"Gravity is a harsh mistress." ~Patrick Warburton as "The Tick"

Here it is, after 11 PM. And I'm awake. Yup. Except this time, it isn't the itching... This time, it's the pain. Most of the time when I complain of "pain med fail", it's because my skin is itching too much for me to sleep. But today, I just fucking ache. I woke up achy and I stayed achy. I even fell asleep this morning around 7 AM (I get up at 5 AM usually). I slept for almost two hours and then could barely move to get up. I dragged myself to the shower. I stopped though, at my bedroom door and just stood there for a moment. The disabled guy actually asked if I was okay. I just said, "No." and walked on to the bathroom.

I'm getting better at tolerating a hot shower. Sometimes, my skin hurts and even the shower hurts. But on these harsh-gravity days, I can tolerate a near-blistering hot shower. It seems to help. Heating pads don't hurt, mostly because I can't wrap my entire body in one. And my soft-and-fuzzy-blanket isn't always an option because sometimes I hurt and I'm warm. There's no winning sometimes.

I still haven't gotten my new dosage of Gabapentin in the mail yet. If I don't get it tomorrow (two weeks after my appointment), I'm going to call to find out when it was sent. I'm also waiting for a parcel from Shawn in Australia. That'll have some Cadbury in it and Australian Cadbury has healing powers. It does. You can't tell me it doesn't because odds are, you have never had it. AND odds are if you have, you weren't in need of healing. So you don't know for sure. So, trust me. It does.

As I'm sitting here, typing this, all my muscles ache. I feel like I need to stretch, but stretching hurts more. Oh, speaking of stretching, I have been doing some yoga stuff. Not a full yoga routine or anything, but some basic yoga-style stretching. It's a start.

I feel bad when I complain about all this. I've been doing a 365days self-portrait project for over a year now and these days when I feel like absolute hell, I fake my way through my portrait. Before, I'd do a photo of my feet or my hand or something equally lame. But, I figure if I can tack on a happy face, I can fake my way through my self-portrait. My profile photo here on the Blogspot is a bad day photo. In fact, I'm pretty sure it was one of those "up all night, bad next day" photos. But, hey, I faked my way through it.

And what makes me feel bad about it is that some very nice people tell me how lovely I look and then say how great I'm handling it. And I don't feel like I am. I feel like I'm a sniveling little crybaby about it. Doing a 365days self-portrait project is fairly self-centered thing to do anyway, but then to complain about how shitty one feels as the photo's caption, well, it seems like overkill. I don't mean to and I try not to, but it happens. I try to keep it contained, for the most part, to here... where the title tells you what's going on.

Here's hoping tomorrow's self-portrait submission will look as good as how bad I feel tonight.