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Tuesday, March 5, 2013

At least I wasn't in public this time...

I've posted about these stupid flareups and how bad they hurt and sometimes they bring on tears. And the crying has only happened a few times. And one time, it was in public. (if you don't feel like reading that- either again or for the first time- I had a painful, tearful meltdown at the ren faire).

Today, I woke up, feeling tired and sore, just like yesterday. We had a major snowstorm coming. I woke up expecting to have a foot of snow on the ground, but when I looked out the window, there was barely a dusting on the ground (well, on the roof of my back porch, which is visible from my bedroom window). I took my morning medicine, I had my breakfast (a couple of Special K cereal bars, because I didn't feel hungry enough to eat a real breakfast, but I had to eat something because of the medicine I take in the morning). I dragged myself back upstairs before 7 AM and took a weird hour-ish long nap.

I woke up from that restless nap feeling slightly better. Just a little. Not much, but a little. The snow had intensified and we had four to six inches on the ground by then. I did my usual morning-after-morning stuff. Took the dogs out, cleaned up a little bit in the living room (I really need to vacuum, but I already felt crappy and dragging that Dyson around would have made me feel worse). Then I set out to do my 365 for today. It was snowing and I was hoping to catch a decent shot of the snow falling. I'm in a group on Flickr that does daily themes for your 365 projects and since mine is a self-portrait project, the theme was a little daunting. "Just one shot". No retakes. And if you know me, my 365s are carefully posed and sometimes take as many as ten shots to get just one that I like.

So, I rigged an old umbrella on my camera and the tripod (because it was still snowing) and went out and took my "Just one shot". Then I did about six retakes, because the falling snow looked so cool in that "just one shot" that I wanted to see if I could get a better shot for Facebook Profile Photo use.

And everything was fine. I went on with my day. I made lunch (ham and cheese on wheat), I edited the few photos (I kept that One Shot and one of the retakes, and I took four shots of some roses in the snow). And around 130 PM, I started to get twitchy. Sitting at my desk became uncomfortable. I stood in the kitchen for a few minutes, considered doing the dishes. I stood in the living room, going through the cable guide, but I didn't sit down because I knew the dogs would get all over me and that would hurt.

I figured that my body was just tired, like yesterday. Yesterday, around 4 PM, my body said it was done. That happens sometimes and I lay down for about thirty minutes. Sometimes I sleep, sometimes I don't, but the 30 minutes helps. I told my son that I wanted to get up at 430 and if I was still in bed at that time, to come get me. At 440, he woke me up, because, goddamn, I fell to sleep almost immediately.

I was in bed today, fully clothed, feet still in my boots, watching TV and expecting to doze off a little. But for 20 minutes, I became progressively worse. My clothes hurt. My boots felt like they weighed fifty pounds. The pain was all over my body, everywhere. I got up and took off all my clothes and got back under the fleece blankets. Surely that would help. That always helps.

For over an hour, I lay there in bed, my muscles, my skin, my body just screaming in agony. Everything hurt. Laying completely still hurt. Moving my legs to break that pain hurt. I was in hell. I cried. I couldn't stop the tears. I couldn't stop the pain. I was in bed, naked under the super soft fleece blankets and cried from the pain. Eventually, I fell to sleep for about thirty minutes. When I woke up, I still hurt, but I wasn't crying anymore. I stayed there for more than another hour before I got up. I was in bed for three hours total, most of that time spent naked with the fleece blankets.

Around 5 PM, I finally made my way downstairs (in my giant yoga pants and too-big "I shoot RAW" T-shirt, and the softest hoodie I own) and promptly took my Vicodin (that'd be an hour early and as I type this, its almost 90 minutes since I took that).

I was thinking about this fibro thing earlier today (because, how can I not? It seems to be the center of my world) and someone once asked me how it feels to have it. I was thinking of writing up a post that describes things as they happen- of course, I'd have to save it as a draft through the day and then post it at the end of the day. But I can say this...

You know that feeling in your body when you've worked out after not working out for a while? That feeling of tight, painfulness, on top of complete fatigue in the muscles? That is how I feel on a "good" day. My larger muscles ache almost all the time. Good days are the days when I don't need the Vicodin to get through them. That's at about a 5 on the 1 to 10 pain scale. And then, those days when I cry. The days when even Vicodin doesn't touch the pain. That pain today was so intense that I can't find the words to describe how bad it was. But, right now, 90-ish minutes after taking three 5/325 tablets of Vicodin on an empty stomach (I haven't had dinner yet), I've finally reached that point. I feel like my muscles have worked out too much. Every muscle is tight and sore. My skin feels hot, but when I touch it, it isn't hot. When I say "everything hurts", I mean everything. Even the tips of my fingers- my fingernails... well, the nail bed, actually- that hurts. It hurts to type.

At least I'm not crying. That's all I can say about that right now. At least I'm not crying and at least I was alone in my room where nobody could see me crying about the pain. I'm going to take my nightly muscle relaxers and find something easy for dinner. Tomorrow will be better.

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