properly. Catching one, of course, was another matter entirely, but when my own little bronzed self was prancing around in a bikini at seventeen, no-one seemed to mind that I kept dropping it and having to bend over to pick it up. Be that as it may, seventeen was probably the last time I threw one, or cared to. But of course, faced with the fact that I suddenly couldn’t, I was bitter about it.

Truth be told, I’m bitter about everything. Standing up – just standing up – wears me out. Last summer, I horse-played with my niece in the pool for a couple of hours every day. I carried her on my hip into the ocean waves, and out, and in, and out, as she shrieked with fear and delight. I never took the elevator up to our condo, choosing instead to sprint up and down the three flights of stairs when coming or going. I ran interference with the niece and volunteered for countless little errands so that the parental apes could enjoy as much beach time as possible.

There is none of that this year. Earlier today, a mere ten minutes of standing at the shore break and watching my niece make her first attempts at body-surfing was exhausting. The pain medication gives me approximately ninety minutes of relief, starting about thirty minutes after I take it, irrespective of dosage. Once it wears off, it’s an hour or more’s wait, in pain, until enough time has passed to take it again. And while I’m waiting, my mood tanks, predictably, and I get annoyed with everything and everyone around me, predictably, and I get snappish, if not downright mean, which may also be predictable, but isn’t fair to my fellow apes.

So I hate myself for it, and I add that to my hatred of everything else that’s going on with me, and I want to scream and scream, on and on, loud enough for dogs to bark three cities away, and even that probably wouldn’t be enough. Because I’m used to being disabled at home, but the last time I was here at the beach, with my family, where I’ve been virtually every single August since I was seven months old, I was about as physically fit and strong as I could get.  And I suspect that was the high water mark, and that I will never be back there.  It’s true that in my current mental state I tend toward the morose, but it’s also true that, morose or not, I’m probably right.

Even though I knew I’d be taking it easy this year, I failed to appropriately prepare myself for the effect my condition would have on my vacation activities, in no small part because I failed to comprehend just how weak and easily exhausted I truly am. My current level of functionality (if one could even call my paltry activities anything with the word “function” in it) introduced itself into my life at home a little at a time. Of course I knew I was down a lot of strength and stamina, but it seems I was fuzzy on the actual loss totals.

Well, I’m not fuzzy now. I’m horrified, and resentful, and deeply upset. My pain level has been quite high since last night, dropping just below a five for the given ninety-minutes of active pain medication before shooting back up to a seven. Or possibly an eight, but I don’t want to own the reality of once more being in the neighborhood of an eight just yet.

It’s not that I didn’t set my expectations low with regards to this trip. It’s that, apparently, I didn’t set them low enough. Because in addition to me not enjoying much of anything, my family is for the first time being treated to front row, 50-yard-line seats for my condition. I had been rather adeptly hiding the ugly details from them for the past nine months, but the jig is now officially up.  Revealing the unvarnished truth of my situation to them is incredibly upsetting, not just to me, but probably to all of us, and has enabled me to add guilt at being a burdensome, worrying shadow of my former self to my fast accumulating pile of self-loathing.

When I sit down on the bed and cry at home, only the cats jump up to comfort me. This evening, it was Momma Ape with her arms around me – the same Momma Ape whose throat I jumped down this afternoon for some comment she made that concerned me in no way whatsoever other than the fact that she made the mistake of making it after my pain medication wore off.

I don’t know how I’m going to do this for the whole rest of the trip. I’m scared and depressed and I want to go home. Except I don’t want to go home, because home is a sickly reminder of how bad I’ve felt and how long I’ve felt that way and I needed desperately to get away from there. Home felt like a cage, and I wanted out. And it’s not like I expected the beach to make me feel brand new. I just figured it might help me relax a bit to not have to do all of the stuff I have to do at home, which in turn would help reduce some of my pain and fatigue.

It wasn’t until I got here that I realized that it wasn’t home, or the stuff I had to do, that was the cage. It is my condition and its effects on my mind and body that have been pressing on me. And no matter what I do, or where I go, it’s always with me. And now it’s here, in this haven of sparkling sea and salty sun, a place that has always meant respite for me, ever since I was a little girl. I can’t escape from what’s going on inside me. Not even here.

I’m just going to have to learn how to cope here, like I did at home, except here, I have to learn it a lot faster, because I’m only going to be here for ten more days. This is the first real test of everything I’ve learned about myself and about what’s really important to me, and if I don’t pass it, this vacation will be pretty grim.

I’m going to decide, right now, that I am going to pass this test. Because I didn’t just bring my injury with me. I brought the person who has been learning to live with it with me, too. And once I get her up to speed, everything else will be OK – really OK. No matter where I go.

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answers (1)

Posted on August 2, 2014 by C. M. Condo

As requested, this is the first in what will be an intermittent series of answers to Miss Emily‘s questions, in no particular order:

4. List 11 facts about yourself.

1. My fingernails grow really strong and really fast.  When I was a kid, I used them to break into locked rooms and closets in my house, as well as my sister’s diary.

2. I am lactose-intolerant

3. My favorite color is burgundy.  It was gray for a long time, but I finally got bored with it.  My favorite color combination, however, is still charcoal gray and sunflower yellow.

4. I am a grammar snob

5. I have a deep and abiding disgust for advertising and marketing and all those who perpetrate it. People whose job it is to convince you that you want something that you don’t actually need, and then aggressively sell it to you, serve no purpose on this earth whatsoever, and we should gather them all up and deposit them on a desert island with no cell phone or wi-fi service and allow them to cannibalize each other until the last one finally dies of starvation.

6. I have three tattoos

7. I used to think blogging was primarily a pathetic, self-aggrandizing plea for attention and that only self-obsessed people did it. Ironically, I still kind of think that.

8. I think I have pretty feet

9. I have three (count ’em), yes, that would be three cats and I live in a one-bedroom apartment. I’m pretty sure my per capita cat-to-person ratio qualifies me for crazy cat lady status.

10. I used to be the lead singer of an alternative rock band.  At that time, I also had purple hair.

11. I find animal torture harder to watch than people torture.  People will always be cruel to other people, but animals don’t deserve it; they’re just innocent bystanders to our parasitization of the planet.

Posted in Aspect I | Tagged | 2 Comments

closing in

Posted on August 1, 2014 by C. M. Condo

Almost, but not quite. That’s what this week has been. A series of discoveries that things that I thought were OK are still not right. Things I thought had been fixed were still broken. A personal life that I thought was moving in a positive direction actually isn’t.

Tuesday
Tuesday was when the trouble began. I don’t know why, but I suddenly decided, that day, that I’d had enough of the water pooling in my shower, toilet, and sinks. I called a plumbing service at 7:45 AM and was promised that a plumber would be here by 9:00.

I should have known better. He didn’t show up until 12:30, and for some reason, it took him two more hours to discover that he was going to need to snake out the main line for the building and run a camera through it.  And of course, he didn’t have the equipment for that particular task on his truck, so he was going to have to come back Friday and do it then.

So I was in for three more days of pooling, bearing the brunt of the other building residents’ carelessness with regards to flushing inappropriate items down their toilets and drains. I’d sent countless e-mails during my years managing this building warning tenants to be careful about this. Apparently, no-one paid any attention. And why should they have, since it didn’t affect them? It only affected me, as my unit is the waste water’s last stop on the way out of the building.

So I was angry, not just at not getting it fixed, but for even having to deal with it in the first place. I’d finally bullied the board members in to hiring a real building manager back in January.  I wasn’t supposed to have to do this crap any more.  The fact that I had no-one to blame but myself for the timing was completely beside the point. The point was that if I had passed this off to the building manager, it would have been weeks, if not months, before he handled it, and I’d already waited too long to have it seen to, in the futile hope that someone besides me would have noticed something was wrong and taken it upon herself to do something about it. Ha. As if.

But whatever. Go ahead, inconvenience the bitchy, handicapped woman. It’s not like she has anything else to do.

Wednesday
Wednesday, I was supposed to get an arthrogram, which is some sort of radiographic procedure in which they take multiple views of the anterior face of my scapula (the side facing my ribs) and search for physical abnormalities in the bone and attached tissues. If I had to guess, I would say it will likely involve insertion of a needle under said scapula, followed by a camera of some sort, not that I bother getting worked up about how painful a procedure might or might not be any more. But when I arrived at the radiologist’s, the woman behind the desk informed me that they don’t do arthrograms at that office. She said someone should have told me that before they let me schedule the appointment.

This should have been pretty upsetting, because it meant I’d have to wait another three weeks for confirmation of the most recent orthopedist’s diagnosis, never mind treatment. But for some reason, I couldn’t find the strength to express my disappointment, despite the tears that had begun to overlay my eyes. My driver for the day seemed willing to back me up if I chose to make a fuss, which was certainly within in my rights to do, but instead, I thanked the technician, put the prescription back in my folder, and walked to the door, leaving my friend barely enough time to rush around to get ahead of me to prop it open.

He expressed frustration for me on the way back down to the parking garage, putting a sympathetic hand on my back as we walked the short distance from the elevator to the handicapped parking spaces. I assured him I was OK; that in fact, I felt bad for him, as he was the one who had taken off work so he could taxi me to and from the appointment. He insisted, as we got back in the car, that I was the one who should be angry.

But I just didn’t feel like getting angry. There didn’t seem to be any point. “Waste of energy,” I muttered, directing the remark to my knees, which were pulled up onto the passenger seat in an effort to round my spine away from my knife-edged scapula. In fact, I didn’t know why I was unable to produce the appropriate emotional response. Was I just getting used to this? To being disappointed? To things not working out the way they were supposed to?

Thursday
Thursday, I had to run errands; I’m leaving town on a two-week, family vacation this weekend. I had planned to split the errands between Thursday and Friday, but now that waiting for the plumber looked to swallow the lion’s share of Friday afternoon, I had no choice but to do them all Thursday morning, which meant that by the time I got to work at 1:30, I was already in pretty rotten shape.

I’m down to three hour shifts at this point, but I ran out of energy at about the end of the second hour, and watched the last one tick by from inside a shrinking well, the narrow walls slick with pain. I imagined it was my life smeared on those walls, the life I was supposed to have, that I almost made it to, but not quite, now sucked out of me and bleeding down the stones into the mud below.

I had to stay for dinner at my parents’ house, a short drive from the office, because there was no way I could manage the rush hour version of my twenty-mile commute home in my beleaguered state. As I laid on their bed, an ice pack strapped to my back, Momma Ape kept me company, packing her own mountain of necessities for the trip and chatting about what a production it was to pack to go anywhere when you had to account for so many physical disability issues, a sentiment with which I wholeheartedly concur.  After about fifteen minutes, though, my stomach was too upset for me to be horizontal any more.  I said as much and got up to make my way to the kitchen.

“So it’s just going to be like this from now until you go to bed tonight?” Momma Ape asked.

“Yes,” was all I said.  I felt, rather than saw, her reaction. After all, it was no different than mine would have been, were the situations reversed.  Both my affirmation and her response were the plain and simple truth, and me and Momma Ape have long since passed the point of bothering to dress it up, or not for each other, at least.

A few hours later, I took the scenic route home, cutting through city neighborhoods, charming and verdant with their old houses snuggled up to each other under large, arbored canopies.  I opened the windows to let in the cool evening air, and put on some upbeat music in an effort to lift my mood.

It had the exact opposite effect.

Friday
Now, it’s Friday. On Fridays, I work in the morning, from 8:30 to 11:30. I was already in some discomfort by 7:00, which did not portend well for the rest of the day, but mornings are usually OK. I doubled my meds in an effort to get ahead of the pain, rather than waiting until someone stuck a cheese grater under my scapula to ante up. But just in case I was planning on trying to have a good day anyway, I got snapped at by the receptionist at the plumbing company at 8:15 when I called to get a time for the afternoon’s work. “You’ll get a call when they’re on their way.”

“Yes, I know,” I replied, forcing myself to remain calm and friendly, “but I just wanted to let you know, I have to be somewhere at 6:00 tonight, so if they can’t arrive by 2:30 or so, this isn’t going to work today…”

“Ma’am, you’re on the schedule for twelve noon and I’ll call you when they’re on the way.”

“Of course, I understand that, it’s just that Tuesday you said they’d be here by 9:00 and they didn’t arrive until 12:30, so I wanted to give you a heads up that I don’t have as much wiggle room in my day as I did then…”

She cut me off again, “Yes ma’am, I’ll call you when they’re on their way.”

I sighed, and thanked her, and hung up.

I spend too much time on the phone with irritated staff people. I still haven’t heard back from a doctor I left three messages for earlier this week, and I know Momma Ape would insist that I call his office, again, but I just don’t have it in me to get sh*t on by another receptionist.  Not today; not after the week I’ve been having.

I had wanted to get a different sleep medication to take with me to the beach, but it looks like that’s not going to happen. Hopefully, just being away from here for a couple of weeks will be medicine enough. I was restless last night, but I don’t care any more; sleep, no sleep, it hardly seems to matter.

Everything else…
As for my personal life… I just don’t even want to get into it. A thing that looked promising a couple of weeks ago has stalled out, leaving me right back where I started. So last night, I e-mailed a f.w.b. to arrange to partake in the benefits tomorrow afternoon, because one way or another, goddammit, I am getting laid before I leave town on my last official outing of this waste of a summer. It’s not even about the sex (not that I’ll be turning it down, of course); I really just want a man to come and wrap himself around me, break through my personal space and shove my loneliness out of its favorite chair for a couple of hours.

Also, while I try to avoid dwelling on it, I have exactly zero job prospects, a circumstance which may or may not improve upon graduation next Spring, provided I am actually able to graduate. I still don’t know if I’m going to be able to handle my course load this semester, which includes a class with a three-hour lab that I have to pass in order to graduate, and have had to drop out of, twice, because of this f***ing shoulder business.

The entire horizon is gloomy, including this vacation, what with me artificially depressing my expectations to avoid being disappointed. Last year, we had freak weather and I didn’t get to go in the ocean. This year, weather or no weather, I still probably won’t be able to, even as I maintain a secret intention to get out in it at least once anyway.

I will have to sneak it behind Momma and Big Daddy Ape’s backs, since there’s no way they’ll let me do such a wrong-headed thing if they have anything to say about it. I’m a grown woman, though, and can choose not to give them the opportunity to say something about it before I actually do it, thus saving me from wasting any energy pleading my case beforehand. They can have their say afterwards, when I’m in pain and regretting it.

The end of the summer is closing in, and I have miserably little to show for it. Injury-wise, I have a bit more range of motion, but the pain and sleep situations continue to deteriorate. I’ve nailed down what exactly exacerbates my pain, and what I have to do to ensure I won’t be in too much pain, but since that what-exactly entails sitting and/or driving, I’m not certain how much control I’ll be able to exert over matters with regards to school.

So, long story long, I have no idea what I’m going to do come September. Part of me just wants to throw in the towel and drop out of school and go back to working in veterinary clinics.  However, that would require ignoring the shoulder completely, and I’ve admittedly not had much success in that arena.

But the whole reason I went back to school was so I could get a job working with animals. The rest of it, the research, the teaching, the technical writing – all of that was a reaction to the changing conditions on the ground. None of it is what I really want to do, although I would have been – would still be – perfectly content doing any of those things. What I really want to do is get a hold of the dial on my life timer and wind the spring back five years, to before any of this started, and take another crack at it.

Not that I’d have a much better chance of getting a base hit than I did before. I was one of those kids in gym class who struck out at tee-ball. My life batting average is similarly dismal, and just because I now have a handicap to justify it doesn’t explain the twenty years leading up to said handicap, which were defined by my inability to extract my cranium from my rectum.

Even as I know that all I’m doing right now, with this post, is winding up my current situation into a pity party that doesn’t serve any purpose other than making me feel worse, I just don’t have anything else to do, nor the energy to do it with. I’m spent. Dried up.  Totally empty, even of fumes.

I do need this vacation. If nothing else, the smell of the ocean should help me loosen the shackles of my depression for a spell and give my soul a chance to run around a bit. I’ve been spending too much time in this damned well, staring at the shiny walls, imagining the worst. If I can get out of it, even just for a week or two, maybe I won’t mind so much when I find myself back in it, as school ramps up and my shoulder injury once again takes over the reins of my life.

The summer is almost over, but not yet. I still have some time left before I have to relinquish the driver’s seat; I still have one place left to go. And I’m going, even though it will hurt to get there, and probably even more to get back. But pain, no pain, I just don’t care any more. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that I get to the finish line, just this once, before the reality of my total impotence closes in.

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questions

Posted on July 29, 2014 by C. M. Condo

Miss EmilyAnnaB, one of my favorite bloggers, recently sent me a parcel of nice questions to answer, about things that have nothing to do with my shoulder. Those answers will be forthcoming later this week.

I like being given questions I can actually answer. I field far too many questions that have no good answers, nearly all of them from well-meaning people who are surreptitiously hunting for solutions to my shoulder issue while trying to sound like they just want to understand what’s going on with me.

I do not get this phenomenon at all. When a friend of mine is hurting, I don’t press her for details. A simple affirmation of the situation is all I need. Depressed? Bad mood? Back pain? That’s good enough for me. Here’s a hug and some cookies, and I’ll be texting you over the next few days with smiles and warm fuzzies. I mean, what if your friend said his dog just died? Would you press him for details about the nature of the dog’s illness and manner of his death? Probably not.  (I hope not, anyway.)

And yet, people seem all too eager to put their hands on someone else’s chronic pain problem and fix that. I will admit to having this impulse myself from time to time, but I have learned to suppress it. I’ve also learned that suppressing it has actually improved my ability to be sympathetic, since I’m not wasting mental energy pointlessly skimming through my thimbleful of medical knowledge in an effort to “help.”

Some people may call their inquisitive solicitude altruistic, but I disagree.  I think it is self-centered. I think, deep down, each of us wants to be that one person who figures something out, or invents something, or discovers something, or does some particular thing better than anyone else, in order to get all of the kudos that result. On the inside, each of us is convinced our own specialness, uniqueness, and amazinghood, and if the world would only recognize that and let us fix it, it would be a much better place. We apply this line of thinking to lots of situations, even [especially] the ones we are woefully under-equipped to handle.

Trying to solve someone else’s medical problem is a classic example of this, and it’s nearly always doomed to failure. This is because the well-meaning friend is usually not a doctor or any other kind of medical professional. All the friend has to go on is a ridiculously small sample of health experiences, few (if any) of which actually happened to her and not some friend of hers, and none of which are anything like what the person she wants to help is experiencing. Despite this, the friend is nonetheless absolutely certain that among her ridiculously small subset of personal and second-hand experiences is the answer the other person is looking for.

It sounds stupid because it is stupid. I wish I could carry around a sign that says: NO YOU CANNOT UNDERSTAND WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME AND NO YOU CANNOT FIX IT. I could just pull it out of my purse with my good arm and put it in someone’s face every time they started down their “Have you tried acupuncture?” garden path. “Have you had an MRI?” “Have you tried physical therapy?” “Have you tried cortisone injections?” “What medications are you taking?” “Have you tried herbal tea?” “Have you seen an orthopedist?” “Maybe you have a blocked chakra…”

This incessant game of twenty questions I am subjected to every time I am stupid enough to open my mouth about what is going on with me is exhausting, not to mention insulting. I mean, get over yourself already. I’m on my seventh doctor. As in doctor. With a medical degree. What do you do for a living? You’re a dog walker? And that qualifies you to diagnose my problem, how, exactly? Do you really have the audacity to think that you will succeed where so many internists, anesthesiologists, neurologists, and orthopedists have failed? Because, like, wow. That’s balls, dude.

Why don’t you ask me something I can answer, instead? Like, do I need anything? How did I sleep last night? How are my cats? Do I need a ride to the doctor’s tomorrow? Would I like to meet for lattes some morning soon? Would I like a hug?

Those are easy questions. I’m happy to answer those questions. It’s all about asking the right questions. And isn’t it always?

Posted in Aspect I | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments