Good Feeling and Farewell

"Good feeling, won't you stay with me just a little longer..." The Violent Femmes

I don't exactly feel great but the soul tearing pain has stayed away for a day or two. Time seems to be doing a funny thing with me where I will struggle through each day wondering if it will ever end. Eventually, I blink or something and a month has gone by. Melissa and I looked at my symptoms and came up with causes and potential solutions to each one. The tooth pain has the easiest short term solution. If I keep applying it, Oragel works wonders. It just takes several tries and it requires me to stay calm. The cause seems to be the way I hold my jaw out of stress. Staying chilled is very helpful here.

The jaw pain was scary until I realized that the sore jaw was affected by moving it around. In fact, it responded (in the worst way) to me setting my jaw out of stress. The two things seem to be related and then there is my neck pain. It felt like something was swollen but my very smart primary care physician pointed out that there are no glands or lymph nodes in that area. The tooth pain lines right up with the jaw pain which lined up with the neck pain. The muscles that move my jaw to set my teeth to grind are the same ones that hurt. Figuring it out was one thing but I couldn't survive another week of the pain. I had to assume that I would be reduced to some sort of primitive animal state.

Melissa prevented this by suggesting I use my cold gel pack to dull the pain. It works for my headaches where there is no muscle and cold is recommended for muscle injuries. I was able to rest the cold pack under my jaw getting numbing cold for the neck and jaw. Even better, I rolled up one of my long sleeve shirts and put it behind my head. Now, I can rest in the broken recliner and get support to keep me from hyper-extending and hyper-pronating. It felt good to solve the problem but it felt even better to solve it together with my beloved.

On Saturday morning, I got my Pearl Jam tickets with a big assist from Melissa. We're in an upper level on the same side of the stage as the last show. We're in row 15 but I'm sure the Wells Fargo Center is designed at least as well as the Spectrum. We'll be able to see everything and hear everything too. A few days after I said that stress and pain were getting bad enough to tear my soul up, I got my Pearl Jam tickets and some pain relief. My long term treat has been ordered and should be on its way.

There was just one more thing to stress over. Were my parents going to sign the house over to me like they had promised? It was an exceptionally generous move but I worried that they wouldn't go through with it. There are just some people in the world whom I piss off seemingly by breathing and my parents are two of them. It could be many things if you look hard enough with enough paranoia but I had been worried about being strung along. They would have been fully within their rights to string me along for a month or so wondering what was going on.

Well, the use of the past tense there should tell you all you need to know. They were not stringing me along beyond my father's conditions which were reasonable enough. (I pay the lawyer and sign first.) I am very bad with time but they seem to have signed more or less a week after I did. I'm free at last but I have no parting shots. I will not take the blame if there is blame to take but I did have the goal of getting closer to them way back in 2000-2001. That goal failed until separation was really the only choice. I thank them for making the choice a painless one in some ways. They made it painless financially and I'm not sure if healing the other pains are within their power.

I wish them the best along with my sister and her family. Farewell.