April 19, 2004

• Fatigue 101

  I figured out something this afternoon, recognized a pattern, put some
  pieces together.  It didn’t automatically immediately make me feel
  any better, but it may have planted a seed.  It did give me the
  courage to ask to be let off the hook for something I had agreed to do,
  but which I didn’t feel would be in my best interests.  I’ll try
  to explain.

  For years, a couple of decades anyway, each trip to town and back out
  here to the quiet peaceful valley would require about three days
  recovery time before I would be back on my feet again.  That’s the
  Chronic Fatigue part of ME/CFIDS,
  this damned disorder.  For most of that time I just knew that
  going to town wore me out and I needed time to recover.  Not just
  going to town, but any strenuous or sustained activity, and I’d get
  worn out and then I’d veg out for a couple of days then I’d again be
  able to do a little bit of something.  Little by little I have
  been learning the how and why of that.

  The sensation of fatigue, the
  tired feeling, is the mental manifestation of a physical
  condition.  Just as the sensation of hunger is the mind’s response
  to a condition of low blood sugar in the body, so the tired feeling
  comes from a chemical condition, primarily an accumulation of lactic
  acid in muscles.  We only process and excrete lactic acid while we
  sleep.  This is part of what sets off the cascade of inner events
  that lead to all the crazy manifestations of sleep deprivation. 
  With chronic fatigue, there are some impediments to the normal process
  of restorative sleep.

  I remember my mother speaking of being “too tired to
  sleep.”   Eventually I learned what she meant by that as I
  came to experience it.  The first night and usually the second
  night after a town trip or other fatiguing activity, my sleep is
  restless and interrupted.  It takes as many as two or three such
  nights of trying to sleep before I get one decent straight-through five
  or six hour stretch of restorative sleep.  My depressed day last
  week came after a night of little sleep and much discomfort from muscle
  spasms.  The following night I got a bit more sleep and felt a bit
  better.  Then I had a full night of sleep and felt energetic and
  ready to go again.

  Last summer I experienced a wonderful, even miraculous remission of the
  ME/CFIDS.  It’s great that I did, because great demands were
  placed on me due to Greyfox’s catastrophic relapse and subsequent
  recovery.  I feel that Spirit helped me rise to the
  occasion.  Whatever it was that kept me going last year, so far
  this year it’s not there for me.  I have tried to keep running on
  at the pace I’d become accustomed to, but I don’t have the
  momentum.  I’ve been running myself into the wall over and over
  again.

  I thought about all this today, mostly during the solitary driving time
  between home, the rehab ranch, Greyfox’s stand and the Double Trouble
  meeting.  Along in there somewhere I asked Greyfox if he needed me
  to come in on Tuesday to take him to the Space Cadets meeting since
  he’s committed to be there in his capacity as literature person and his
  car is still on the fritz.  When he answered that he did, I
  accepted it and said okay.  Later on, after the volunteer work at
  the ranch, the meeting and one supermarket stop, I asked him if maybe
  he could find another ride.  I just knew by then, from the way my
  body felt, that one day of rest would not put me back in shape for
  another such trip.  I’m committed to go back in on Thursday to
  drive the rehab van, and two such trips in four days is a prospect
  almost painful enough to make me cry just contemplating it.  He
  said that one of my sponsees had offered to give him a ride to meetings
  when I’m not around, and I was pathetically grateful for that.  It
  let me off the hook. 

  I probably sounded a bit silly thanking him every few minutes during
  our second supermarket stop for letting me off the hook.  Even as
  I limped over to a freight cart, sat down, pulled off my boot and
  kneaded the muscle spasms out of my toes, I was feeling pathetically
  grateful not to have to do it three times this week, but only
  two.  That toe thing is one of the worst manifestations of the ME
  part of ME/CFIDS (if it is possible to separate the ME from the CF,
  which I sorta doubt).  Greyfox gets it too, so he’s
  understanding.  Spasms in the muscles along the bottom of the
  plantar area behind the toes make it feel as if the middle toes are
  trying to crawl back under my foot to the heel.  It’s bad enough
  in bed at night or barefoot around the house.  It can be hell in
  shoes in public where massage is difficult and whimpers and screams are
  disconcerting to onlookers.

  In an effort to give a balanced view of this damned disorder, let me
  just say there is something positive about this thing.  Our
  muscles don’t atrophy from disuse.  All that couch potato time
  isn’t turning me into something as soft as a pile of mashed
  potatoes.  The biophysical mechanism behind this fatigue-and-pain
  thing involves sensorimotor nerves that keep firing all the time, even
  at rest.  That’s how we build up so much lactic acid with just a
  small amount of activity, and why it takes so much sleep to dissipate
  it: our muscles never rest.  I would not recommend it to a healthy
  person as a good means of staying in shape, but I can use it as a bit
  of self-consolation when I need a bit.

  Other than the fatigue and discomfort today, it was a fine trip. 
  Some worthwhile things were accomplished, I had lots of laughs and the
  kind of caring sharing that happens in good therapy groups. 
  Greyfox let me have my pick of some new crystals and rocks he bought
  from a traveling salesman:  a quartz crystal with sulfur
  inclusions that I’ll wire-wrap for a pendant, some beautiful atypical
  banded kyanite, and a polished slab of iridescent labradorite.  I
  also brought home a quartz crystal with chlorite inclusions to
  wire-wrap for Greyfox.  We love rocks.  On the way in I saw a
  male bald eagle and a bit farther on was a pair of cranes in their
  soaring, circling dance, some of the first returning waterfowl this
  year.  They were the smaller brownish ones, not the big white
  whoopers with black wingtips.  On the way home, I got behind a
  trucker with bright halogen lights coming out of Willow just as it was
  getting dark, so that last part of the drive was safer and easier than
  it would have been with only my puny headlights.  All in all, an
  excellent day.
  

  • 5:53 am
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