As of Friday, I’ve officially been diagnosed with Lyme Disease. It’s a clinical diagnosis, partially based on my reaction to antibiotics in December (I was exhausted but the pain and swelling totally disappeared). I’m supposed to get blood drawn (tomorrow, hopefully) to check for Lyme antibodies, but at this point I have enough symptoms that my GP was willing to call it. See, the tests for Lyme are pretty unreliable – the false-negative rate varies from 30-50%, which is pretty absurd.
I’ve been on antibiotics since Friday afternoon, so I’ve now got 2 days worth of pills in me. I’m tired, but my sleep schedule has been pretty messed up lately. Have any of you ever seen a mouse or a hamster (or a rat, I suppose) slip while running on its wheel? If they’re going the right speed, they kind of get thrown around in there like clothes spinning and bouncing around in a dryer. That’s what my sleep schedule has been like lately – I’ll get it going reasonable for a day or two, and then it’ll get majorly screwed up again, and I’ll be thrown around for several days by that. It doesn’t seem to matter whether I take the measured approach to fixing things (adjust by just a little bit at a time) or the radical approach to fixing things (either stay up a huge amount of time or knock myself out with sleeping pills, either way designed to get me asleep at the appropriate time).
This video gives you an idea of what I’m talking about: http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&feature=endscreen&v=buUKHggrhd4 (I wanted to embed it, but it looks like WordPress wants to charge $60/year to let me embed videos. wtf, man? I just want to embed ONE now, it’s not something I do a lot…grr)
That? That’s what I feel like with my sleep schedule right now. And I keep having to jump back on the wheel because, well, you can’t go without sleep. Not to mention, a girl’s got to get to her doctor’s appointments and her classes.
I’m also dealing with what seem to be fairly typical Lyme symptoms.
Rage. Oh my god the rage. There are things going on that it’s perfectly normal to get annoyed about. I’m not annoyed about them. I want to verbally eviscerate my fiance because the house is messy. The fact that he’s stressed out to the point of being somewhat emotionally fragile at the moment (which means that I feel like I should be more careful about snarling at him than usual) is producing a very counter-productive reaction: I’m even angrier and want to yell at him even more. It’s at its worst late at night, which would of course be an especially bad time to yell at him because he’s an early riser and tends to be impressively incoherent when woken up in the middle of the night.
The screwed up sleeping schedule I mentioned is another typical Lyme symptom.
The forgetfulness is…I don’t have words for it. I sometimes lose track of conversations mid-sentence. I’ll be saying something and then all the sudden I have NO IDEA what I was saying. It’s exasperating and it makes me look stupid. It also frustrates the ever-loving crap out of me. I also can’t remember anything I’m supposed to do, nor can I remember to ask my fiance to do things when he’s awake, which means that I crawl into bed at ungodly hours of the night and wake him up to ask him to do something, which he has trouble remembering (because the poor guy was asleep), which only adds to my rage issues. Completely unfair, and I KNOW it’s completely unfair. Which only makes me angrier. *facepalm*
I suppose I should add a psychiatrist visit to my to-do list, to deal with the anger, and I know I need to see my sleep specialist, only I never remember when his office is open and I’m free to call.
All in all, the collateral damage from this damn infection is impressive and frustrating and ye gods do I need this thing to go away. I mean, I’m not normally a tranquil person, and I tend to have bad sleep patterns and a bit of being scatterbrained, but this? This is just absurd and unlivable.
Brilliant Mind Broken Body 