Wow, time has sailed past me and I haven’t even blinked. I think the drugs really are starting to kill my brain cells because I’m apparently experiencing lost time.
It’s been a really rough month health-wise. After my week of doom I cockily assumed that I’d have a few great weeks. We haven’t been able to parse out the logic of exactly how birth control pills are supposed to be helping me, so Bear and I were thinking that maybe my symptoms have been so bad because it’s been so long since I had a period. And maybe after I do have a period I’ll be bounding around here with more energy than I know what to do with.
Not so much.
I made Bear move the tv into the bedroom during my period week so I could be as comfortable as possible in my misery, and as soon as I had him move it back to the living room, it wasn’t more than two days before I ended up back in bed.
I hate doing this for a number of reasons. 1) My normally incredibly isolated cabin fever world of never leaving my apartment distills down even further into my incredibly isolated cabin fever world of never leaving my bedroom, and 2) Although Bear is normally an incredibly compassionate and supportive and caretaking husband, when the tv is in the bedroom, he shuts down. No dishes get done, no laundry gets done, no garbage gets taken out, no cats get cleaned up after. So that once I’m up to moving around again, I’m buried underneath a mountain of sludge. That sucks.
But if there is one lesson I’ve learned through all this nonsense, it’s that I have to recognize and honor my limits. So my OCD self has had to learn to deal with the sludge. It’s good for me, right?
I’ve started recording an audio tape of my symptoms. I think someday I’d like to write a book about this, so I need details. It’s made me notice another symptom I probably wouldn’t have found otherwise – my shortness of breath. I can barely talk without getting winded, so now the tape just sounds like me practicing my new career as a phone sex operator perfecting my heavy breathing.
The bright spot in all this is that I work with the teenage girls at church and I absolutely love it. And they love me. This is what I save all my energy for throughout the week. I’ll go into more detail about this later, but I’ve been running the last couple of activities and I’ve been amazed to see how much I can accomplish out of sheer willpower and adrenaline. In fact, I might get to go to Girls Camp with them this year and sing dorky camp songs and listen to them all cry about how awesome God is and how much they love each other. I’d put up with just about any pain to be there for that. I think that would feed my soul for a long time.