August 21, 2002

• Where does malingering leave off and masochism begin?  I used to make myself sick to stay home from school.  Now I’ve started wondering how much of my current illness can be traced to such causes.  Mekebol‘s comment highlighted these thoughts for me.  It has been on my mind for some time.  She and I have noticed similar tendencies to drift into reminescences when we start working out our current health issues.  One problem we share is chronic fatigue.

  
  

  There is no doubt that I’ve abused my body with drugs and have had it banged around in accidents and violent attacks.  Now I’m wondering, as I have wondered before, what damage I might have done with my thoughts.  I couldn’t just lie and tell my mother I was too sick for school.  Both of my parents had been very strongly opposed to lying.  That was my most stringent parental injunction.  Also, I’m not a very good liar.  When I tell lies, it shows.  I blush, can’t make eye contact, give myself away in myriad ways.  So if I wanted to be sick enough to avoid school, I’d have to think myself sick.

  
  

  It wasn’t hard.  I’ve always felt more or less yucky in the morning anyway.  Unstable blood sugar and a night’s fast is enough to leave me nauseated and incoordinated when I wake in the morning.  Oh, and irritable, too.  If I don’t eat and fix the blood sugar right away, then the headache starts.  As I kid, I knew nothing about blood sugar or defective appestats.  I just woke feeling blah and amplified the feeling enough to convince my mom.

  
  

  After fourth grade, it wasn’t necessary very often.  By that time I was genuinely sick a lot of the time.  From then on, my efforts have usually been directed the other way, toward getting myself up and about, to have a life even if it is only brief bits in between the down times.  Chronic fatigue turns that effort into challenging mental gymnastics sometimes.  It has been easy to forget that I was ever healthy and normally active.

  
  

  To think myself well now, I’ve got lots of challenges.  So many times I’ve hit the wall, overdone and relapsed, that I’ve learned to expect that.  Now, do my expectations contribute to the relapses or do they just serve to help me remember not to overdo?  I don’t know, and it’s pure hell trying to live with these questions.  There have been times that I’ve just worked away, keeping my mind in present time, getting things done.  I’ve had some spectacular crashes, deep relapses, that way.  But on the other hand, getting the roof fixed and staying at the wedding long enough to get the pictures taken leaves me with results and with a feeling of accomplishment.

  
  

  Today, if Greyfox and Doug make it home safely from their trip to town, I’ll have reasons to feel good about taking it easy.  Usually, I go with Greyfox when he has to go to town.  He can’t lift much weight, has a wee hernia that he’s been putting off getting repaired.  This time he had a dental appointment and last night I asked if he could make the trip without me.  I haven’t been doing a whole lot lately, nothing on the scale of roof repairs, but I have been ignoring those limitations that I’d been in the habit of observing.  I’ve been merely sedentary lately, not entirely immobile.  At the end of the day yesterday, I was too exhausted to take a shower.  (remember, no running water here–showering involves hauling and heating water and hauling it some more)

  
  

  Showering in the morning before a town trip is asking for trouble.  Leaving home with my muscles loaded with lactic acid is NOT the best way to begin a shopping trip.  I might have tried it anyway, but he had to leave early.  I begged off.  Doug volunteered to go.  Time was, not so long ago, that I would not have been comfortable letting the two of them be alone together.  But the old fart doesn’t hate the kid so much any more, now that he needs him, and Doug is bigger than Greyfox now.  It’s good for the geek to get out of the house now and then, too.  Is it good for me to be here alone with the quadrupeds?  I don’t know, but it is certainly peaceful here right now.

  
  

  For days and days now, ever since the blog when I made that premature start into the prison story, I’ve had an image in my mind.  I can see Mrs. Burt, the head matron, meeting us at the door with a douche bag in her hand.  She met all new arrivals that way, as I would learn when it became my regular job to clean that entryway every day.  It’s not the most attractive image, but it does have it’s comic value.  Trouble is, I’ve had so much older stuff on my mind, memories from childhood and adolescence, that I have not felt like focusing on her and continuing that train of thought.

  
  

  Any sort of focus has been difficult for a couple of days.  On this quiet day at home alone, it’s back to the shamanic CDs and some brain food supplements, neurotransmitter precursors, for me.  If it produces anything readable, I’ll let you know.

  • 5:59 pm
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