Valentines
I don’t usually really celebrate Valentines, the anniversary of when Wolfe and I met is Feb 2nd, and we usually celebrate that, and Valentines often slips by mostly un-noticed.
It’s the little daily gestures of love that are most important to me regardless. For instance hot tea waiting for me in the mornings. Wolfe gets up early to go to work and he leaves me a pot of hot tea by the couch and laptop. I never know which flavor of tea I’m getting till I pour that first cup, and some days, like today, he forgets the bag and I have hot water. Which always makes me smile, and sometimes laugh. Sometimes there’s a protein shake/smoothie for me in the fridge, and this morning there was freshly juiced juice.
Ever since Luna’s last heat, and we suspect she is pregnant, she has been SO snuggly, there’s definitely a personality change, she wants cuddles and rubs all the time, so I’m typing this around a very snorky snuggly pug. I think she’s hoping I’ll give up my typing and go back to rubbing her belly.
I’m feeling a bit introspective today, and a bit sad, as I’m thinking about my health, my fibromyalgia and my altered existence because of it. Chronic pain and fatigue is wearying, to say the least. It’s one thing to have a cold or a flu that brings you down and lingers on and quite another to have something like this. After many many months now, I’m still adjusting to the idea that feeling this way may be my constant companion. I still have a couple of therapies I can try, to see if there will be a significant impact. There’s a class of drugs that works well for some people with fibromyalgia, and then there is also alternative medicine/healing. The trouble with these options is a) expense and b) fear.
We don’t have a lot of money right now, and to sink money into treatment that may not lead to any significant improvement is truly daunting. There is also simply the fear around, even if we could afford it, trying up all my options for feeling better, and finding out I can’t. Using up my options and coming out on the other side knowing nothing does or can work would be a big blow, one I don’t know if I can face right now. Sounds silly doesn’t it? Not wanting to try treatment for fear you can’t get any better, so choosing the path where you definitely won’t get better. Honestly though, even though that is a fear, If we had the money, I’d confront it pretty darn fast. The big thing holding me back is the expense, and in the case of the traditional medicine, medication I haven’t tried yet, it’s also the side effects.
I know I spend a lot of time disassociating from my own body physically and emotionally, as focusing in on it, is hard to do. Letting myself ‘feel’ the pain, is hard. I spend my time constantly distracting myself with games on the computer, the television, food, something, usually multiple things to keep my focus external, keep the mind busy. The body still on the couch, and ignore the physical and emotional pain inside of me. When I let my attention come back to myself, the awareness of how wrong things are in the body, how weak and tired, and how much I hurt. Is overwhelming. Sometimes I find myself in awe, that I can just be and keep going when the body does hurt this much, feel this way, when everything is so weak and sore, and to know it’s simple. I don’t have a choice. Chronic pain is a weird thing, it’s changing me, and I’m trying to direct that change to make it as positive as possible, but it is changing me.
I try to focus on the ironic upsides, it’s making losing weight a lot easier, because really, it kills my appetite. I used to be aware before my fibromyalgia that If I had pain, particularly head or upper body pain, that I’d get nausea with it, but now the nausea and lack of appetite, have just kind of blurred into that mass of sensation in me that is so constant that it’s become ‘normal’. That and my bowels work so poorly now, that it’s hard to want to put stuff into your body when you have such a hard time getting stuff out. My digestive system, like every other system in my body seems to be weak, exhausted, sore, with depressed functioning, etc.
Fibromyalgia has become my most intimate companion. There are things you can choose to foster and develop, love and grow close to in your life, and there are things that you are powerless over. How do you come to terms with those things in your life that are unwanted, are with you, and are out of your control. Can anything positive come of this? I think that’s one of the hardest things, is my focus is always on trying to create the best out of the worst. To accept and love even that which comes into opposition against me, when that takes the form of people or other externals, somehow I’m able to do that. See an enemy in no person, and extend love and compassion, light and laughter, at least from my end of the equation, into that situation. I don’t ‘hate’ anyone. But I hate my fibromyalgia, I hate it’s symptoms, and it’s a struggle not to ‘hate’ my body, myself, for ‘doing’ this to myself. How do I create love there? Is there even any benefit to trying to do so? Accept maybe, but create positive regard for?
Happy Valentines Fibromyalgia?
What can chronic pain teach me? Please let there be a silver lining, please let there be some love, some positive, something powerful that can be good that can grow out of something that makes me feel so bad, and so powerless. If there is a lesson here, I’ve yet to find it. It’s hard to look for it, when most of the time in order to cope, I’m needing to look away from it.
According to the Catholic take on Valentines, where we get the name of the holiday at least, from the first Martyred Saint Valentine: St. Valentine was a Priest, martyred in 269 at Rome and was buried on the Flaminian Way. He is the Patron Saint of affianced couples, bee keepers, engaged couples, epilepsy, fainting, greetings, happy marriages, love, lovers, plague, travellers, young people. He is represented in pictures with birds and roses.
To all of you plagued with pain, and we all have some measure of it, some form of it, Happy Valentines.
XO
Leila