October 3, 2003

• Risks, Costs & Rewards for Breaking the Rules

  Yesterday I broke the rules.  Today I’m paying for it… paid
  all night, really.  I started paying about the time I stopped
  breaking those rules late yesterday evening when Greyfox got home from
  town.  Sometimes, I just throw caution to the wind and forget the
  rules.  It helps me get things done and I consider it worth the
  cost.  One reason that tactic works for me is that I can usually
  delay the “payback” part of it long enough to get a lot of work done.

  Mark J. Pellegrino,MD of Canton, Ohio, has written a sensible and
  helpful set of “rules” of ergonomics for those of us with ME/CFIDS (AKA
  “fibromyalgia”), designed to help us cut down on the pain and
  dysfunction from “trigger point activation.”  If you are
  fibromyalgic, you know what I mean.  If you are curious, you can
  Google “trigger point activation” and “myalgic
  encephalomyelitis”.  Dr. Pellegrino’s rules of “fibronomics” can
  be found here:
  Fibromyalgia Information – Fibronomics

  

  My son Doug captured this shot of me standing on the back of the
  sofa in Couch Potato Heaven yesterday (the wires on the right are for
  the PS2 controllers, and this computer desk where I’m sitting
  now is just visible to the left of my feet, behind the
  sofa).  In the picture, I have just finished hanging my favorite thing,
  an old Navajo rug (about 100 years old), that I bought at a flea market
  in the ‘seventies for $5.00.  I love that rug as much as I can
  love anything that isn’t alive.  It hung for years on the wall
  behind my bed in our old place across the highway, and has been waiting
  for a few years for me to get it hung here.

  Raising one’s arms above shoulder height is one of those things that
  breaks the rules, activates the trigger points, causes strong tearing
  and burning sensations in neck and shoulders, and results afterward in
  muscle weakness, stiffness and dysfunction.  Those sensations
  other people tend to call simply “pain”, I can largely transcend
  through the PainSwitch,
  and I’m looking for a similar way to transcend the dysfunction. 
  Meanwhile, today I’m back to stumbling and fumbling, the fibromyalgic’s
  way of knowing she has overdone things physically.

  I’m not regretting what I did yesterday.  In fact, I’m really
  glad I got the gumption to dare the dysfunction and discomfort and get
  it all done.  Not that it is ALL done.  There is still a lot
  of work to be done in the back room.  That used to be my
  “workroom”, and since we moved Doug into Greyfox‘s
  old room I have been turning it into a “dressing room” where Greyfox
  and I can store our clothing, and a library where some of the books
  that have been in boxes since the move here will eventually end up on
  the new book shelves I acquired this summer.

  What I did yesterday, in addition to hanging the rug on the living
  room wall, was to rearrange a bunch of shelving and furniture in the
  back room, sort a lot of clothing and prepare a few bags of things that
  no longer fit to go to a thrift shop.  It looks as if the things
  I’m wearing in that picture above could be added to one of those
  donation bags after they get back from the laundromat.  I am still
  losing weight, though it’s much more gradual now than during the
  first six months. 

  That‘s something else I don’t regret:  about eleven
  months ago, I kicked sugar, my lifelong favorite drug of choice, as
  well as eliminating some other addictive foods
  from my diet.  The only food addictions I’ve kept are caffeine and
  capsaicin.  Those two, according to my body’s responses to Muscle
  Response Testing (Applied Kinesiology)–a controversial technique I
  accept because it works (Seventh Huna Principle: 
  Pono–effectiveness is the measure of truth)–work for me. 
  Caffeine and capsaicin, my muscles tell me, are good for me. 

  A little bit of Google research told me that they both increase my
  resting metabolic rate, so that I lose weight sitting still or even
  sleeping.  My health care provider told me that they are also in
  the pharmacopeia as treatments for asthma, so using them cuts down on
  my prescription costs.  I’m taking less than a quarter of the
  asthma meds I was taking a year ago, and I’ve lost more than a third of
  my body weight in those eleven months, without going hungry or
  exercising. 

  The “NOT going hungry” part was especially important, since much of
  my health trouble in the past was related to hypoglycemia.  I had
  to find a way to eat that didn’t make me sick.  In the weeks
  before I started the radically healthy new diet, it became evident to
  me that I always felt the worst within half an hour or so of
  eating.  Eliminating the allergenic addictive foods ended that
  discomfort and dysfunction.  The weight loss was a
  side-effect.  My “new” thrift-shop wardrobe was one of the payoffs
  for that.  Needing to get rid of a lot of the baggy old clothes
  I’ve always liked (before they got all baggy on me) is one of the costs.

  • 3:18 pm
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