zeptember

It has been a full week since I went dancing, and my knees are still killing me. This is not the first time that I’ve complained about my arthritic knees.
Read here
and here
and here
and here.

Now that I’m working with children again, it takes even longer for my knees to recover from a night out dancing, because I have to go right back to work the next day, bending and running and squating all day, getting down at a child’s eye level all day, sitting on the floor with children, getting back up again, moving around. All day. The knees get no respite.
It has been a solid week of visibly inflamed knees. They’ve been warm to the touch and swollen. But a trip to a specialist this year revealed that I still only have osteoarthritis and chondromalacia patella, not rheumatoid arthritis, and I was assured that I was not a candidate for knee replacement surgery any time soon.

Well, after this past week, I want a second opinion.

This also creates a dilemma -

It’s been over two years since my laparoscopic surgery, which diagnosed me with endometriosis. Two years is usually about the time it takes for endometriosis to start causing a problem again, because it’s either continued growing or started regrowing. It can continue to proliferate in the same place if one has only had the area cauterised during surgery, or it can regrow near the cauterised area. It can always sprout in new locations, too, regardless of type of surgery performed. It was in November 2008 that a large ovarian cyst was found on my left ovary - the same ovary that had a lot of endo cleaned off of it in February 2007. Since November, I’ve had a lot of problems with my menstrual cycle, so this leads me to believe the endo is getting worse again. I fear it’s trying to twist my ovary back again like it did before, and I also fear that the endo is growing in new areas because I’m experiencing pain in different areas on top of all the usual places.

So I really need to have a second endometriosis surgery, and I’m really interested in excision surgery this time around.

And now my knees are really bothering me, so I’m feeling ready to take care of my knees, which means surgery.

I can only barely afford one surgery at a time. First of all, I do not have the luxury of taking a couple of weeks off of work to recover from endo surgery again. I cannot afford to go without a check for that long, and I have no paid time off whatsoever at this current job. I’ve already taken 18 days off of work to go on my honeymoon this year. Then there’s the biggie - the type of health insurance we have through my husband’s work is nowhere near the quality health insurance he had at his last job. Every little lab draw I get and anything above the normal doctor’s visit brings me a huge bill to pay, because the current insurance doesn’t cover as much as the old insurance did.

I estimate that the next time I’ll be able to financially afford to take time off work for endo surgery won’t be until next summer at the earliest. I say summer because if I am still teaching at the same school, I can just request to not be added to the summer daycare schedule for three weeks to a month and in summer it will be okay to do that. They won’t fire me for taking the time off. During the school year however, different story.

Once I’m recovered from endo surgery, I can tackle the knee surgery. I hear the recovery time is much shorter, but I haven’t researched it yet. Perhaps I can do it over a four day holiday weekend or something. But the funds to cover the out-of-pocket expenses that insurance doesn’t cover - I won’t have money again after the endo surgery perhaps for another year.

So IF I am fortunate, I can swing endo surgery for 2010 and knee surgery for 2011. Otherwise, give another year each.

Blah.

Hate being broken. Hate being in pain. Hate coping.

I know, I know. It could always be worse.

I’m home alone as usual on a Sunday afternoon but the difference today is that I’m enjoying it. I have done nothing physically active all day today. Sunday is usually my day to get all the housework and laundry done before the work week begins again. Today there was so much going on and I totally cleared my schedule.

• There was afternoon tea in the backyard, courtesy the neighbor upstairs.
• There was a sheet rock party at a friend’s house - a work party to help him get his new house in order so he and his wife and infant can move in.
• Another neighbor in the back of the house needed help getting her digital converter box all set up because as of last Thursday, broadcast television as we’ve always known it in the U.S. ceased to be. I called the FCC and we got a guy to come out and wire everything up for my neighbor, because I didn’t know how. I have not had regular TV or cable TV for probably six years now, by choice. We just have DVD and VHS hookup when we want it. We did not purchase the digital converter for our home.
• A neighbor two doors down wanted me to babysit her toddler.
• A neighbor almost three blocks down wanted me to babysit her toddler.

I cleared all of it off the schedule because of george, who is not actually showing himself, yet, but today I’m extremely weak, tired and sore.
I even asked my husband to go to the grocery for me because I couldn’t even manage that.

Aside from the blah of the pain, the fatigue, the weakness, I feel so happy to be able to sit alone and journal. I’ve truly been needing alone time like this.

Every Sunday, my husband has band practice, comes home for an hour, then goes to game night with his buddies. Sometimes I mind, sometimes I don’t. I would love to get a Sunday evening group hangout thing going for myself. But not tonight.

Friday was the last day of school. As of Monday, there will be no kids for one week. We teachers and assistant teachers will be tearing down our classrooms and preparing for summer daycare, which begins on June 22nd.
Out of nine weeks of summer session, each of us only have five weeks of employment. We’re all juggled around between the school we’ve been working at and the toddler school, which is located a couple miles away - over by where I used to nanny in Spring, 2008. There’s too many teachers and not enough students enrolled for summer session.
I’ll be using any extra time I can make for myself to look for other employment, or to stack babysitting jobs to tide me through until end of August, when the full time school year begins again.

With the lack of full time employment so soon after returning from our honeymoon, I should have been stacking babysitting jobs already, and should have worked all weekend. The opportunity to work all weekend presented itself - by two different families. But the thing is, I have to also take care of my health. Right now, I’m in downtime. My body is just not coping, nor are my emotions. So the money will just have to wait.

Back on January 1, 2009, I made a list of things I wanted to do this year. I’m checking in today to see how far I’ve come.

This year, I will:

• Become more of an advocate for Endometriosis awareness and humane treatment for those of us who suffer from it
• Put my life’s worth (1985 - present day) of diary entries about my chronic Endometriosis-related pain all in one place publicly on the Internet (Well, I have a complete upload from 2006 onwards, but at least it’s all in one place now. I’m still putting up entries from further back when I have time).
• Travel to the U.K. for the first time.
• Buy Obtain my first ever kitchen table (our neighbor gave it to us yesterday!)
• Finally stop consuming alcoholic beverages because I know it will kill me based upon the medical condition that I have, and it’s time I started loving my innards every minute of every day instead of cursing myself for an illness I was born with
• Learn and practice yoga
• Live my first year of many decades under the new title of WIFE to my superhero (it’s not been a full year yet
• Re-read every book I have on Tibetan Buddhism, and seek out more, because that more than any other belief system still really speaks to me 14 years after I found it
• Begin pardoning people who have incurred my wrath in years past (I’m not talking about small tiffs here, I’m talking full on silent treatment for years or decades) (still working on that, making surreptitious overtones)
• Generally start to practice true forgiveness on a grand scale

Heh, I didn’t realise I was going in order til I checked back in on my list. Weird. Level of difficulty was pre-arranged, I guess.