In a bold move unanticipated by everyone involved, my Fall symptoms exploded a bomb in the back of my head covering the entire surgical area. That area is defined by the surgical scar that starts down between the very top of my shoulder blades and continues all the way up to the top of my head where a local doctor found a staple while treating me for some completely unrelated thing. It was removed two years late but everyone is confident that it had nothing to do with my surgery's unsuccessful outcome. Simultaneously, my shattered teeth secreted some sort of acid that made my whole mouth hurt. Finally, another bomb exploded in my jaw connecting the pain in the front of my head to the pain in the back and in the neck.
All I could do was cover the entire inside of my mouth with one of those Orajel style products, take my medicines on time and recline with a cold pack wrapped around as much of my face as it could cover. The key was to remain calm and hold on because one of the medicines was going to work or someone was going to bring me home some medicinal reinforcement. (It's formal name is whiskey but I don't drink it for the taste.) I'll explain later why I didn't have any on hand but I knew that I would make it eventually. Time passes including both the good and bad aspects of life.
As I made it to that meditative state that leads to sleep when I'm physically exhausted. We call those days that end in "y." As soon as the pain was on the separate side of my mind from where I was living, the cat signal went off. (I have trouble describing meditation adequately because I learned so much of it from reading science fiction and fantasy novels.) Maddie insisted that 2 PM was actually 5 PM and so her dinner was about to be late. Normally, I meditate to the sound of my own breathing but a yowling cat makes regular breathing difficult so I played a favorite Pearl Jam CD. It's the bootleg from the night Melissa and I attended. (It's a legal bootleg produced and sold by the band in case you're wondering. I'm not hypocritical about intellectual property rights.)
Madeline (the evil bitch cat from hell or my sweet baby girl depending on the circumstances) jumped up on my CD player and popped out the CD while it was playing. She scratched it up pretty good in the process but I'm hoping to work these scratches out like the ones resulting from being stored badly for months at a time. Unfortunately, Maddie decided that she didn't want me to relax and feel better. She wanted to be fed and didn't care who had to crawl across the broken glass and glowing charcoal floor to do it. (It's my blog. I'll exaggerate when I want to.) She did take several more flying leaps at me and I am touch sensitive all over my body during winter symptoms. Eventually, I hid myself behind a closed door in the office and tried to work while my neighbor the car detailer sent metal spikes through my head. He was cleaning a van and his customer was shouting a conversation over that noise.
Chilly Weekend and Rough Passage are coming along pretty well. I tend to write late at night when the office is most useable to me. One thing slowing the work down is having to listen to my body. Every so often, I can keep one of my symptoms from dialing itself up to 11 by giving my body what it needs. Usually, that's rest or sleep that I need but I'm troubled by nightmares that don't sound so scary to me while fully awake. If I hear an angry or just loud male voice, I dream that my father is in my home. He's decided to keep his distance the way I keep mine for both of our sakes unless I've missed my guess but dreaming his voice leaves me awake and shaking for hours That's the other thing the whiskey does well. If I'm shaking from my PTSD, it helps me stop.
As a day sleeper, this leads to some funny looking journal mentions of having a drink at 7 AM but I assure you that I've been awake anywhere from 12 to 30 hours at that point. It's always five o'clock in that burning war zone I call a nervous system. I had a full morning of work planned but I'm just going to have to try some rest.
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