Back To Life, Back To Reality

Last night I had a vivid dream I was filing the freckles and sun-spots off my body with a fingernail file. This reminds me that I need to see the dermatologist for my annual once-over for skin cancer (Arizona can do that to you), need to make my annual female appointment and basically get back to tending to my life. It has been ignored as I have stroked, Prednisone-freaked and blog-obsessed these last few weeks. I am taking Flexeril to keep myself calm and from spinning out into a steroid-frenzy, exhausting my body with activity spurred by energy I do not own. It is making me groggy and foggy. Manic and headache-inducing or groggy and foggy, why are those my only choices? 

A whole new world has opened up since going "live" with my blog only seven days ago. The response has been overwhelming, and as I connect with so many beautiful souls, each absorbed in their own layer of process with this illness, I am touched, honored, reminded and renewed to keep going...keep on keepin' on. I set goals in my life I am no longer able to keep since the strokes. Although sorely disappointed, I am trying to be compassionate towards myself. Not only is there no immediate masters program in my future, I don't even feel comfortable taking two classes so I have dropped down to an easy conversational Spanish class solamente. I could not make it to puppy training class last night, layering yet another burden of responsibility on my overworked, overwhelmed, stressed-out husband. I need to pay the bills and get my thank you notes out and do laundry and get back to cooking dinner at night and stretching every day and going to bed early and managing our household and still somehow find a way to rest and renew. And I really need a paying job. Ahhhhh!

I saw my psychiatrist yesterday. He is taking me off the SSRI, given the possible link to RCVS's unknown etiology. I told him I only want to take "old" drugs, with years of documented side-effects. I simply do not trust the new ones. The flip side is I am now on eleven prescriptions. Half of these are to combat the side-effects of the ones keeping me alive. Absurd! I am not allowed to take my customized cocktail of supplements due to unknown interactions with the steroids. But I keep having these horrible viral flare-ups and my immune system needs a major prop-up. So I am sneaking a few anyway. Just reviewing all this, taking a moment to ponder the snapshot that is my life, I am overwhelmed with what is actually happening to me and understand the need for rest and relaxation. I will survive this, yet again another psychotic round of prescription drugs and scary medical conditions, and will get to the other side. But as my brain sits in a fog and my leg and foot will not stop bouncing a mile a second, my hands shaking uncontrollably as I type, I understand the crazy juxtaposition I am in and think I am going to take a nap. Yeah right. Where did I put that bottle of Flexeril anyway?

Thanks for joining,

Leah

This blog was originally published on 8/18/10. A year and a half and nearly 110,000 hits later I cannot imagine my life without this blog and the amazing people I have met because of it. Thank you, friends and readers. You have given me a purpose I did not know I was created for.