zeptember

I’ve been plugging away all night trying to bend WordPress to my will for pages on educating the masses about Endometriosis, and now I’m officially giving up. I’m cranky, I don’t care, people can friggin search for info themselves, and I don’t care to keep educating myself. I’m miserable, I’m bleeding like a stuck pig, I don’t want to go on with this life …

and… radio nigel just started playing Enigma’s Return to Innocence.

Love - Devotion - Feeling - Emotion
Don’t be afraid to be weak
Don’t be too proud to be strong
Just look into your heart my friend
That will be the return to yourself
The return to innocence.
A return to innocence.
If you want, then start to laugh
If you must, then start to cry
Be yourself don’t hide
Just believe in destiny.
Don’t care what people say
Just follow your own way
Don’t give up and use the chance
To return to innocence.
That’s not the beginning of the end
That’s the return to yourself
The return to innocence.
That’s the return to innocence.

Ok, ok.

And now, some invigoration:

I need more Native American warrior music in the house.

I took a shower around 4pm. i’d taken a tylenol3 around what, 1:30pm? So I should have been fine.

But no.

The cramps started up once again after I got out of the shower. And because I’d stopped taking the Chinese herbal pills this month due to pill overload, I now pay the price in the form of clots again.

I took Ibuprofen 600mg as soon as I got out of the shower, around 4:30pm. It kicked in within about 20 minutes, and the pain subsided. I felt bad that my honey was doing so much housework today, so I did some dishes. Very slowly. That’s all I did. And the cramping came back.
I tried to let the Ibuprofen continue to do its thing but that time had passed. Around 5:45pm, I took a Tylenol3. Now I wait for it to fully kick in (I have dizziness so it’s starting), and I’ve stopped moving around - I’m on the couch with dual heating pad action.

My rant for today is:

How the fuck am I supposed to work on hobbies or side projects when I’m constantly in pain, waiting for the meds to kick in, and updating this journal as to what’s going on so that I have some sort of fucking record for myself, the doctors, and others who go through this hell?

I don’t DO anything!!!! I sit here in pain and cry and/or whimper. I fall asleep continuously at the keyboard. I sleep half the day because of the pain and the medication. I do this for up to four days. Then when all the pain stops, I have to get back to work. There’s no more time for side projects. The time was used up by being in pain and in a daze on medication so that I could barely even update my journal.

So nothing extra and meaningful for me gets done in life. Nothing.

That’s my rant for today.

While in Tylenol3-induced sleep, I had a dream about something in my childhood. It’s ALWAYS something out of my childhood whenever I have codeine.

This dream featured the woods I grew up in. I was in my dad’s living room, peeking out of the golden/yellow 1970’s curtains hanging over the large picture window. I had my little 35mm film camera with me, and I was taking pictures of the woods through the window like I often did as a kid. There were a bunch of boys in the forest below, playing football. I squinted to see them better. They were dressed warmly cuz it was a cold day out. When I looked closer, however, I saw that the floor of the forest was GREEN - there was GRASS down there.

THAT’S not right.

The curtains kept falling back across the window, obscuring my view, and I had to keep pushing the curtains out of my way so I could get a better look at the forest, camera still in hand. I could see now that where all the streams used to be, there was now PAVEMENT in winding paths. The pavement was right over the top of the streams, with the streams flowing beneath them! In the right corner of the forest, near where the boys were playing football, I could see that a portion of the cement path was not there, in order to reveal the stream flowing beneath it.

My eyes scanned the forest and moved towards the left, and I could see less and less trees, and more and more ground, covered over with thick green sod.
The whole place had been turned from a natural wetland into a city park!! People were walking around down there, playing in the park - playing in MY FORMER WOODS - MY FORMER SANCTUARY.

I scanned the forest towards the left of the view out the window, and searched for grampa’s plow - the one that two trees grew through after he’d left the plow in the forest because he was too old and weak, and then had died. I found the plow, but the trees growing through the wheels had been chopped to stubs only in the wheels themselves, and there was no marker explaining the plow’s existence there in the former woods.

And the tree house that Uncle C had built - the trees and boards and the cement tubes were all gone to make for a pretty park.

I began to cry. It was all gone. They took it all away from me.

My crying woke me up - I was crying in real life.

And, in reality, this dream may not be so far fetched, because based upon what my father has told me over the years (reports of developments still coming in every so many months from him), the people who bought my father’s house put a second addition onto the house, and developers nearby have been clearing the forest on the other side of the road from this house, and putting in McMansions. The developers and the city have widened the two-lane highway into FIVE lanes, so of course they’ve cut into the forest. There’s now a sidewalk at the far end of the two-acre front lawn I and the family used to mow with the John Deere tractor.

I need a new sanctuary.

Notes about the dream:
The golden curtains haven’t been hanging in that window since the early 80’s, and he no longer lives in that house since the late ’90’s.

I’m not sure the city could get away with paving over the streams, although I know its done all the time (it’s happening off Highway 101 in San Mateo right now). In the case of the natural wetland near my father’s old house, that valley floods like the devil every spring, because the streams that run through the forest are major tributaries to the Rouge River. So I don’t see HOW it would be possible to fill it in or pave over any part of it. In that regard, I may still have some semblance of my sanctuary left for whenever I visit home. Maybe.

View out the picture window.

Looking into the forest from near the garage.

The forest in the winter.

The forest in the spring.

The property as it looks today - not much different from how it always looked.

Woke up suddenly at 7:30am and went to the bathroom.
George had faded throughout yesterday but began gushing again. As soon as I let him out, the pain began strong. There was no time to get the meds in me. I’d let the night go by once again without waking to take more pain medication, and now it’s too late.

So here I sit, waiting for the medication to kick in. It’s been half an hour and george is beating the shit out of me. I’ve got a heating pad on my pelvis and a heating pad on my back.

The reason I didn’t take a new round of medication last night was because the stomach ache had returned. So when the stomach is hurting, one naturally doesn’t want to put anything into it, including pain medication that normally makes the stomach a bit pained or uneasy to begin with.
That’s the catch-22 and now I regret it. I can’t win either way. This makes me have major empathy/sympathy for my uncle, who has stomach cancer. My aunt says he’s in a lot of pain but I have NO idea. Even this pain with this mysterious stomach illness that I and six of my friends got on Christmas Day - even this stomach pain, which makes me empathise with my uncle - I still have NO idea what he’s *really* going through.

Gah. I’m taking another Tylenol 3. I can’t handle this pelvic pain and I’m willing to brave further stomach irritation because it can’t be as bad as my pelvic pain.

…the pain is low in the pelvis and makes me forget to breathe. It burns. The pain is strong in the lower back and makes me want to arch my back to stretch, but doing so makes the tightness in the pelvic region hurt even worse, because the muscles in front are so unwilling to stretch. So I lay on top of a heated rice pad to let it dig into my lower back. I push the ball of my foot into a nearby piece of furniture to attempt pressure point relief. An endometriosis book I have says to sit upright and bring the left ankle up across the right leg and hold the ankle or the ball of the foot. But that position KILLS me. I need my man to be awake to help me - to massage me - to hold the pressure point on my foot. But he’s been sick with the stomach virus, too. He’s still sleeping. I may wake him in a minute anyway, but only if the second Tylenol 3 doesn’t kick in soon.

… I return to this journal entry. As soon as I think it’s too much to bear, the wave of pain suddenly shrinks back, and I feel the jaw pain from gritting my teeth more than the pelvic pain. I stick my tongue between my teeth to release the jaw clench (something I taught myself to do after the car accident when I had TMJ so I wouldn’t have to wear the jaw splint for the rest of my life). Now I ‘m sitting erect on the couch, cross-legged, facing long-ways with my back to the arm of the couch as it were. I have the rice heating pad balled up on my lower back, and the electric heating pad on my upper back. Tongue still stuck between my teeth, eyes hurting from the worried position they’ve been in since 7:30am but I can’t seem to relax my face.

The pain comes again.

I opened my mouth, I’m breathing, doing the breathing exercises.

There’s a scrub jay outside, just started calling. It’s 8:19am now.

I take you with me through this. Someone has GOT to go through this with me.

I don’t mean to be cruel to humanity, but I so desperately want one of those devices in the movie Strange Days - the headgear like virtual reality that allows someone to see and feel what is going on with someone else.

I wrote this bit about the device just now on IRC and my friend just made me cry with her reply:

<julie> I know it’s not much consulation, Steph, but I believe you. Every word. Every time.

I thanked her.

I’m thankful for the time difference - it’s 11:24am where she is. Someone is awake to talk to me in real time. The bitch part of this is that any emotion I experience - crying, fear, excitement - it sets off a wave of hormones in the body - it’s a natural thing of course - but the hormones are rich in the uterus and pelvic region, and this sets off further pain. So the crying just set off a new wave of pain. No, I can’t win.

…I return to the journal entry again. It’s 8:30am - the one hour mark now. I’m feeling dizzy so the medication is kicking in. Why did it take an hour again. Why did I have to go through the pain again - oh yeah.. this time was because of the stomach virus and not wanting to take the meds last night. So my body had a lapse of coverage and the pain snuck in.

Soon I will be able to sleep again, pain free.

Both my man and I slept through the night. He slept for a total of 13 hours he says. I slept for about 11 hours.

Today we both feel better. Still tired, but the nausea is gone. I’m still bleedy and crampy but continuing to take the medication on regular rotation. I’ve only slipped up once so far, cuz I forgot to wake up in the middle of the night and take more meds. I woke up at ten to six in the morning and was in a lot of pain. I’m so glad to be back on the Tylenol 3 because it kicks in so much faster. I also remembered to eat something with the medication cuz I didn’t wanna chance stomach ache again.
While I’ve not been pain free on this cycle, and while I’ve still been bedridden, the being bedridden is mostly due to fatigue because of george and the meds, not the debilitating pain (except for that little bout I had around 6-7am this morning due to forgetting to take meds).

I can’t decide if I’m just going to sit on the couch all day or if I’m going to take up my Ma’s suggestion (we talked by phone yesterday) and ‘get a hobby’ so I don’t think about the pain. I told Ma that I do have a hobby of organising all my photos into albums, but that for some time now I’ve not had the money for more albums, so piles of stuff have been sitting around. It was then that the idea came to me - just scan all the damned photos and memorabilia and put it on web-based photo albums for now, until I get the photo albums I want. That way, I’m still DOING something instead of just being on the Internet in chat rooms and on LiveJournal and on this journal all the time.
I could also start really WRITING my life story, or other novels…again. I start, stop, start, stop.

And I can also continue working on my astrology business. That’s pretty important, but while I’m in pain and on pain meds, much more difficult to focus on.

Oh, something else I need to mention - once again with the forgetting.

I panicked yesterday because I have no memory of phoning my father on Christmas Day. I called his cell and left a message but he didn’t call back. So last night I called his wife’s cell. She laughed, said she doesn’t remember, either, and then declared my forgetfulness to be the onset of menopause. I told her I’m only 36 years old, and NO, it’s not onset of menopause because I still have a very regularly-spaced period. I told her I hadn’t really talked about it openly with friends and family until this year but I have a HUGE problem with my memory ever since The Car Accident in ‘94.
She remained convinced that it’s onset of menopause, so I let her have her view of reality and then talked with my dad. He assured me that I did in fact call him on Christmas Day.

However, I had neglected to tell him about Uncle B. So I broke the news. Dad and and my Ma’s sister used to be buddies, and my aunt still has fond memories of my dad, so I told him he should give them a call. He said he would.

Anyway, the forgetting still pisses me off. I truly panicked - I truly had no recollection at all of having phoned my dad on Christmas Day. My dad’s wife doesn’t help matters by saying the obvious, “it’s not going to get any better, you know”.

YES. I KNOW. THANK YOU. This is why I often wonder if I’ll have early onset dementia.

Blah. Anyway.
Right now, someone is outside clipping trees or flowers or something outside and it sounds like nail clippers, a sound I hate.
And it doesn’t help that I have a headache from having drunk only a little bit of tomato juice. Guess I’m still allergic to tomatoes after all these years. I get this lovely headache every time I have tomato soup, too.

*deep breath*

*exhale*

Ok.

My man is home all day today. It’s Saturday afternoon. Life is good, honest.