I’m terribly out of date on the blog. I guess it doesn’t really matter, considering I write here more for myself than anything else.
I’ve come to realize something. When one has a chronic illness, there is a major part of the brain dedicated to dealing with it’s management. Except you don’t think about it so much; you just do it. It becomes a part of your daily ‘routine’.
I never put any thought to that until recently…because I’ve started feeling better.
I throw the word ‘better’ around in relative terms; ‘better’ for me might be ‘borderline intolerable’ for you. However what I do know is this; over the past almost two months since I’ve started a new medical routine with a new doctor and, more recently, started eating better…I’ve felt the best I have in almost 2 years.
I’ve explained it to a couple of other people through a computer processor metaphor. When you are running Windows or OSX, you’re dedicating system resources…RAM, processor power, hard drive space, etc. to keeping that running. Same with your body; you breathe, your blood flows, your eyes focus…all of those subconscious actions happen whether you want them to or not.
Then there are the things you are actively doing…working, riding your bike, having a conversation, shooting heroin. Same with a computer. There are things you want it to do beyond just running Windows/OSX. You want to use Word, play solitaire or surf the Web for porn. Those are all processes that require extra resources. The more processes you run, the more resources you use…and your computer starts to degrade in performance.
Now…what happens when you get sick? You don’t WANT to get sick; you just do, and so your brain and your body start to combat that with resources, thereby taking away performance from everything else. What happens when you’re chronically ill? It’s like a computer virus that your virus software can’t get rid of, and so the virus keeps plugging away at what it’s doing, soaking up resources and making your computer difficult…sometimes impossible…to use.
Sometimes you can reboot the computer and things are set right for awhile.
When you’re chronically ill, rebooting is sleeping. You’re shutting down all of your other processes in order for your system to concentrate on healing and helping to repair the problem.
The final thing I’ll ask you to imagine is waking up one day to use your computer and you realize that, after using it for a bit, it’s running more smoothly and able to do things quicker. You look and realizethe virus seems to be be going dormant.
That’s kind of what’s happening to me now. Before, I’d say I was at about 65-70% every day. That depletion becomes worse because I generally can’t sleep. I wake up 2-3 times a night in pain and rushing to the restroom. I also have a hard time eating. Naturally, because I can’t hold onto anything, my nutrition levels are pretty poor. And it HURTS to eat sometimes, so I’ll skip meals to avoid feeling worse. And this is FURTHER compounded by the fact that, at work, I have to be organized, thinking and mindful of what I say and do pretty much all day long.
Now, I feel like I have at least 15-20% MORE power freed up, and it’s CRAZY. My brain is going haywire. I don’t feel like I can sit idle because I have so much going through my head. I also feel like I can do things much more deliberately and with more patience. I’ve noticed that my tolerance for traffic is higher, that I can do things more deliberately without anxiety and rushing (walking the dogs, for example), and that I can be around crowds without feeling like I want to explode.
That doesn’t mean I’m not wary. I still don’t trust my body. Actually, that’s a little worse. Before, I could generally predict with some fairly routine accuracy if I needed to go running to the restroom. There’s some comfort in that kind of inconvenience, believe it or not. Now that feeling is gone, and without those expectations, I’m left wondering if my body will all of a sudden decide to sabotage me when I don’t expect it. I’m hoping, though, that if this keeps up, that I can start to relax even more.
Note how I said “if this keeps up”. That’s the other part I struggle with.
On one hand, I know that I should just relax and take advantage of this time without worrying about “if” it’s going to stick around. I need to convince myself, make my brain believe, that it WILL and that I shouldn’t worry about it. If I just keep doing what I’m doing, I’ll be fine.
On the other hand, there’s that bittersweet voice that says, “This can’t last.” I hate that. It reminds me of what I’ve become, which is a little bit cynical. That same voice also urges me to prepare for when it all goes downhill again.
As always, there’s the search to find the balance between those two points, and oddly enough, I feel like I’m working towards it by doing some of the things I’ve been doing. For example, I’ve found some strange pleasure and meditative qualities in organizing the areas of our house that have been unorganized since moving in. I’ve organized our closets and created a place for everything. I spend my day at my job attempting to predict what’s going to happen and putting enough organization in place to where if something happens, I can handle it quickly and easily. The tools and resources I need are in places where I can find them immediately. I figured I’d apply that same mentality to everything around the house. I’ve been keeping everything pretty tidy.
Part of this is because I’m also bored. Christy is out of town so I have a lot of extra time on my hands.
So here I am writing because I’ve organized the crap out of everything. I feel like I have a lot of different things I could do, which is an awesome feeling and something I’m not used to. I struggle to do some of the most mundane things by the end of the day because it’s everything I can do to just function all day through the chronic pain. Now that this pain isn’t there, I’m finding that there are so many things I not only CAN do…but I WANT to do.
Here’s to hoping this lasts for a while. Guess I’ll go build something now.
…just when you think people can’t really be as stupid as they are, you get to see heartbreaking sh*t like this.
