Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Who Knows Best

FDA: Do not take these drugs together.
Doctor: It's ok, you can take these drugs together.
My body: Why the fuck did you take those drugs together?

At least, as of today, I'm finally recognizing the symptoms of the serotonin reaction shit. Also very weird, the increased dose of my MAOI started taking very obvious effect about a week ago, a week and a half after the increase. Now I feel everything else louder and louder, but at least I'm not in pain. I just hate the want-to-throw-up-the-inside-of-my-toes feeling. I'm making an executive decision and taking a half-dose of the offending drug tonight until I can talk to my doctor in the morning. I JUST WANT TO WORK RIGHT AND FEEL RIGHT AND NOT FUCKING THINK ABOUT IT ALL THE FUCKING TIME.

Monday, August 23, 2010

Sun Ray Sting Ray

It's beautiful out. I tried to help pack the car and the sun stabbed me in the eyeballs. I was and still am wearing my giant sunglasses. I came back in and still felt it piercing all the way through the inside of my skull. I couldn't complete a sentence. I still feel it. I want to hold on until HDS leaves. Then it will be silent again and I can bury my head in my pillow and my dog can curl up in any room he wants. I will have as long as I need to be alone; this is my human contact time and the end of my HDS time and my chance to soak it up, pain or not.

If I still feel like this tomorrow, maybe I'll go to the migraine clinic for extra shots. Too many days of really bad.

Whine whine whine.

More Pain, More Thoughts

My brand of  love scares away boys and sets back feminism 40 years. Writing about love is gauche now, anyway. That's why I get migraines--to give me something to write about. It's a through-line to my story, a  regular source of conflict, and a free pass to be self-involved.
Free pass is putting it nicely.
Screaming internal distraction that makes it hard to notice much else. Unless I lose myself in something. Today I spent a very long time figuring out how much something listed in an obscure currency decades ago would cost today (as in, today dollars versus then shekels, not how much it's actually worth today). I edited  photos, tried to write product descriptions, got frustrated and heard my brain fizzling, and finally settled in to watch a gazillion episodes of Twin Peaks.
I wanted to be functional this weekend. I even saved my shots this week and drugged up Saturday morning. No good. Pain pain pain since Friday. Before that, too? I don't really remember when this bout started. It's been a bad one. HDS leaves tomorrow and her husband and friend came to pick her up. I wanted to have a nice goodbye weekend. I want to feel well enough to know want.

I'm supposed to go out to see my mom on Tuesday and maybe go shopping with her. It's been less than seven weeks since she was diagnosed with cancer. Now she may be fine to drive and shop again. That's amazing. She's so lucky and we're so lucky and everything has been so amazing. But there's a part of me that also struggles with her getting better and better while I have no real "better" in sight. Mine isn't scary, mine can't kill me. That's huge. But there are no walks, no ribbons, no support groups, no t-shirts, no awareness months, no product lines, and no foreseeable relief for my migraines. I will never be a "survivor," and that's appropriate because there was never any threat. Cancer is something you survive. But migraines are something you suffer.

I don't expect life to be easy, I just feel the things that aren't.

Everything is true at the same time, Reality is the version accepted by the majority.

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Lake Street Red Line Stop on a Wednesday Afternoon

Two men singing on the el platform with their permit clearly visible.


One plays guitar and sings melody, the other harmonizes.

They sway.

The harmonizer smiles.

The guitar player has long grayed dreads. He’s thin but not hungry, looks faded and worn but without pain. His skin is graying. His shiny black guitar looks gray under the subway lights.

His voice is anything but gray. Warm and mellow, like honey, like the 1960s folk that bore him. You can hear the hope and marijuana round the edges of each phrase.

The harmonizer reminds me of the old smiling Sambo images. Less bright, less ridiculous, but retaining a bit of the please-the-white-man quality. Still, his voice is pure and adds a dimension to the familiar tunes.

Police officer with his big german shepherd sitting not 10 feet away, staring.

The German Shepherd is watching the permit

The police officer isn’t watching much of anything.

A train comes and the guitar player leans into a concave *beam* to retune.

I drop a dollar into the bag with the permit.

A woman walks past. She is so large her legs sink down, burying her feet and her flip flops.

Saturday, August 07, 2010

Pad My Walls

I've got the crazies tonight. The pain was mostly gone today, but all the other fucked up shit diminutively classified as "aura" rendered me insane. It's so strange that when I get like this I can write. I can do a number of other random things quite well, too. Hopefully tomorrow I won't discover that I destroyed, offended, or bankrupted anyone, but I think I got a lot of work done. Walking the dog, I was ready to chainsaw the trees after 30 seconds of the cicadas. I hate the fucking cicadas. Crickets chirp; cicadas scream like electronics, but they ebb and swell so you can't forget they're there, vibrating at the frequency of your skull.

So I thought I was hungry. I'd been munching snap peas all afternoon, but perhaps red meat would cure my homicidal crankiness. I browned ground beef, planning to add one of the Trader Joe's Indian eggplant pouch things as an instant, no-thought sauce, but then I found a can of ranchero something soup with a recipe that sounded good and we had all the ingredients. So instead of three minutes and my nice fake Indian weird beef thing, it was 30 minutes for my fake Mexican weird beef thing. When it was done, I opened the oven and grabbed at the metal without thinking--no oven mitt. I can write but I can't use a stove.
Oven hot. No touch. Four-year-olds understand this. I'm alternating typing and icing my pointer finger.

Possible Boy and I had talked about seeing a movie tonight. At some point this afternoon I considered inviting him over to watch a movie, or doing some quiet but still social activity with him. Then I stand up and everything is wooziness and I try doing basic household crap and realize how scary I look. I don't want to hide all the time and only see friends when I'm glowing, but the bad stuff is easier to ride out quietly at home where I don't have to consider the variables. I'm not sure how to maintain friendships this way, but tonight I'm curled up afraid of myself and still trying to figure out how to get back to my parents' house to help out as soon as possible.
Cancer trumps migraine. Cancer kills.

Friday, August 06, 2010

Pathological

Pathology report: lymph nodes all clear. No chemo necessary. Woohoo!

My mom had to have a second, though minor, surgery because her skin wasn't healing properly from the first surgery.

My dad has been by her side every possibly moment, bringing much of his work to the hospital and actually taking his years of accumulated time off. He has been an absolute super hero. Under normal circumstances, he likes doing as many things as physically possible. He's mellowed down some so that he can now wait in line without exploding, but he used to send each member of the family to stand in a different check-out line and then we'd all join whoever got to the counter first. If there were fewer lines than family members, my father would bounce back and forth between lines, check things out at the front, go back and shop some more or do whatever he found to keep himself occupied. The man couldn't stand still. As adults, my siblings and I refuse to participate in the efficient but rude multiline blitz.

I try to be there for my mom as often as I can so my dad and my brother don't have to. My dad hadn't cleared his work schedule to take my mom home after the unexpected second surgery so I planned to be there Tuesday and Wednesday. Thanks to the migraines and everything I've had to do to fight them, I'm no longer bothered by blood and IVs and all that, plus I'm female and not modest so I can help my mom get undressed and dressed.

Driving back and forth these past few weeks, I've somewhat abused my Torodol: nothing that will kill me, but a bit much for keeping it effective.

Tuesday, HDS stayed home from work because the inside of her head burned. I went to the hospital to find my mother quite chipper. She was walking around before they had her out of recovery and wanted real food as soon as the nurse could find her an unplanned turkey sandwich. Considering how much trouble she had with the anesthesia the first time, we were all pleasantly surprised.
Meanwhile, I took one of the alcohol wipes and bandaids laying around and gave myself another shot of Torodol. My sunglasses never came off.
My mom, who had surgery, was doing fine and better all the time. I, who had all my parts intact, got worse and worse. Sound, smells, all the usuals but no amount of caffeine or drugs seemed to stave them off.
I wigged out. There was nowhere I could hide in the hospital that was dark or quiet. Everything buzzed and hummed and beeped. I'd find a dark hall or stairwell only to step in and activate motion censor fluorescent lights. It was light a bad nightmare. I curled up in a corner behind a doorway where at least no one was around and cried and cried because it hurt so much.

I cried because I felt like I had no right to my pain, here on a post-op hospital ward.
Mine can't kill me.
But my mom will get better. My mom will be a cancer survivor.

I went back to her room and sat in a chair in the dark part while my dad tried to fuss over making it darker for me. I'm not sure what I said or did at that point but I figured I'd just sleep in the corner until the pain blew over. Then my mom said my dad and brother were going to both drive me home so my car would be back at my house and that was what she wanted and they would deal with Wednesday because I needed to take care of myself.

Lots of gratitude and I was home. I give my family a lot of credit for this one.

That night it stormed so loud the lightning woke me.

Thursday, August 05, 2010

Down for the count again. My mom has Cancer and is doing better than i am right now. I feel like I have no right to be so clobbered by something nonfatal.
 

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