Cranky Fibro Girl

Harnessing the healing power of snark

Free At Last

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Wherein I really wish someone had given me a map beforehand with a giant red “X” and the message, “This is a REALLY bad idea.”

Originally published 7/31/2005

I think one of my favorite things about being in my thirties is the fact that I no longer feel like I have to pretend about who I really am (or am not) in order to get people to like me. This was not always the case.

Back during our first year of marriage my husband, who is himself an Eagle Scout, worked as a volunteer with a Boy Scout troop and I, caught up in the flush of wanting to impress my new husband, agreed to go along on one of his troop’s camping trips.

Important Side Note: If you have never been camping before, I would HIGHLY recommend that your first trip not be with a troop of scouts, because any points you feel you have gained by being “a really cool wife” will quickly fade when you realize that, compared to everyone else on the trip including elementary school students, trail dogs, etc., you feel like a giant, incompetent wuss.

I really should have known that I was in over my head when my husband and I went to the outdoor store to buy me some gear. We did not go there to buy a cool backpack, or a kicky bandanna, or a nifty trail tool. No,we went so that I could buy my very own, neon orange, plastic poo shovel.

Things kind of took a turn for the worse once we had hiked up the trail to the spot where we were going to camp that night. We had foolishly drunk all the water we’d packed, so my husband went down to the river, filled our two plastic bottles with water, ran some iodine through the bottles, and handed one to me. I looked at the bottle, looked at him, and said, “It’s brown, And. There. Are. Bugs. In. It!” He looked at me and said, (and please bear in mind that he had only been a husband for a little under a year and hadn’t yet developed the sensitivity that he has now after nine years of marriage), “Well, the bugs are dead. And we have this lemonade mix to add to it!”

Even now, eight years later, I can’t think of this story without experiencing total incredulity at his response.  And even now, eight years later, my husband insists that we would not have even had this problem, if only he had packed a darker colored drink mix.

Happily I did recover enough from this trip to start going out on day hikes with my husband and our friends. As a matter of fact I was pretty impressed with myself on our last trip, because not only was I wearing my very own pair of official hiking boots, but they were so well used that we had to patch them together with duct tape.

(Yes of course we had duct tape-I was hiking with three engineers! As a matter of fact, the only reason that I didn’t have to sleep suspended in between two trees in some kind of jury-rigged duct tape shelter was the fact that the other spouse who came on this trip was five months pregnant.)

However, there are still some hurdles to overcome before I can consider going on another camping trip, as is clearly illustrated by the following conversation I had with my husband the last time he went camping.

10:00 pm. The phone rings.
Me: “Hello?”
My husband: “Hey, Jenny. I need your help.”
Me: (panicking at all the possible emergencies that could befall campers, and wondering just exactly where I can rent an emergency extraction helicopter at 10 pm on a Saturday night) “Oh my gosh, are you all right?!”
My husband: “What? Oh, yeah, we’re fine. I just need you to get the Almanac so you can tell us the geographical size of Liechtenstein in square miles.”

Silly me-what was I thinking?! These were highly trained, highly capable, highly intelligent men. Clearly the only emergency situation in which they could possibly have found themselves would be to be without immediate access to the geographical data of tiny, landlocked, central European countries.

So anyway, the jury is still out on the whole camping thing, but between you and me I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Encyclopedia Of The Missing Months: Part Two

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So picking up where we left off last time, I was starting to feel better, I was beginning to venture outside of the house, and I was starting to hang out with other people in person, rather than just online. Which was great, except for the fact that whenever I start to have a good period like this, I always get

AMNESIA: I get it in both directions. When I start to feel good, I immediately forget how long I was sick and in pain, and catapult myself back into life at an insane level of intensity and activity. And likewise, when I start to feel sick again, I forget that there was ever a time when I wasn’t miserable and in pain, and then plummet down to the abyss of hopelessness and despair. (See Also:  All-Or-Nothing).  And then add to this my

BI-POLAR: issues, and you have the perfect recipe for crazy, which is not completely my fault. It’s really hard to pace myself when I feel well, because there are so many things I want to do, and I don’t have any idea of the length of time in which I’ll be able to do them. And I don’t know where the edges of my

BOUNDARIES: are until I bump up against them. So I just have to try things and then see what happens and what affect it has on me. It’s very messy. (See Also: FLAILING AROUND). And I hate messy. And on top of that, we’ve been experiencing an inordinate amount of

DISASTERS: here in our neighborhood over the past 2 1/2 months. Beginning with this:

 

What you are seeing here is the root ball of a 100-ft tall oak tree from the yard of our neighbors across the street that one day, with no provocation whatsoever, fell across the road and crashed through every line and cable and whatever else was in its path. Fortunately it did not fall on anyone, nor did it fall on anyone’s house. But it did take out the power in a spectacularly catastrophic fashion, which is always a major problem for me, because I am on a

CPAP: machine, and in order to run it at night I need constant

ELECTRICITY: which we were told would not be repaired until sometime around 4 am (It was about 4 pm when the tree fell down.) So, while casting envious glances at our neighbors who own their own

GENERATOR: we were forced to go check into a

HOTEL:  at 11:30pm that night so that I could sleep. It would have been sooner, but my husband insisted on waiting, because he fully expected the power to come back on “any minute now”. That lasted until about 11pm, by which time I was so stressed out about the situation that he said, “You go and take a Xanax. I’ll go and talk to Georgia Power, and see if they have an estimate for when the electricity will come back on. That’s when we got the “4 am” news. And as a matter of fact, when we got back

HOME: at about 6:45am the next morning, they were STILL there, working on part of the lines. And actually, this was the first in a series of  events that began to

SNOWBALL: until the snowball gained enough momentum to turn into an avalanche, which we are all (there are more characters involved as the story progresses) still trying to dig ourselves out of.

 


 

 

Let Me ‘Splain. No, There Is Too Much. Let Me Sum Up

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So if there’s anyone still hanging around here (Hi! Thank you for still hanging around!), you may have noticed that I sort of disappeared in the middle of April, and am only now re-surfacing. And for that, you can thank Fibro-F*&$#%@-myalgia.

I am totally overwhelmed at the thought of trying to “catch up” all that lost time here on my blog, so instead I’ve decided to do a quick little Encyclopedia of the Missing Weeks. This will still take a few posts to cover, but who’s gonna complain about ready-made blog content?

So here we go.

AMNESTY: “A general pardon”. This is the quality I am granting myself before I start writing anything. I don’t have to write about anything if I don’t want to. What I do want is for this writing to be fun. So that’s my guide.

BEGINNING, THE: You know how sometimes a period in your life gets set apart mentally, even if what’s marking it off in your mind has nothing to do with what happened to you then? This is like that. I will always remember that this period began when one of the water mains broke down at the lake, and we didn’t have any water for the entire day that Saturday. It was really not even a thing, because it was fixed relatively quickly. But it did make me actually sit down and think, for the first time ever, I’m sad to admit, “Wow-what do people do who really DON’T have water?” That question marinated for a long time, and then thanks to a Facebook friend I was introduced to the following organization.

CHARITY: WATER : Charity: water is a non-profit organization bringing clean and safe drinking water to people in developing nations. 100% of public donations directly fund water projects. So now I have a way to take some action on that question. Which is very cool. I can’t really volunteer for anything, since I don’t know from day to day what my pain and illness is going to look like. But this I can do. I can help here.

CLOTHES: I also remember that day because for the first time in, like, ten TRILLION years I went shopping and found clothes that fit well, look good, and are comfortable, which is basically impossible if you are a woman who actually exists in all three dimensions. So this was HUGE, because that day I was actually leaving the house and interacting with other people in person, also for the first time in A Very Long Time, and I actually felt OK with how I looked. So we met up with another family and went to a

CONCERT: which I wrote about in this post. It was quite significant because

DRESSING UP: was involved. I mean, I actually put on a bra. I wore a dress.  I carried a purse. I wore wedges, for crying out loud. THERE WAS MAKEUP INVOLVED. My husband almost didn’t recognize me. All of which helped set the stage for the next few weeks of CRAZY.

(To be continued.)

 

Ms. Direction

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One of the things that impresses me the most about my husband is the fact that no matter where we go, even if it’s a place he’s never been to before, it takes him all of about five seconds to figure out exactly where he is, and then, exactly how to get to where he wants to go next. As a matter of fact, if you watch very carefully as we arrive in a new location, you can actually see a 3-D holographic image of the city lift up off of the ground, hover briefly in the air , and then settle right down onto his brain.

My dad and my brother are exactly the same way, so I always know that if I am ever out with any one of these three men I am always OK. (I also know that I don’t actually have to pay attention to pesky little details like street names, street signs, the name of the actual city or country in which we are currently located, etc. because they will take care of all of that for me.) Plus, if the three of them are all together then it is like their navigational powers are amplified, so not only do we get where we’re going more quickly and more efficiently, but we also always have a parking spot waiting for us right by the door.

In contrast, I myself am never entirely sure of where I am in any given moment, and if you ask me how to get from one place to another there’s a very good chance that at least part of my answer is going to involve the phrase “by magic”. My husband has learned in giving me directions to avoid such tricky technical terms as “north” or “east”, and instead to stick to simple instructions like, “turn left by the big chicken”.

Unfortunately, this lack of navigational ability only increases if my mom and I take a trip by ourselves. Last fall she and I drove together to another state to stay with a relative who was ill. Every. Single. Day. we had the exact same conversation: “Do we turn left out of the hotel parking lot, or do we turn right?”  Every. Day. Not only did we not have a virtual map in our minds, nor could we remember from one day to the next in which direction we needed to turn, but it also never once occurred to us to write down the correct answer at the moment in which this decision occurred so that we would have that Critically Important Information to refer to the next time we needed it.

This Vortex of Spatial Dislocation only intensified the night that she, I, and another relative had to go to the grocery store by ourselves all by ourselves in this town which was not our own. (And I don’t mean to perpetuate unfortunate gender stereotypes here, but this particular relative was also of the female persuasion.) The three of us got in the car, set off on the very same road ON WHICH WE HAD  JUST DRIVEN on our way back from the hospital mere moments earlier, and , you guessed it, turned the wrong way. And it took the three of us AT LEAST ten minutes to recognize this fact.

The good news is that we all did survive this trip and somehow managed to get back home, and I discovered that if I really, really HAVE to I can reach down and tap into hitherto undiscovered navigational abilities. But if it has to come to that, be warned: we will definitely be taking the scenic (read: WRONG) route.

Free At Last

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I think one of my favorite things about being in my thirties is the fact that I no longer feel like I have to pretend about who I really am (or am not) in order to get people to like me. This was not always the case.

Back during our first year of marriage my husband, who is himself an Eagle Scout, worked as a volunteer with a Boy Scout troop and I, caught up in the flush of wanting to impress my new husband, agreed to go along on one of his troop’s camping trips.

Important Side Note: If you have never been camping before, I would HIGHLY recommend that your first trip not be with a troop of scouts, because any points you feel you have gained by being “a really cool wife” will quickly fade when you realize that, compared to everyone else on the trip including elementary school students, trail dogs, etc., you feel like a giant, incompetent wuss.

I really should have known that I was in over my head when my husband and I went to the outdoor store to buy me some gear. We did not go there to buy a cool backpack, or a kicky bandanna, or a nifty trail tool. No,we went so that I could buy my very own, neon orange, plastic poo shovel.

Things kind of took a turn for the worse once we had hiked up the trail to the spot where we were going to camp that night. We had foolishly drunk all the water we’d packed, so my husband went down to the river, filled our two plastic bottles with water, ran some iodine through the bottles, and handed one to me. I looked at the bottle, looked at him, and said, “It’s brown, And. There. Are. Bugs. In. It!” He looked at me and said, (and please bear in mind that he had only been a husband for a little under a year and hadn’t yet developed the sensitivity that he has now after nine years of marriage), “Well, the bugs are dead. And we have this lemonade mix to add to it!”

Even now, eight years later, I can’t think of this story without experiencing total incredulity at his response.  And even now, eight years later, my husband insists that we would not have even had this problem, if only he had packed a darker colored drink mix.

Happily I did recover enough from this trip to start going out on day hikes with my husband and our friends. As a matter of fact I was pretty impressed with myself on our last trip, because not only was I wearing my very own pair of official hiking boots, but they were so well used that we had to patch them together with duct tape.

(Yes of course we had duct tape-I was hiking with three engineers! As a matter of fact, the only reason that I didn’t have to sleep suspended in between two trees in some kind of jury-rigged duct tape shelter was the fact that the other spouse who came on this trip was five months pregnant.)

However, there are still some hurdles to overcome before I can consider going on another camping trip, as is clearly illustrated by the following conversation I had with my husband the last time he went camping.

10:00 pm. The phone rings.
Me: “Hello?”
My husband: “Hey, Jenny. I need your help.”
Me: (panicking at all the possible emergencies that could befall campers, and wondering just exactly where I can rent an emergency extraction helicopter at 10 pm on a Saturday night) “Oh my gosh, are you all right?!”
My husband: “What? Oh, yeah, we’re fine. I just need you to get the Almanac so you can tell us the geographical size of Liechtenstein in square miles.”

Silly me-what was I thinking?! These were highly trained, highly capable, highly intelligent men. Clearly the only emergency situation in which they could possibly have found themselves would be to be without immediate access to the geographical data of tiny, landlocked, central European countries.

So anyway, the jury is still out on the whole camping thing, but between you and me I wouldn’t hold my breath.