elephants know how to party

physical whatchamawhatever

I know I’ve been lax about keeping anyone current on what the latest status is with my seemingly endless state of physical wonkyness.

(In case you’re just tuning in, I have lots of pain. Just about everywhere. Seen doctors for years now. Lots of them. Been in physical therapy, had x rays and MRI’s, seen surgeons and tried TENS units, trigger point injections, massage, chiropractors, and I currently take a pile of medication for various shit everyday that looks like a pile of Fruity Pebbles sitting in my hand. Some days are better than others. This is not one of them. Sometimes I seem downright normal. Other times I’m crippled and wish a train would run over me already. Hence the Fruity Pebbles. The list of shit tried and specialists seen is too much to type, so on to the latest bit of news...)

I got a call from my new doc. Technically she is the PA of the doctor I see at the pain management clinic, and I have really resisted going to see her. I’m so sick of new doctors I could... make sheep explode by looking at them. Not that I have anything against sheep, but I was trying to think of something suitably violent but yet cartoonish enough I could stomach typing it...

I digress.

New doc (the PA) is wicked great. My first appointment with her she managed to shove my SI joint back into place, which she then followed with shifting bones in my knee, ankle, and foot back into their correct places as well. If it sounds unpleasant, you are indeed correct. The SI joint involved a few choice trigger point injections into my hip.

The word I’m looking for here is, "GARRRRRRRRR!"

Once the SI joint was where it was supposed to be, she moved on down my leg, with the bones in feet being the most stubborn of all. Go figure. No injections on the rest of the leg, but I was at my limit with her trying to manipulate tendons over bones or whatever the hell she was doing. Dude.

Whatever it was, it seems to be working. I’m in more pain. (laughs) Which is what is expected, since whatever has shoved my various body parts into the wrong places has happened at least four years ago. Doing a full medical history, I can narrow down the possibilities for causes:
taking that triple somersault down the concrete steps four years ago
and/or
the flying acrobatic trick I did on the steel jungle gym in the 5th grade, resulting in me bashing my skull into a concussion and falling to the rocks below
and/or
the possibility that a lot of the problems actually stem from birth, when my nearly ten pound ass tried to rocket out of my poor rather petite mother. And I mean ass, because that’s how I came out: full breach. Ass first, legs up around my freaking head. The doctors told her I should have been born by C-section but whoops, too late! By the time she got to the hospital I was on my way out, and was born before my dad parked the car.

Whatever the reason, the pushing of things back where they go causes intense muscle spasms, as I learned when my neck was worked on last year in physical therapy. Being fixed right after an injury is one thing; waiting years to correct it is quite another. My muscles, etc, are quite used to being where they are now. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt like hell, it does. But having stuff shoved back from whence it came hurts like hell, too. The SI joint and leg work she did has made muscles in my back and legs freak the fuck out. One day I was suddenly aware of some new shin muscle that I never noticed existed before. I think it was screaming, "YOOO MOTHERFUCKING HOOOO BITCH!" I’m not sure, it’s hard to translate, but that’s probably close enough.

I’ve been wearing my totally sexy SI belt again, and now I can actually tell what it’s supposed to do. The last PA told me to get one but oh, he forgot to actually adjust the fucking joint, duh. Not that I knew what he was supposed to do- that’s why I pay them assloads of money, that schooling they have so they know stuff I don’t...

Pain makes me cranky. Please ’scuse my sarcasm. Garrrr.

Anywho, I’m back to wearing the belt and keeping as active as possible, but it’s a challenge since I’m using weird "new" muscles and holy shit am I tired! And the muscle spasms, blah blah, it’s fun.

Back to the current news. The PA calls me yesterday and tells me she got the results from the MRI I had done last week, and wanted to talk to me about it.

Note: having a doctor call me is mind boggling. I told her repeatedly that I loved her. I’m not kidding.

Her suspicions about a possible rotator cuff tear were correct, she said. I have an anterior labrum tear, which I googled of course, and grossed myself out with it, especially with the pictures of MRI’s and various medical illustrations so I could figure out where the supraspinatus and subscapularis are, so I could translate what the PA told me about having tendinosis, not to be confused with tendinitis, because tendinosis is degenerative and therefore sucks my ass all the more for not having been diagnosed earlier:


I mean, yay that I have a doctor with a freaking clue finally, right?
But not yay that it’s taken me this long and this much pain to find ONE, right?
And what does that mean in connection to the fact that I had six months of excruciating myofascial release work done, some of which was pulling all the fuck over these f-ed up already muscles and tendons and I don’t know what all...? Because I am thinking to myself that that probably did not do good things for my shoulder, although it helped my neck.

And I’m left wondering, what else is there to find? The PA and I talked briefly about that, and my concern that she’s finally pulling the lid off the barrel of the hilarious but ornery monkeys that make up my body.

So.

I am optimistic and jaded, pissed off and thrilled.
Those go together about as well as a shoelace and doorknob sandwich.

I’m going to take more Fruity Pebbles and talk crazy shit. As most of you know, I totally excel at that. I believe sushi with friend is to be had, so fuck it, I’m out...



Pickled ginger heals all.

bastards, raining bulls, and magical bird friends

I've had some strange dreams as of late. No stranger than normal, I suppose, but there's been a few doozies that have stuck out in my head. I'll start with the icky ones and end on a positive note:

1) I'm at my grandparents house, and my son is in the back seat of their car. My son's biological father (aka Bane) gets in the drivers seat and starts to back out of the driveway. My grandparents are in the garage, distracted, and don't notice, but I am flooded with guilt at having brought this into their household. He's trying to steal THEIR car and MY child. Self righteous indignation sweeps over me and I go after him. Moments later, we are on their front porch, which has somehow transformed into a room. I am chewing Bane out for being an asshole, and there is a knock at the door. He smiles sadistically and says, "Oh, I wonder who that could be?" and opens the door. The person standing there is wearing the exact same calculating grin, and it is the physically abusive boyfriend I had dated just before meeting Bane. Bane hated him in real life, so I find this alliance to be baffling. I look to Bane, who is letting the other bastard ex inside, and Bane says to me, "It's like...an intervention. A Bitch Intervention."
I started to punch one of them, I'm not sure who, and that's when I woke up. I was punching the bed so hard my head was bouncing up and down.

2) There were a string of strange dream-circumstances that led up to me missing my MRI, something I was in waking life very anxious about, but the one I remember most was the one before I woke up. I was trying to get out of a parking lot, but there was, bizarrely enough, a lot of very angry bulls in the road. At that intersection, there may have been about twenty, some clustered in groups, others facing the vehicles, each one pissed off and ready to charge. Right next to me was a semi truck, and I thought that if I was to have a show down with a bull, I would very much prefer to be driving a semi truck. The bull that was getting ready to charge the semi truck didn't care in the slightest. It was PISSED. That's when the gravity of the situation struck me; a bull ramming a semi truck? Obviously these are no ordinarily pissed off bulls, right? I try to make my way around them as carefully as possible, and as quickly, only to get onto the highway and realize where the bulls are coming from: the sky. Yes. It is raining bulls. The bulls that land and live are the very angry ones. The ones that land and don't live actually splatter hugely, but it's all some kind of ectoplasm green slime, much like in the movie Ghostbusters.

I woke up and told my husband my mind is very devious indeed. Apparently I couldn't come up with something logical enough to stop me from my MRI appointment, noooo, it had to be raining bulls. (rolls eyes)

3) This morning I was dreaming about some sort of combination dragonfly-hummingbird. We were in a glorious field of wildflowers, and I kept tossing my keys into the flowers, and my little flying friend would swirl and swoop deep into the flowers, so I could find them again and toss them again, almost like a game of fetch. I remember thinking it was terribly whimsical, and that I should be afraid I might lose my keys somewhere, but instead I was obviously blessed with some sort of magical ability to play with this creature, and so nothing bad could possibly happen. The last part I remember is laughing and tumbling through the tall flowers, being careful of my new friend and waiting to see where it would pop up and what whimsical thing it would do next.

That's good stuff.

occasional law student standing on glass

I’ve spent the last few hours going through legal sites and statutes and limitations and legal mumbo jumbo about the law concerning divorce, what constitutes abuse, child custody, and all those pretty nitty gritty topics that suddenly require microscopic inspection when the shit hits the marital fan.

Not to worry, my dears, it is not my fan.

However, it is the third state I’ve microscopically analyzed over the last two years, for the benefit of three different friends in three ugly ending divorces. All three of them (forgive me, you all know who you are, and you know I’m not judging, hell!) have one very common theme:

Passivity.

That is not to say they don’t have balls (one of them literally), but there’s something about being in an emotionally abusive relationship that seems to tie up the sense of self worth, the power of conviction, any momentum towards assertiveness, and rewire the entire logic center of the brain into a labyrinth even a surrealist would cringe at.

I know how it goes. Been there, done that.

Physical abuse, sexual abuse, been there and done those, too. The frightening thing is that those are, in some bizarre twist, easier to deal with. And I think it’s because it’s easy to recognize them for what they are: abuse. But when someone is subtly (even obviously) controlling you, warping the reality you live in, and creating endless chaotic mini disasters in your life, you tend to focus on trying to hold shit together, clean up the mess, do damage control from the latest round of fuckyoufollies that your once beloved has served up for you again...

The truly insidious part of it all is that you’re busy knitting up one end while they unravel the other, but you frantically knit, thinking progress is being made, something is being done, surely things will get better, but they don’t.

How long can you do that before you finally crack under the pressure? And when that crack happens, is it in brute strength, does it propel you out of the situation, or is it a simple fluttering feather, the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back, leaving you hopeless and broken, a shell of the person you once were, resigned to depression?

When I had a shrink ask me about my past, she told me to close my eyes and look down, deep within myself, and asked me what I saw.

What I saw startled us both: I saw myself standing on a piece of glass, and beneath me was an ever darkening abyss, but beneath my feet I could see smaller and larger sheets of glass, jagged at the edges, moving slowly in every direction, each one playing a scene of my past. I didn’t know how deep it went, but I knew the darkness was not something I wanted to delve into. And yet- I was still just standing on a sheet of glass. The present moment was simply that: a sheet of unbroken glass, waiting to be imprinted with the ever present NOW, and then it too would become another layer shifting beneath me.

When does that transformation occur, I wondered? When does the current piece of glass become the fragments of my own history? While I pondered that, my shrink calmly noted, "That doesn’t sound as if you feel your life offers much in the way of stability." All I could do was blink at her, dumbstruck, feeling the precarious sheet of my own psyche beneath me, no matter where I was, no matter what was happening, and thinking that, indeed, I did not feel safe. Ever. And also, how weird am I? What a bizarre image to have of oneself. Where were my glorious unfurling wings, my sense of majesty, the golden shafts of sunlight illuminating my loving self?

I don’t know. I think, retrospectively, these things are just different aspects. Maybe moods. I don’t know. But I refuse to resign myself to one or the other. I think I have need for them both. One keeps me breathing, with the ability to take utter joy in the bird singing outside my window, the other keeps me alert, able to differentiate between that which is healthy and that which is not, a trait I sorely lacked before.

It’s painful to stand to one side and watch someone else struggle with something so painfully familiar, and to know that it isn’t my battle, and I can’t do it for her. Lessons of such an intimate core building nature are not something you can do for anyone. They have to shatter their own fragile moment and let the past become something they can stand on, with their own two feet.

I can, at least, offer advice, show options, basically hold up a window to look through or a mirror to serve as a reality check.

And then I have to step away, hold my own ground, and stay balanced.

sorry about the delay...

Some stuff I am schooled enough to know how to fix, but when it comes to dealing with a glitch in the programming on the server... yah, not so much. Hubby fixed it though, and things should be rolling along now.