inkgrrl's inkblog

…and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.

I started today (now yesterday) all fruminous jabbery and franxious (frazzled + anxious) and when I finally couldn’t stand the monkey poo in my head anymore I remembered that it was ok to move. Encouraged, even. The moving, not the monkey poo. I was and am tired of feeling timid about hurting some other bodypart/thing stupid, and my reluctance to breathe deeply and risk shoving my first rib into a painfully wrong space has seriously gotten in the way of killing off that timidity before it spreads to other things (like a fungus, timidity is). Continue reading

I spoke with a girlfriend this morning who I haven’t talked to in over a year, and had a good time catching up on the past year, unfun as it’s been for both of us. We used to work together at Pfizer and she has a medical background, so understood what I was telling her in my short blorp summary of 2009: “this and this and this, so then that and that in order to prevent THAT and now this and these are some of the consequences and other things that are going on out of all of this and that.”  I found myself unable to articulate my primary condition and issues using the proper medical terms – situational or stress-induced aphasia I can remember and label and say – but the other things, bulging and herniated discs and osteophytes and such words as would accurately explain what I have been dealing with, simply stayed in the dark closet at the back of my brain, unwilling to come forward into the light of day.
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I wish I had hungered for patience as a child, but I’ll do my best to remember mellow light like honey in a jar, and to feel that warmth granting my bones graceful lassitude when I want to power forward in a panic-fueled rage against time and pain and money and all the things I haven’t done yet that pick at my flesh like crows come to feast on my inadequacies.

My GIST list is behind in posting, but not behind in my head. I have many days of grace to blog about, to account for, to be accountable for documenting here as a reminder to myself when I’ve forgotten the honeyed glow that lights my progress over the last eight months:

March – the MRI
April – the last day in a cubicle
May – the physical therapist
June – the first epidural
July – the second epidural
August – the 16th c. map of Asia writ large in hives all over my arms and legs
September – the third epidural, finally
October – the first lesson in routine pain management, reinforced by the physical therapist
November – the diagnostic nerve block followed by RF ablation of the offending nerves
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