I am adjusting to life again after time spent hurting as much as I ever have before. There was nothing I could do about it except sleep when I could and knock myself out as close to unconscious as I could when I couldn't sleep. Pain medication wasn't doing much of anything in the wake of weather that went from unseasonably warm to snow straight to a shockingly warm spell. While everyone I knew except Melissa enjoyed this bout of "good weather," I couldn't even be grouchy about it through the pain. Now, I feel well enough for boredom to have set in again but it doesn't take that much. I bore easily.
There is fear mixed in the boredom, of course. I'm no stranger to pain. In fact, a normal day involves a few hours of pain only made bearable through some scary narcotics. This was something different that I am still trying to understand. The pain at the hotel and just as I got home was the pain of exhaustion. I needed rest and I needed sleep of the in bed variety which I resist because of its unpleasant side effects. It was very difficult to overcome but then it seemed to stop but it was replaced by a variation of the exhaustion pain where I was either dosing in my chair or doing my best to keep crying out to a minimum.
Last night, I expected to find the agony again but I was greeted by what you might call moderate pain instead. What do you do for moderate pain again? I took my meds and rested but was awake almost all day. When I tried to sleep, I was confronted with dreams that had the frantic pace of nightmares but with details that seemed pleasant at the time. These dreams involved joining very intense organizations with very enthusiastic people. These people were so intense that they were carrying me along much of the time in the literal sense but they could not see how I was holding them up. Carried along by their enthusiasm, I fought to contribute all I could but then I felt restrained. The dream decided that I was late meeting up with my father who was driving me home to his house.
After enduring lectures on my poor performance, I was told that I had kept an old friend waiting so long that there would be time for nothing more than a hello. In truth, I barely caught a glimpse of her and not enough to decide who she was. Strangely, I retained the image after waking and realized that she was no one. In the rush to make me feel as guilty as possible, my brain might have combined some facial features of two people whom I would enjoy seeing. Then again, the truth is that I know both of them are safe and reasonably happy so there was no desperation or heartache involved. The problem was that I figured out the sensation of being restrained quickly. Madeline and Meekers spent most of the night pinning me to the chair so I had to go through several more rounds of the dream before I just about shouted a command that they will follow from time to time if I'm emphatic enough. "Everybody out of the pool!"
I might not have felt rested by I was no longer crushed by exhaustion so I ate a meal. Melissa made one of her amazing hams for Christmas dinner but I was much too sick that night to eat much. It's been that way pretty much straight through since my previous entry but this was a meal that both tasted good and I was able to finish. I'd like to claim that it was balanced but the best I can say is that I got up to get my own plate and that this meal consisted of ham with a simple version of Melissa's macaroni and cheese. It had diced tomatoes in it which happen to be a fruit.
This strength is fading without me doing more than showering and writing a couple of pages on the Zephyr project. It took one of my last two cups of coffee to get me to this point in the first place. As much as I prefer the neatness of the K-Cup system, I miss the utility of the pot of coffee that strengthened as it sat out. All I needed to do was heat it up and one coffee making effort could last me for days.
I don't want to go to sleep now. Melissa is home, if sleeping, now and she'll be at work later so that's when I want to sleep. I'd rather sleep later and risk the pain than to miss seeing her off.
It turns out that today is Saturday and not Sunday like I believed when I was grumbling about Melissa's night shift. She is working a mid-shift today. It's also true that today is Saturday and not Friday the way my pill container would indicate. It seems that I failed to take an entire day's worth of meds somewhere in there. My best guess is that it happened during one of the lost days when I slept too much. It could also have been the cause or effect of one of those horrible pain days. I could wear myself out making guesses.
When I learned that Melissa was working a mid-shift instead of a night shift, I was able to stay up to see her off and then I got a couple hours of napping in. I felt refreshed instead of entombed so I continued working on excavating the area around my chair. The process is moving along nicely but there's a sort of frustration inherent in this kinda work. Instead of organizing and paring down the stuff that was packed away for nearly a year, I am merely clearing away the debris from those days of intense pain. Progress is progress and I've learned to take my victories where I can get them. I can't depend on achieving big victories with any regularity
In any case, my body is still sorting itself out after locking down to deal with all the pain. What my body wants is another nap and I'm hoping to give it just that.
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