August 18, 2004

• neuromuscular crap
  and a fire update

  I have declared this a day off.  I feel a sense of frustration
  bordering on resentment concerning that decision.  But what’s the
  sense in being resentful of myself — or anyone or anything, for that
  matter?

  I’ve been on a roll, getting a lot done despite having to take frequent
  breaks to catch my breath.   I have unpacked piles of boxes,
  mostly books we brought over from Elvenhurst, some recently and others,
  below them in the piles, last summer when I installed some new
  bookshelves in the back room here.  After Doug and I redecorated
  his room last year, I needed a rest and lost my momentum.  Then
  Greyfox moved back in for the winter and heaps of his stuff made my
  reorganizing project more difficult and daunting.  So it stayed,
  boxes heaped in the middle of the floor, heaps growing higher, until
  Mercury went retrograde this time and I got an irresistable urge to
  organize.

  The debris at the top of the heaps included a bonanza of baskets. 
  I like baskets… and boxes, pots, pitchers, containers in which to
  organize and store other things.  My collection of baskets grew to
  near double its previous number recently when Greyfox and I happened
  onto a special sale at a thrift shop.  There was a jumble of
  baskets in and around several large boxes there, for 25 cents
  each.  I picked through the heaps, cherry-picked, high-graded the
  collection and came home with eleven “new” baskets.  They were
  just adding to the clutter until the other day when I sent Doug to the
  old place to unscrew and bring back a bunch of ceiling hooks.

  One of the niftiest ways I know to increase storage in small spaces is
  to hang things from the ceiling.  Over the past few days I have
  been clearing more space for books on shelves by taking the things that
  had been in boxes on those shelves and putting them in baskets hanging
  from ceiling hooks.  That involves several actions that aggravate
  my ME/CFIDS, and I have been paying for all the climbing and reaching
  with sensorimotor reactions.  Every muscle I used for those tasks
  has repaid my efforts with cramps and spasms, discomfort, tingling,
  numbness, unresponsiveness and various weird sensations such as
  creeping skin and twitches.  This has interrupted my sleep, and
  that adds the burn of lactic acid to the list of symptoms.

  On top of that, I’ve been experiencing some intermittent hyperacusis of
  my hearing.  The best thing about that is the intermittence. 
  It comes and goes, so I do get some occasional relief. 
  Unfortunately, it seems to come on strongest when I’m fatigued, so over
  the course of this busy week it has been steadily increasing. 
  Along with the sounds of every little chirping bird, barking dog or
  passing airplane, not to mention the whir of the hard drive, the hum of
  the fridge, the clack of the noisy space bar on our new keyboard (Have
  you ever considered how many times a minute a fast keyboarder, such as
  my kid Doug, hits the spacebar?), and any other noise in the vicinity,
  there is a sensation associated with the hyperacute hearing.  It’s
  like a fluttery thing inside my ear.  Sometimes it’s a rhythmic
  thump.  Other times it’s more chaotic, like something tiny
  flinging itself against the inside of my eardrum, trying to get
  out.  Still other times, it is a prolonged strrretchy feeling with
  an accompanying screeechy sound. 

  Twenty years or so ago, when that symptom first developed, it was
  maddening and scary.  Now that I’ve grown used to it, it is just
  tiresome and annoying.  It means I lie awake longer waiting for
  sleep to come, and I wake more frequently.  It has always come in
  only one ear at a time, and lying with that ear pressed into the pillow
  helps.  Ear plugs don’t help because they make the fluttery
  feeling more acute.  Lying on one side all the time just does not
  work, however.  Muscles cramp, sinuses clog (another damned
  symptom of the damned disease), and conscious or not, I roll over to
  ease the pain, stiffness and congestion.   If the rollover
  was unconscious, the subsequent effects wake me up.  If I was
  already awake when I rolled over, at least then I’m not awakened by the
  sequelae.

  In the early years and decades of this disease I was grumpy, a crabby,
  irritable bitch.  Without a diagnosis and a disease on which to
  focus my responses to the discomfort and disability, I focused on the
  sounds that woke me up, and the neighbors, pets or sleeping companions
  whose actions or sounds disturbed me.  Like a wounded bear,
  enraged and irrational, I struck out emotionally and either verbally
  berated or physically separated myself from those perceived sources of
  my discomfort.  If I had given in to all — or any I suppose — of
  my violent urges then, I’d still be in prison for the mayhem I’d have
  perpetrated.  Eventually I learned that it was my body, my
  hypersensitivity and not the stimuli to which I was overreacting, at
  fault.  I adjusted.  After a time of hating and rejecting my
  own body, I realized it would be more productive to focus my feelings
  on the damned disease.  Until I can transcend those feelings
  altogether, that’s where I’m at now.

  Today is a day off because I need to go to town tomorrow.  I’m not
  kidding myself that I’ll be able entirely to resist the urge to clean
  and organize.  I shall moderate it.  I will not drag the
  kitchen step-stool all over the house again today, upping and downing
  and screwing hooks into the ceilings — not much, anyway.  I’ll
  find things that I can do sitting down, such as matching up the dozens
  of orphan socks that have turned up in this spate of
  housecleaning.  That way, tomorrow when I go to town my gait will
  be more graceful and less lurching, my attitude will be more accepting
  and the tasks I must perform will be less onerous.  If I succeed
  at easy-going today, I might even get a full night’s sleep tonight, and
  that will make tomorrow’s trip to town more enjoyable all round. 
  It’s worth a shot, anyway.

  fire update

  I just got a quick phone call from Greyfox, alerting me to a story on the front page of the Alaska section in today’s Anchorage Daily News:

  MAT-SU: Numerous small wildfires are snuffed; lightning is forecast today.
  …

  Wary of superdry conditions and a bevy of new wildfires this week in
  the Mat-Su, state firefighters at Palmer are preparing for more trouble
  today with extra airpower and crews.

  In other parts of the state, similar fears persist, and at least one
  blaze is burning so hot, it’s melting the ground. Fire thawed
  permafrost on a bluff overlooking Mile 137 of the Steese Highway,
  causing mud to flow over about 100 feet of the road, said fire
  information officer Dave Schmitt. The mud slide was caused by the
  Bolgen Creek fire, one of six major fires that make up the 320,000-acre
  Central Complex.

  And smoke around Central in the Interior on Tuesday hampered
  firefighting operations — crews had no air support until early
  afternoon.

  In the high-elevation tundra above Jim Creek near Wolf Point,
  eight smoke jumpers and a helicopter with a 300-gallon bucket Tuesday
  afternoon battled the three-acre Sheep Camp fire, which took off on
  steep slopes at midafternoon, officials said.

  A column of thick smoke was visible from the Butte and Palmer, but by
  late afternoon it had started to collapse once firefighters — and the
  bucket drops — hit it, said John See, regional fire manager for the
  Alaska Division of Forestry.

  Fire officials called in an additional air tanker and crews in light of
  dangerous conditions hovering over the Valley this week: extremely dry
  vegetation in which fire burns deeply and takes longer to extinguish,
  all of it made more dire by forecasts for dry lightning today.

  “If that pans out, it’s likely that we’re going to be really busy with new starts,” See said.

  That’s our Valley they’re talking about.

  • 1:03 pm
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