Mush!

Sitting on the porch this morning, my neck and shoulders stiff and painful from the spiros and too little sleep, I started to complain to myself. Grumbling, shifting and settling, looking for a comfortable position in my chair and finding none, I berated my recent party-animal lifestyle.

On Wednesdays, our dear friends come over to cook us dinner and check in on how we’re all doing. I love that they want to help out, love seeing them and appreciate that they’d set aside an evening each week for us. They are part of our family, but it means a late night for me. And one night a week of going to bed after nine isn’t so bad. No one expects much socialization out of me after seven anyway.

Last week, though, our Thursday and Friday evenings also included time with friends and missed bedtimes. Consequently, I spent most of last weekend in bed recuperating. Again this week, we were blessed with a meal cooked for us in our kitchen by our best friends on Wednesday. And again yesterday, we had dinner with a different set of good friends—the same ones we spent last Thursday with.

What we did last Friday escapes my memory at the moment and I’m too lazy/tired/sore to get out of my chair to fetch my calendar. Whatever it was, I hope today isn’t a repeat. I can’t handle these late nights—and how pathetic that staying up after nine is late now.

That may be the most difficult thing for me to adjust to with this being sick and getting better business, that I can no longer count on my brain to push through whatever lies ahead and expect my body to ably follow. I recognize this fact cognitively; daily the pain and exhaustion remind me of my current frailty. But I am prone to forgetting, falling back into habits, willing my body to keep moving through the pain.

Except it doesn’t work anymore. One or the other is likely to fail, frequently both with my brain going one way and my body another. Or neither going anywhere, just spinning in place. A few weeks ago, I tried to do laundry while herxing. I may as well have tried to walk twenty miles for all the sense I showed that day. Not once but twice I found myself standing in front of the washing machine, crying from the body pain, my brain off on some tangent of rage and self-pity, unable to move.

My arms and legs refused to inch forward, and my brain flipped me the bird when I tried to get tough and told myself to suck it up and just move already. Our laundry facilities are in the basement and the comfort of my bed is two stories up. So while I can conserve energy and toss the (mostly mesh) laundry bags down the stairs, I still have to cart the clean clothes back up with me. In theory. That day, I ended up leaving it all downstairs and asked my wife to help bring it up for me when she got home from work.

The thing is, getting stuck down there shouldn’t have happened once let alone twice. I’m not a stupid woman, but I can be astoundingly dumb sometimes. And stubborn. Rather than admit defeat and ask my wife to always bring the laundry up for me, I’ve been whiling away my sleepless afternoon rest hours coming up with ridiculous methods of getting it up myself.

Obviously, splitting the heavier loads into smaller, lighter ones would only mean more trips up and down the stairs. I tried tossing a light load up the stairs, but it is neither as effective nor as satisfying and watching it fly down, skimming the risers and landing with a soft thud. Tossing the laundry up required more energy than carrying it (duh) and resulted in a flurry of panties and socks. (I will admit, throwing the laundry up the stairs was inspired more by anger than a desire to conserve energy.)

A number of rope and pulley systems have presented themselves, but in reality I’d probably trip on the rope and do some serious damage. I slip down those basement stairs enough as it is.

Sadly, I am left with little choice but to ask for help when I need it, to continue to work on recognizing when that is, who to ask, how to ask. Who knew it would all be so complicated? Now I remember why I’m so mulish. I usually fail right at the gates in not recognizing when I need help until it’s too late. If I do manage to pass this hurdle, I fall at who and how. I went out on a limb a while ago, asked a friend to help me with something. It didn’t work out. I never got an answer either way, had to come to the conclusion myself and let go of the hope for what I wanted. Still today I don’t know which of the three were off, probably all. But it hurts and makes me ever more reluctant to reach out.

Our dear friends who come and cook for us, I didn’t ask them for their help. The one I call Sister just announced one evening shortly after the holidays that she was coming up once a week to see me, then her wife got on board, and it morphed into this wonderful weekly dinner. I have a feeling that if I’d asked for it, the outcome would have been different.

Maybe the best course of action is to maintain a position of acceptance for the help and love that come my way, show my gratitude for what I have, and buy more panties and shirts so I don’t have to do laundry when I’m herxing. That sounds like a good plan to me.