A great many people take Thanksgiving as a time to reflect on what they are grateful for, and how great their lives really are.
I’m not. It’s the end of Thanksgiving weekend, and I didn’t get more than a couple hours worth of schoolwork done all weekend when I was hoping to get caught up. My concentration is shit and I keep dozing off over my books. I may not be allowed to take one of my exams because I missed a ton of class due to this muscular whatever the hell that seems to be tangled up with the arthritis. While I feel better once I’ve been awake for about 3 hours, that’s longer than I can manage to be awake before class (that is, I can’t wake up 3 hours before class). Were I to try it, I’d have to stay lying down because I’ve had a very limited amount of sit-up time, and I’d fall back asleep. I did try once. Fail.
I’m tired. I’m sick – I have something that has completely stuffed up my head and blocked up my ears, and I have a GI bug giving me diarrhea. Monday, I fainted and we don’t know why – I wasn’t having any dysautonomia/POTS symptoms, I just turned my head to the right, had shooting pain, and woke up slouched against the couch. On Tuesday, Hudson did the unbelievable – he pooped in the building where my physical therapists’ is. My sleep schedule is utterly and completely screwed up. I keep forgetting to make the phone calls I need to make to get doctor’s apts and other things set up. Not getting those appointments means I don’t get help with the things that are causing problems. It’s a lovely catch-22.
The arthritis-of-some-kind is improving dramatically, but the improvement in my joints has made something else very clear. I think at the beginning, about 1/2 of my pain and loss of motion was muscular; at this point, I’d say that’s 3/4 of what I’m experiencing. I suspect I couldn’t separate the two out because with EDS, the pain is as much in your muscles and surrounding ligaments as it is in your joints themselves. And it doesn’t improve. Heat makes it very slightly better, motion starts as agony but eases into more comfortable motion. Rest just means that I’ll be in pain when I start moving again (though if I do not rest and try to move all the time, the result is even worse). I don’t really know what to do about all of that.
I forgot to get some critical paperwork filled out, and the deadline was 2 weeks ago. I’m not sure if they’ll be able to work with me.
I had this dream several weeks ago, that I was diagnosed formally for the arthritis. I quit law school, and between us my fiance and I put together a shop where I could do just about anything artistic I wanted. It was quite a nice dream. The best part was that I no longer had massive deadlines hanging over my head. I’ve fallen behind on everything and blown every deadline since this all started in March. I’m tired of always waiting for someone to get upset with me because I’m not doing enough, not present enough, et cetera.
It’s funny, I dream about not going to law school and I’m not sure I want to finish, and yet my first response to an email that suggested I might not be allowed to finish a class (and possibly more than one) was to be so deeply upset that I was wildly nauseous and very upset. I am less upset now, and the nausea is mild compared to how it was, but I still am loathe to accept an external force causing me to quit rather than choosing it for myself. Because I’ll admit, it is a possibility. It’s just not one I like much when I don’t have a choice, and when I have gotten So Damn Close to finishing law school.
I’m not saying I don’t have things to be thankful for. I do. I’m just refusing to be a Pollyanna and pretend that those things are in and of themselves enough to make life all good right now. My fiance and my dog are wonderful, my lawschool has been pretty good about working with me, I have health insurance and a roof over my head and a car that functions, and all of these are good things. Just life as a whole is…on the rough side right now.
Bleh. My stomach is roiling again, and hte muscles of my arms, legs, back, and abdomen all ache and hurt. This kind of pain makes me think of over-twisted rope, ready to snap. *sigh*
Brilliant Mind Broken Body 
I’m so sorry you are suffering so intensely. That’s a terrible burden to be bearing, even with help. I will be praying for you every time I think of it. I have Fibromyalgia, Diabetes, Bipolar, ADHD, and a couple other things I can’t remember right now because I’m sick and sleepy, point being that I understand at least to some degree how you feel. I lost my beloved teaching career three years ago because of my bipolar. I’m still not really over it. *hugs*
Bipolar can be tough to manage. I’m lucky in that with the right medication and occasional therapy, mine has settled onto a pretty predictable pattern.
I can sympathize with not really being over losing your career. I’m…I’m still trying to figure out how I feel about the possibility of losing law school and a career in law. I have developed such a love-hate relationship with law school that I really can’t disentangle it from all of these very powerful mixed emotions. And I have such an intense fear of failure, something that I had been taught at a young age and had re-enforced repeatedly, that THAT tends to blot out everything else.
Might the muscle pain be caused by fibromyalgia? Some people who have RA also have fibro (not me, knock wood…)
I’m sorry you’re feeling so awful, Kali. It is indeed hard to feel thankful when you’ve got so many serious negatives bombarding you all at once. If you were to stop law school right now, while you’re sorting out what’s making you feel so bad, and getting treatment, might you be able to start up again later? Take a hiatus, so to speak? It just seems like trying to keep up with the intense courses and the stress that inevitably comes with them can’t be doing you any good right now and may be making things worse. A break of–say, six months to a year–might be just what you need.
In the meantime, I wish you comfort and calm as the hectic holidays approach. Take the best care of yourself that you can, ‘k?
I theoretically already had fibro. That’s what started all of my difficulties in August ’07. While several doctors have shied away from ‘officially’ diagnosing me, that’s what they check off on my paperwork and one of the residents a couple years ago admitted that he didn’t know for certain why they weren’t calling it.
Unfortunately no, I can’t take a break. My law school has an absolute start-to-finish date of 6 years. It applies even to military reserve people who get shipped off to war. This is the first semester of my 5th year, and I need at least 2 more semesters plus a summer session; if I don’t get to finish one or more classes this semester, I’ll need all 3 semesters I have left. Also, I was coming off of a break. I withdrew from classes in March, and while I was theoretically working on my guided research, there really wasn’t terribly much pressure on it. They just hadn’t gotten anywhere on the arthritis thing while I was on break, so while I rested, I didn’t really get better.
I am very much looking forward to the holidays. We’re going up to see my fiance’s family, and they’re very laid back on holidays. No huge gift-giving things, my fiance and his parents do all of the cooking, and the family is all very local and very sympathetic to the fact that I don’t travel well, so they tend to come to his parents (where we’ll be staying). My dog and their dogs get along well, and really all I have to worry about is getting my gifts for my family and an exchange I’m participating in into the mail in reasonable time. At that, my family knows I’ve been very sick, so if things are late, they won’t fuss.
Goodness, it’s my birthday today. I’m 28 and I feel 80.