November 15, 2003

• This was yesterday, written in notepad because xTools wasn’t working:

  
  

  Wham!
  …thud
  …crash
  *tinkle*

  
  

  

  
  

  It’s a chain reaction.  When I hit that damned wall, when one of these “fibro” (ME/CFIDS) flareups hits me, other things start falling apart.  What makes this day particularly hard was that after the crash last week I’d had a few better days and thought I was on the upswing.  In the analytical way I have of casting about for reasons and explanations, the only thing I can think of that might be contributing to this current crash is the cold.

  
  

  None of us has adjusted yet to the snow cover.  All three cats mince around on cold paws.  Pidney complains more than usual.  I’m convinced that she has lingering pain from old frostbite that must have occurred before we moved in here with them.  She frequently, even in warmer weather, perches on top of the PS2, the hood of a just-parked vehicle, or other warm place, and she cries a lot in cold weather.  As long as we’ve known them, Granny Mousebreath, her mother, has had one “tanto bladed” ear, with a rakish angle to its tip where frost nipped a bit of it off.  She comes up to me sometimes, and rubs her ears against my hand, asking me to warm and massage them.

  
  

  Even Koji, the husky who each winter runs out to romp whenever there is fresh deep snow, now in the sudden cold and frozen ground under just a few inches of white, rushes back immediately begging to be let in after each trip out on his chain.  And me… I’m going to need to go round up the little electric heater to put under the computer desk, and/or hunt down my old fingerless shooter’s gloves for keyboarding.

  
  

  Intellectually, I understand why it is suddenly so much colder.  Last week was foggy and rainy, now it is crisp and cold and white out there.  Albedo, the reflectivity of the planet’s surface, is increased by the snow.  The sun’s heat is being reflected back out into space.  Dammit, I know it’s cold out there in space, but does space really need our heat, I ask you?

  
  

  This morning I woke with symptoms as severe as any I’ve ever had.  It reminded me of sixth grade, when all this shit started for me, and I missed more school than I attended.  When I tried to get up today, my head was so heavy I could barely lift it from the pillow.  My neck felt just the way it has after the whiplash injuries I’ve experienced a few times.  Still, now hours later after struggling with Greyfox’s help to get out from under the cat, the dog and the covers, I have that burning sensation in neck and shoulders.  I’m weak and uncoordinated… pathetic… if it weren’t for the self-criticism verging on self-loathing, I’d be tempted to indulge in some self-pity here.

  
  

  I just called the only phone number I have for an officer of a group where I hold a service position and told her answering machine that I wouldn’t be able to make our monthly meeting today, and asked her to pass along my regrets as I resigned my position.  It wasn’t that hard a job, but it did require getting into the meeting hall a few times a month, whenever I could catch someone with a key to the office, inventorying our stock of pamphlets, books, etc., and purchasing the necessary replacements.

  
  

  When I got there to do it at an opportune time (when it was possible TO do it, since I don’t have a key) I did a good job of it, but circumstances–one thing and another–have kept me from doing it for a while.  I’m feeling the same sense of failure that I felt when I lost my last “real” job, the kind with a paycheck and regular hours, in 1976, for the same reason:  this Damned Disease.  We abbreviate it “the DD” on the fibro forums.  I’ve always thought it amusing that DD is damned disease and DH is dear husband, but who am I to quibble?  That shorthand was around on those boards long before I was.

  
  

  Anyhow, ever since Greyfox, my DH, realized that this particular fellowship, the older one, possesses all the earmarks of a cult, and noticed how much hypocrisy is institutionalized in its customs, and how severely and and unfairly many of its members denigrate our other fellowship (the one whose members recognize at least some of the hazards in using at least some of the other drugs), and denigrate us, and the other members who attend both AA and NA meetings, he’s stopped going to their meetings. 

  
  

  That left me, the one who kicked her alcohol addiction thirty years ago, who never did buy that bullshit about its being a disease with no known cure, and knew it was a cult before she ever attended that first meeting with him, trying to find ways and means to get into the meetings often enough to fulfill the obligation I volunteered for when he was going to two or three meetings a day and I was doing the driving for him.

  
  

  I know that no one will be seriously injured and hardly anyone will even be inconvenienced by my quitting.  I just don’t like being a quitter.  I know that some of those hard old barflies who have substituted their addiction to AA for their addiction to alcohol will show outward regret and concern at my absence, assuming with secret pleasure that I have “gone out” and relapsed into drinking again.  On that score, it is to laugh, since alcohol was only my drug of choice when I was young and ignorant, before I gained access to and discovered the pleasures of other drugs I liked much better.  I just don’t like being misunderstood and misjudged, and certainly don’t like giving that much secret pleasure to such a bunch of warped hypocrites.

  
  

  And that’s another thing I don’t like about this damned disease:  its invisibility.  Not one person in that fellowship knows that I have myalgic encephalomyelitis / chronic fatigue immunodysfunction syndrome.  If they did know, few of them would care, since most of them are obsessed with alcohol and too involved with maintaining their fragile white-knuckle “recovery” while they sustain the unbalanced brain chemistry they do not know or will not admit is the cause of their so-called incurable disease, with their pills and smoke and whatever other substances or processes they’ve used as substitutes for the alcohol.  But at least if I had one of “their” diseases, such as cirrhosis or liver cancer or Korsakoff’s psychosis, they could recognize the symptoms and understand why I will have missed this meeting.

  
  

  Ah, well, I guess it’s okay, really.  It’s just my ego not wanting to be misjudged by that pack of pathetic judges I’m judging.  Lots of other things they don’t know, can’t understand or will not accept have much more meaning and import, to them, to me and to the planet.  And I have a lot of more important tasks that need to be done, which will not be getting done as I sit in Couch Potato Heaven next to the woodstove under two layers of blankets and do a piss-poor job of handling the controller of the PS2 on a relatively non-challenging RPG.

  
  

  As I mentioned at the start, that was yesterday.  Today is a better day.  Ironically, it’s colder, but still better.  For one thing, I got more sleep.  It didn’t happen in an uninterrupted stretch.  Greyfox screamed when some burning wood fell out of the stove as he was tending it in the middle of the night, and the weight of the dog on my legs or Pidney’s pointy little feet poking into me as she perched on my hip, or some one thing or another, woke me countless times last night, but I persevered. 

  
  

  Usually, when I’m awakened and sleep doesn’t immediately overtake me again, I get up and do something.  Last night I decided that the most important thing I had to do was sleep, to let some of the lactic acid out of my muscles and to do some other of its magic knitting on my ragged sleeves.  This morning, I’ve got some fans going, trying to defrost these big windows in here before I cover them with clear poly sheeting for the winter.  I always put off that chore too long, hanging onto that clear view of the outside world just as long as is feasible, plus a few days.  I set up the small heater under this desk, too.  Now I’m going to go get into several layers of clothing.  Jammies just aren’t making it here today.

  
  

  

  • 2:44 pm
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