Ya know, some days life is a tad daunting. I usually sleep a restless sleep, awakened by burning sensations or random pains, despite my night-time dosage of amitriptyline. The alarm goes off at 5 so I have time to do my exercise bike, or my muscles stiffen up all day (although honestly, I'm so exhausted lately I have been missing it more and more – self defeating, eh?). I'm out of the shower by 6, have makeup and work clothes on at 6:30, help get the kids wrangled while packing my lunch and having breakfast. Then I'm on the road and jockeying for position on the interstate to get to the office in a timely manner.
I spend the day in an office chair working at a computer, getting up often so I don't stiffen up from staying in the same position for too long.
I go home and there's the kid-wrangling through dinner, then if there's no choir practice or kid's activity, I put da boy to bed at 8:00, which can take an hour.
Then into bed myself, and it all starts over again.
Not bad really. I know a lot of moms who do a heckuva lot more than I do during the day.
And I hate to whine. Sometimes anyway. But I'm gonna whine here. Just doing this much has become hard. And I used to do so much more. But now, pulling myself out of bed is painful as well as exhausting. I stay in the shower too long some mornings just because the warm water on my muscles feels so damned good. I can't always grip the knife very well just to cut up my son's banana. My daughter's basically on her own except for dialog – "Got your violin? All of your homework done? Put on your coat!"
While I sit in my office chair I can expect back spasms, shoulder spasms, electric shocks, chest pains, heartburn, neck aches. Also on a good day energy drinks will actually keep me awake. On bad days, I doze off during meetings, and hard as I try, I just can't f*cking help it. It's humiliating.
Last Friday, no matter how hard I tried, no matter how much Diet Dr. Mountain Dew I plugged into my gullet ("Hook it to my veeeeeeiiiiiiins!") I still nodded off several times during a packed-house industry meeting. When an opportunity came to leave the meeting early, I jumped on it so I wouldn't debase myself or my company any further.
In the evenings, I dread every moment I have to walk up or down stairs. Down because it hurts and I feel like gravity's gonna knock me over at any moment. Up because it kinda hurts, but more relevantly I feel like my legs are suddenly made of lead, or like I'm trying to walk upstairs while submerged in a pool of water. Kind of like in nightmares, when you're trying very hard to move quickly and you just can't? They refuse to work with me. And as much as I love our home, at these moments I curse owning a two-story house with a basement.
And at Alan's bedtime, sometimes he asks me to lay in the floor next to him. Every time he does, I pray he doesn't want anything after I'm down there, because it's damned hard to get up again.
And the weight. As I take these stupid fibro meds, my weight keeps piling on. Which makes movement even harder. I have another doctor's appointment on the 19th. I'm going to talk to him about trying to further refine my meds. Something's gotta make this better.
So yeah, I have my whiny pants on today.
