Archive for the ‘The Crazy’ Category

While I was in New York (with a good portion of the internet), a lovely lady asked me (mostly kiddingly I’m pretty sure) how I stay “so thin” since I don’t really exercise. I kind of laughed and wasn’t sure what to say.

I mean, how do you tell a virtual stranger that the way you keep your weight down is by periodically starving yourself?

For a while here, I’ve been doing better with my weight issues. I was able to kind of let go for a while, to stop obsessing so much. But I say that I was able to let go knowing that the whole time I was not obsessing I was at a weight I am comfortable with. It’s kind of like an alcoholic feeling like they’re kicking sober ass when they have no access to alcohol.

Either way, things have been better this summer.

And when Slappy and I went to Canada I knew there would be weight gain and to my credit, I let myself enjoy and indulge in food. It was vacation and there were no scales. But there was poutine (which was eh, not a big fan of gravy), pastries, cakes and all kinds of treats. I didn’t eat myself sick, but I didn’t restrict the way I would’ve at home.

And when we got back the scale showed how much I enjoyed those treats. 6 pounds. 6 pounds in 6 days.

I wish I could tell you that I am being patient with myself and realizing that you can’t lose weight on the spot, that I’m not struggling, but I’m not being patient with myself and I am struggling.

I am struggling terribly.

I cannot seem to get this extra weight off. I think about it constantly, I look at myself in the mirror and I am sad, I am upset. I hate what I look like right now. I hate the way my clothes fit and don’t fit. Which is absurd because we’re talking about 4 pounds at this point, not 40. I know people would KILL to be 4 pounds heavier than their preferred weight and I feel terrible being so mentally screwed up about my weight. I know it’s not reasonable, but that doesn’t make it controllable.

I want to be carefree, I want to stop perseverating on the numbers. But more than that, I want to be 4 pounds lighter. I want my clothes to fit perfectly, I want to feel pretty and thin. I want to have a positive body image, but I want to have the body I like more. I want to be thin more than sane.

And that’s how I know that I’m not doing better.

I’m not starving myself, I’m not doing things that are unsafe, I’m no physical risk to myself. But I am not happy. I’m not me. I’m stuck on numbers and appearance, qualities that if any of my friends came to me upset about I would tell them to ignore. I cannot ignore them. I want to, but they weigh too heavily on my mind. To be honest, those 4 pounds are nothing compared to the weight of these worries, of these crazy thoughts about my body, my worth, my appearance.

I feel heavy in every way right now.

As much as I wish it wasn’t true, I’m not ready to handle the emotional and psychological weight right now. I can barely even admit how serious this is, let alone even begin to pretend that I can manage it, I can fix it or seek help for it. I’m not ready yet. I’m sorry.

And so I continue to manage the physical weight instead. And while I promise to manage it safely for my body, it will most certainly be at the expense of my mind.

I know it seems silly to write about something that I want to forget, I know it seems crazy to re-live an event to forget it. But I haven’t been able to get this one out of my mind, I haven’t been able to not think about this, so I’m hoping that writing about it will be the first step in forgetting.

On Tuesday, Slappy and I decided to take the peak-to-peak gondola ride that goes from Blackcomb to Whistler Mountain. It’s an enclosed ski lift that is around 1400 feet up in the air, travels almost 2 miles and lasts for about 11 minutes. The views are nothing short of amazing and everyone recommended it to us.

We bought our lift tickets and rode the chairlift up the Blackcomb side of the two peaks. I was excited to see the mountain, to hike. I was most excited for the view from this acclaimed gondola ride. We got to the boarding house for the peak-to-peak and we stepped into our lift with 2 other couples.

Our gondola left the boarding area and the view was breathtaking, and all the other passengers in our gondola oohed and aahed.

And I freaked out.

At least, that’s the nicest way I can describe what happened.

With no warning I suddenly felt motion sick. I was nauseated, I was sweating, I wasn’t breathing. I was trapped in a bubble with my husband and 4 other people, thousands of feet in the air for at least 10 more minutes and there was nothing I could do about it. I panicked.

I realize that nothing about that sounds particularly terrifying, except for maybe the height. But I wasn’t afraid of falling or crashing or dying. I wasn’t scared for my life.

I know it sounds silly, but I was scared of throwing up. I know, no one likes to throw up and everyone thinks they understand what I’m saying, but this goes much farther than just dislike. I have anxiety attacks, with fair regularity, purely about the idea of vomiting. I wake up terrified in the middle of the night over it. I carry bags around with me just in case, even though I haven’t had occasion to use one since I was 10. I have pills that I absolutely require to get me out of an anxiety attack- one that is almost always initiated by a stomach ache, or by finding out that someone near me is sick.

My single greatest fear in life is throwing up.

I don’t expect anyone to really understand this, because it’s completely illogical. Typing it out makes me feel silly because it’s ridiculous. I will not die from throwing up. I will not suffer (much) from it. And logically, I know this.

But anxiety knows no logic.

And on Tuesday I was a mile above the ground in a small bubble with 4 other people, and I was about to throw up. As soon as I realized what was happened, I took the pills I had stored in my pocket. All 5 of them at once. I waited for them to take effect, for my heart to calm, for my stomach to settle.

Nothing changed.

I physically could not calm myself down. I couldn’t see past the moment I was in, the situation I was in. The small room that I was going to throw up in.

My heart was racing, my whole body was shaking. I was deeper into any panic attack than I have ever been before. And to make matters worse, the 2 other couples were trying to distract me and all I really wanted was to be left alone. To cry, to freak out. To not have people watching this.

In the last few minutes of the ride I finally began to feel more in control. I still felt like I was going to be sick and I was just praying that we could get off the gondola first. I was embarrassed, I was ashamed. I felt like I had been completely defeated. I couldn’t calm myself down, I couldn’t even control myself with the help of medication.

And worse, I know that I ruined that trip, that adventure for my husband, and for the 4 other people who had to watch my breakdown. (One of the couples got off the gondola and thanked me for not puking, I swear).

Sometimes I feel like I can kick this fear. Sometimes I feel totally rational and see how crazy I am. To be honest, It’s been a long time since I’ve had an anxiety attack that even held a small candle to this one. I have been doing pretty well. But then Tuesday came.

And I’m just tired now. I’m tired of experiences like that, which call into doubt my ability to manage my own life. I’m tired of realizing how controlled I am by my fear. I’m tired of needing pharmaceuticals to help me to breathe, to keep my heart rate from sky-rocketing above 200 beats in a minute.

I have fought this fear for 15 years now. I have had good days, good weeks, good years even. And I have had ones like Tuesday.

Somewhere nearly a mile above the ground in a gondola I realized that I need help. I clearly cannot do this alone. I cannot live like this. I cannot ruin vacations. I cannot plan for every possible anxiety trigger every day.

I’m tired. I need help.

And I’m calling someone for it on Monday.

I’ve never really hesitated to talk about much here. I don’t discuss a lot about my marriage, I don’t give a lot of names or really specific descriptions, but otherwise, I lay most of it out here for you. But there is one thing I haven’t ever really written about. I’ve tried a few times, but words just failed and then escaped me.

I’ve had anxiety since I was about 12. I struggled for a few weeks in junior high with it, and one day the panic and worries just vanished. I didn’t do anything, I didn’t have a life revelation or suddenly learn how to manage my worries, it just got better. And I never really thought I’d have to deal with them again. Then, my senior year of college, the anxiety came back full force.

And it has never left.

Anxiety rules a fair amount of my life even now, 6 full years since the last flood of panic began. I still carry medication with me wherever I go, I still plan exits from events, from family gatherings, from days with friends. I still plan my life around anxiety each and every day.

If you’ve never had a panic attack, I can scarcely begin to explain it to you. It’s as if all of a sudden, you have no idea what’s going on. Your heart races, or sometimes slows down, cold sweat breaks out all over your body and whatever fear you may have had in the moment before the attack began, is now front and center, a huge elephant just waiting to knock you out. It goes from being a little worry to being a HUGE MONSTER scary thing.

When I have anxiety attacks, I always feel like I’m going to throw up. I always feel like I might pass out. And I always lose sense of what is reasonable and what is completely unrealistic. There are times when I honestly feel like I might die. When I think my heart is either going to beat so fast it’s going to explode, or it’s going to beat so slow it’ll just stop. And even though I know that there’s nothing wrong with my heart, that this is all in my head, it doesn’t matter. In that moment, I feel like the anxiety could kill me.

Before I really had anxiety, I always thought people were exaggerating. It always seemed so crazy that someone could be afraid of closed rooms or totally innocuous situations. It didn’t make any sense that people would rearrange their life for their fears, especially for irrational ones.

And then I felt that fear.

Then it gripped me by the throat, by the stomach. It took away all of my ability to reason my way out of things. It took another little slice of the control in my life. I can’t control my mind. I can’t stop my heart from pounding or slowing, I can’t keep my vision from going into a dark tunnel, from my body from shaking violently. Frankly, I can’t control a damn thing once anxiety sets in.

As much as I hate it, the only way I’ve ever been able to come out of an attack, to recover from the vice grip that anxiety has on my life, is with medication. I talk about it as if it doesn’t bother me, as if it’s nothing at all now, but it’s a lie. I hate taking pills. I hate that I can’t manage my fears, that I can’t bring myself out a panic without a prescription. I hate that I’ve dealt with this for years and I’m not getting better. That’s the worst part. If there was an end in sight, it might be bearable.

But there isn’t. And I’ve mostly come to terms with that.

I know that this is likely just the way my life will be. And I live in spite of my anxiety, but I don’t live the way I want to. I don’t get to be carefree. I spent hours thinking about worst case scenarios. I cannot ever just shut my brain down, or be relaxed, even on vacation, even when there shouldn’t be anything to worry about. Because that’s the way anxiety is. It’s not rational, it’s not about reality, it’s about fear. It’s about the things you cannot control. And worst of all, anxiety feeds on itself. Once you have a bout or an attack, you start to worry about having another and usually, that’s all it takes and once you have two in short period of time, the fear of having another is even more heightened than it was before.

Because anxiety isn’t just fear. It isn’t just worries and concerns.

It’s life changing fear.

It’s dream shattering worries.

It’s breath taking panic.

Anxiety isn’t just feeling or being scared, it’s being scared to feel, to be at all.

On my first day of my clinical rotation, I was speaking with a patient, an older man, who was just hilarious. I asked him a little about his family, he answered and then turned and asked the same question. I replied that I had no children, but had been married for two years.

He looked at me and said, “Two years and no kids? What are you doing? You’re just lazy.”

He was kidding, of course, and we had a good laugh. I wondered if he could hear my biological clock ticking the whole time. Because dude.

tick tock tick tock Tick Tock TICK TOCK TICK TOCK TICK FREAKING TOCK TICK ARE YOU LISTENING TO ME TOOOOOOCK

Or maybe I’m giving off baby wanting pheromones or something. I’m not sure.

This whole baby fever thing has been helped considerably by spending all weekend with three adorable babies.

I mean really, how can you resist these eyes? And attitude, I mean really.

And these CHEEKS!?

And well, I didn’t manage to get a single focused picture of Gigi this weekend, but rest assured, the kid is freaking adorable too. The first day we were there she toddled over to me and reached her arms up for me to pick her up. My heart just melted into a tiny puddle.

So it shouldn’t come as a great surprise to me that all I dreamed about last night was being pregnant (which I am tragically not). I dreamed I was, and then wasn’t, and then was again. In the end, just before I woke up, I was celebrating with my family and internets, I was THRILLED. So waking up was sort of a let down.

I know that now is not the time for me to have children. I know I am not in a position emotionally, physically or financially to care for another human being besides my husband. I know that I need to finish school because, fun fact: it’s not free.

But being (slightly) in touch with reality does not seem to do anything for the desire to have a baby right now right now rightnow.

I guess it’s just a good thing that my birth control is REALLY tough to sabotage.

I mean, not that I would do that but, well, I’d totally consider doing that.

It’s been 3 days shy of a month since I sat at this computer and admitted that I have a problem. I don’t know what I expected to happen after that day. I had already told my husband I would see a therapist. I had already told him I was doing better.

Well, I didn’t. And better is a very relative term.

I’m eating enough calories now. I’m still losing a little weight, but not at an alarming or unhealthy rate. Just enough to keep giving me that little exhilaration of success, of control. Just enough to keep giving me that hit of my mental addiction that I need to make it through the day.

My eating may have improved, but the mental side of this remains unchanged. I can’t talk to anyone about it, or I guess, it’s not an inability, it’s just that I don’t want to. I feel alarmingly alone, even though I have people on all sides of me, offering me a rope to climb out of this hole. Even though I have people who are willing to build me a ladder to get out.

The truth is, I like this hole.

I like that I’m doing something successfully. And I like the way my body is starting to look. And I know how incredibly fucked up that sounds. I really do.

I make jokes about having an eating disorder with some people who know. I make jokes about being a control freak all the time. But it’s not really a joke. It’s serious, and I know that. But I’m still not able, not willing, to face it.

It’s easy for people who are outside of this to sit aside and say, hey, this girl needs therapy. This girl needs a trained professional to help her. She needs to realize that she’s hurting herself, even if not physically, then mentally and emotionally. This girl needs someone to help her find a healthier way to find control, or a strategy to give up control altogether.

It’s easy to be an observer on this life.

But it’s not easy to live it.

I don’t want to go to therapy. I don’t like to talk about this, at all. I don’t like to talk, aloud, about the things I’m doing wrong, about how I am not normal, not right. I don’t want to sit in a room and try to dissect why I am the way I am. I don’t want to tell another person that I need help, I don’t want to admit that I’m not okay, out loud, to someone who doesn’t know me. To be honest, I can’t even say it out loud to people who know me well.

I don’t want help.

But I need help.

I knew I needed help when I finished my birthday dinner and worried, unreasonably, about how much weight I had gained in one day. On my birthday. I knew I needed help when I was willing to skip out on eating a cupcake that my sister and I baked last weekend because I had already eaten more for lunch than I had planned in my head. I knew I needed help when I stepped on the scale and felt crushed because I had gained back .6 pounds.

.6 pounds should not ruin a day. Birthdays should not be a time for thinking about weight. A cupcake should not cause mental distress.

I know this. I know all of this. And if it was as easy as knowing, then I wouldn’t be typing this at all.

I know I need help, but more than that, I know I don’t want it. I don’t want to talk about it, I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to sit for hours having another person dissect my life, my brain, my problems.

I don’t know where I’ll go from here. I don’t know the next chapter in this story. I just know that it’s only just begun. I know that the resolution won’t be quick, and it won’t be easy. I know it will involve tears and that it will involve time.

And I know at some point, it will involve help.

But not today. Not yet.

This morning my hair straightener broke. It wasn’t that big of a deal, but it meant I couldn’t wear my hair down today because it was tumbleweed sized and the curling iron couldn’t start to tame it. So I pulled it up into the worlds tiniest ponytail and turned around to see the back. To my surprise for the first time in a few years, the scar on the back of my head was plainly visible.

And more surprisingly, for the first time in a long time, I was self-conscious about it. I was genuinely worried that people might comment, or stare. That it would be noticeable again.

It’s no secret that I have some substantial scars. I have the one on my head, the one on my breast, a couple of good ones on my arms, a few on my legs. My skin is marked with experience in the very same way that my spirit is.

You can’t see all the scars on the inside, but on weeks like this one, they seem to show a little clearer.

I have a scar in my memory from the last time I went to a therapist for anorexia and she told me I wasn’t that thin.

I have scars in my memory from the last time I recovered from not eating by gaining all the weight, and then some, back.

I have scars in my memory from the pain of admitting my problems, time and time again.

I have scars in my memory from all sorts of things I wish had never happened. Many of which were my own doing.

My mind feels raw with its wounds right now, my spirit cracked in more places that it’s solidly together. I am trying to let them heal, to take care of myself and to find my way back to normal, but it’s a struggle. It seems like every time I start to heal in one place, something else breaks.

I feel exposed right now, like all my flaws are on show. It makes me feel even less in control of my life, which really makes everything worse.

It’s amazing how just this morning I found myself worried about what people would think of the scar on my neck, of how they would react if they saw it. And then I realized that it wasn’t really about that scar at all, it was about all my wounds and imperfections.

It was about how worried I am that people might see what’s really going on and how that might change everything.

It started innocently.

I woke up sick at a weekend retreat in San Diego last month. I didn’t really eat much because I felt like hurling pretty much all day. I tried to eat as much as my stomach would allow, but at the end of the day, it didn’t amount to much. When I got on the scale the next morning, I had lost two full pounds.

I haven’t mentioned it too much, but with starting school in August and with the restrictions on activity from the blood patches, I’ve put on some weight I never really wanted. Exercise hasn’t even been an option, particularly given how difficult a regular full school day is right now, and that hasn’t helped much.

Shortly after that weekend, my husband started working nights, meaning he was at work from 5pm to 6am, which was the polar opposite of my schedule. I leave for school between 6 and 7 in the morning and rarely get home before 5 in the evening. While he’s on nights I don’t seem him for 5 or more days at a time, which is tough for a number of reasons. During those weeks I’m responsible for myself only. And somehow I failed at that this time.

While my husband was working nights, I drifted into a familiar pattern. It wasn’t intentional or planned. It wasn’t even something I was fully aware at first.

I was starving myself.

I don’t need to rehash all the details, but I was pretty successful. In two weeks I lost the weight I gained in the past 8 months and then some. I became close friends with my scale, weighing myself multiple times a day, letting the numbers dictate what I ate. I became paranoid of eating foods that would bring the weight back on. I started letting food rule my life.

It took me a week or so before I realized what I was doing. And it took me about 10 seconds after that to realize why. It wasn’t about the weight. It wasn’t really about the weight last time either. It was about the fact that every other part of my life is going to hell in a handbasket. My grades are starting to sink, I’m not sleeping, I’m in so much pain on a day to day basis that I have thoughts that I can’t even admit to here. My husband, my family are all impacted by this.

And I can’t control any part of it.

But food I could control. Losing weight was something I could accomplish, something that I could be responsible for, something I wasn’t screwing up. Which, when you get right down to it, is pretty fucking ironic because screwing up was exactly what I was doing. And even when I realized what I was doing, I didn’t stop. Because in some totally distorted way, I was happy. If I’m being honest, I’m still struggling to stop.

It’s been almost a month and I haven’t told anyone. I only told my husband last night. Not because I didn’t trust him, but because I was, I am, embarrassed. Because there’s a small part of me that doesn’t want to stop, that doesn’t want to lose the control that I’ve finally rediscovered.

I want to say that really don’t know how this happened, how I ended up back in this place, but I do. I am just disappointed in myself, humiliated that this has happened again.

And now I have to own up. I have to admit that I have another problem, I have to seek help because clearly I can’t handle this, my life, on my own. And it’s so damned frustrating that I just want to scream. I don’t know how to live like this, where nothing is mine, where nothing is under my own power or choice. I don’t know how to be a passenger in the backseat of my life.

It’s interesting that people always say that the hardest part is admitting you have a problem. But I’m starting to feel like the hardest part is actually admitting that you are the problem. That the only thing that’s really wrong is you.

After a restless night in a hotel near the hospital, I’m back at home, on my couch. I’ve been trying to estimate if my head feels better, but the relentless pain in my back has made that a challenge. The pain from my back is so acute that it sort of reduces other pain in my body to negligible levels. Which sort of has its benefits.

And so for now, I’m completely undecided on my head. It definitely still hurts, but might be better. It’s just too early to tell.

I’ve spent the day wrapped up in my own thoughts. I’m in a weird place. For 7 months, my whole life has been defined by pain. Every hour has been spent, at least on some level, coping with it. It has infiltrated everything from school to my marriage to my sleep. My life is different than it was 7 months ago.

I’m sure it seems a little crazy, but I’m almost afraid that I don’t know who I am without pain. This doesn’t mean that I don’t want the pain to go away, that I wouldn’t be thrilled to be without a headache, but I’m scared. I don’t know if I remember how to be me anymore. I feel like my life, who I am, has been masked by pain for so long that I won’t even recognize myself.

I have learned how to adapt to this life, I’ve learned how to get done what I need to get done with pain, and it feels like chronic pain isn’t so much an inconvenience as it is a part of me now. An extremely painful part, but a part nevertheless. And so as I wait to see if the pain changes, or in a best case scenario, completely goes away, I wonder a little bit about who will be left behind.

I wonder who I have become, who I am now after 7 months with pain diluting my personality, my life. Am I diluted for good? Am I a watered down version of who I once was?

I know it sounds against all reason to say that I’m afraid of what life will be like without pain, but it’s like all other changes. It’s a mist clouded field of unknowns.

I don’t know what happens next. I don’t know what to expect or what to prepare for. I’m afraid that I’ve spent all this time working to be me again, when it might already be too late. I might be lost, changed forever from those months behind this veil of pain.

I don’t even know where to begin.

I went back to school Monday morning, bright and early. Things went okay, though it was incredibly overwhelming and absolutely exhausting, but I managed.

The very last thing that I had to do before leaving school was change out of my anatomy lab scrubs and tennis shoes back into my normal clothes. I got dressed, and without even thinking, bent over to pick up my flip flop to put it on. Normally, this would be no big thing. But normally, I haven’t had 3 needles and a crap ton of blood shoved into my back in the past week. I can only describe what I felt when I bent over as unholy, terrifying pain. By the time I got to my car (sobbing all the way, I might add, because crying in public? kind of my thing now) my back hurt from just below hip level to the middle of my shoulder blades.

And then I got to sit in traffic for an hour and a half. (And do a whole lot more crying.)

While stuck in my car, I got a call from my husband.

Important tangent: My husband has a hard time getting work done with noise, so he will often work in the bathtub, with his laptop on a chair. He runs the water and it acts as kind of a white noise machine. Yes, it’s a little odd (and yea, a little mental image-y, sorry about that), but it works for him.

Or it did.

Because the call that I got from my husband? was to let me know that my cat had walked up behind his computer and knocked it off the chair and into the full bathtub.

My husband’s not even two year old MacBook Pro, was submerged in hot water. HOT WATER. In case you were keeping track, that was thousands of dollars, literally down the drain. I don’t even have words for this yet.

After getting home and eating dinner and finishing homework and dealing with a very upset husband, I went to bed early, hoping to help with the exhaustion. I went to bed at 9:30 and proceeded to spend more time awake than asleep before my alarm went off at 5:40 in the morning.

And as if on schedule, on the way to school, I had a total meltdown. For whatever reason, the commute to and from school just demolishes my sanity. It’s like I sit in a river of hormones for those 3 hours each day.

What I realized this morning was that my midterm exams are in less than 3 weeks (I have 6 of them in one week), I have missed 9 days of school (out of 15) and I’m so far behind that I don’t even know what I don’t know except that it’s A LOT.

Another important tangent: In December, Slappy and I had decided that because I had a 3 day weekend that happened to fall on Valentine’s Day, his birthday and the weekend before Mardi Gras, that we could swing a trip down to New Orleans to celebrate. He got a week off work, we bought tickets.

It’s something I’ve been looking forward to so very much. And I realized this morning that I couldn’t go, not with school, not with all these absences piling up. I have insisted that Slappy go any way because he has a week of vacation and loves Mardi Gras, but I’m just bummed as hell to not be there (for his birthday especially). I know it’s the right choice, it’s just a shitty one. I took comfort in the fact that I was scheduled to go to New Orleans for 2 weeks in early March for a clinical rotation for school. It made the decision easier, the disappointment a little less.

So I cried for the remaining 20 miles of my morning commute, arrived at school on time (looking like a hot mess) and sat through a PAINFULLY long lecture that was given by the instructor who is assigned as my faculty “mentor.” After class I went up to him to let him know about the (pertinent) post blood patch restrictions, especially the not pushing, pulling, lifting 5 pounds for 2 months thing. Because in the field I’m going into, and in his class especially, we do a hell of a lot of pushing, pulling and lifting.

And he sighed sympathetically, thought for a moment and told me that I wouldn’t be able to take two of my midterms on time. Both require me to lift much more than 5 pounds and perform exercises that I simply can’t do, at least not in less than 3 weeks when I’m supposed to. So now I have to take 2 of my midterms at final exams. Don’t look now, but it’s LAST SEMESTER ALL OVER AGAIN.

So then I cried some more.

And then he told me that I had to meet with the program director at lunch to discuss other ramifications of the 5 pound bullshit. The first thing she asked me was if I thought I should drop to half time, which would extend my program by a year. She told me that some of my instructors had indicated that they’re concerned that I’m not going to pass and while she has confidence in me, she had to ask. In case you wondered, the answer is no. She and I have had this conversation before and the answer is still the same. I’m not spending an extra year in school. It may sound stubborn, but I’ll quit first. But it feels really GREAT to know that my instructors don’t think I can pass my classes.

And then, when I thought things couldn’t get worse, she informed me that because of the fucking five pound rule, those 2 weeks in New Orleans that I was clinging to? They’re gone.

I can’t go.

I’m sure it sounds silly because it’s not that big of a deal in the long run, but it fucking sucks. I have worked so hard to get to where I am. I worked so hard to pass last semester so that I could do those 2 weeks in New Orleans. I sacrificed time and sanity to be able to make it to this point. And it’s for nothing.

It’s another casualty of my health.

It’s another dream demolished by pain.

And just in case you weren’t keeping track, today, this awful day filled with suck, also happens to be the 6th month mark on this headache. If that isn’t just fitting, I don’t know what is.

I have lost so much in these six months and today, like many other days, I have been defeated by this pain. I have been reminded of all that has been stolen from me. I have been reminded of how my life, my dreams have been forever changed by pain.

And I am a mess.

And I just don’t know how long it’s going to take to clean things up this time.

Today began much as I had anticipated. I slept in until 9 (minus feeding the cats at 6:30 because it would apparently kill them to sleep in too…), my mom and I got on the road at 10:30, I had the first throw of death by hunger at 10:31 and even though google maps said that without traffic the hospital was only a 50 minute drive away, it took us the entire hour and a half to get there. Fun times had by all, let me tell you.

We checked in and because of a communications snafu, ended up sitting in the wrong waiting room for an hour. And by sitting, I obviously mean laying down on the bench, contracting 800 different diseases but trying to reduce the enormous head pain of being upright. Once that got sorted out, I was taken to the very same pre-op area where I’d spent my past 2 Fridays. It’s always nice when the nurses know who you are before seeing your chart.

My nurse got down to business and told me that she’d have to put in not one, but two IVs. She then took to alternately examining and smacking my arm to see if there were any good veins. She did not approve, nor instill confidence. A small lifetime later I had one IV in each hand and I had climbed on the gurney to go to interventional radiology.

Now, I’m not new to blood patches. I’ve had 2 now. They’re not a big deal. You lay on your stomach, they numb you, insert the needle (check it’s location on x-ray), take some blood and shoot it in. It’s not comfortable, to be sure, but just not that big of a deal.

I met with my neurosurgeon (more on that another time) and then was introduced to my anesthesiologist. Um, wait. What? Anesthesia? No. Just no. Anesthesia and I do not agree. In fact, we usually hate each other with the force of hours of dry heaving. After much convincing and hyperventilating, the anesthesiologist agreed to not use Propofol, but a different drug that would give the “twilight” effect.

I rolled onto the procedure table, my back was exposed and the anesthesiologist explained that he was giving me some Versed and Fentanyl. Before I could say anything, my eyes were droopy. I was awake, but dude, the world could’ve ended and I’d have smiled right through it. As it turns out, anesthesia and I don’t agree, but Versed and I are pretty much blood brothers.

The procedure itself was VERY uncomfortable because my neurosurgeon believes that the best way to do blood patches is to put as much blood in as he can before the patient cries uncle. And when you cry uncle, he puts a little more in anyway, just for good measure.

In a word: ouch.

The whole thing was over in less than 30 minutes and my mom was brought back in. And then she made a fantastic little mistake. She gave me my phone.

Um, I misspelled cake. I was clearly high out of my mind.

After my hour of coming down off my high resting the nurse came in to give me my post-operative instructions. I expected the whole lay flat for a day and take it easy nonsense. Which is why I literally laughed out loud upon reading my post-op notes.

“For two months: no high impact exercises, including running, jumping, bumpy rides, bending forward, or lifting objects heavier than 5 pounds, including heavy grocery bags. Walking or mild swimming in warm water is okay.”

Okay, first of all, high impact bending forward? How do you even do that? I really want to try it, because, dude, how wouldn’t that be awesome?

And mild swimming? Is that like halfway between drowning and freestyle?

But wait, there’s more.

“Sexual activity for 2 months: Female on top, male on bottom.”

Um.

Wow.

So, let me see if I can get this straight (and break everyone’s minds). No high impact exercises, including “bumpy rides” but the only way that I can have sex is on top?

I totally just got the high impact bending over restriction.

Honestly, I can’t wrap my mind around this. Have these people never had sex? Because that’s just not how it works. Or just never had good sex? And more importantly, what the hell kind of study did they have to do to figure out that being on top was less traumatic?

I mean REALLY.

I suppose I can’t hold too much of a grudge, I did get really high on some really REALLY good drugs today. And, you know, he might have repaired this headache, which I guess is probably a good thing. I suppose that in exchange I can stick to mild swimming, low impact bending over and dictated sex.

The sacrifices I make for my health. Sheesh.