Spring Fever

I had an appointment with my Lyme specialist this morning. I’ve been unbearably nauseous after I take one of my antibiotics fairly consistently now for about a week. As I was throwing up my bagel this morning, I wondered if perhaps I no longer need the meds. The doctor was inclined to agree, to some extent. We’re focusing now on the Lyme, having beaten back the coinfections. At least for now. I’m ever conscious that this is a long process and I’ll likely have to relaunch direct assaults on the little buggers at some point in the future. One more life stressor may knock my knees out from under me, leaving me more exhausted and overrun with invaders than I am now.

But I’m making some headway with cognition and stamina. I’m still greatly fatigued, but when I’m up I can stay up for a little longer. I can concentrate long enough to finish a sentence, if I’m typing. Writing longhand is a gamble, and if anyone interrupts while I’m speaking, the thought evaporates like steam in the inferno of my Lyme-rage and frustration.

The insurance giant who was happy to take my premiums for twelve years have denied my appeal to their denial of my long term disability claim. I am in pain every minute of every day. I can’t stay awake for more than five consecutive hours, and for only a couple of those hours will I be coherent. My short-term memory is a joke. Showering still exhausts me. I can’t walk to the end of the block. I can’t get more than thirty pages into a book without losing track of both plot and character, having to start over again and again. (At least now I can just skim the parts I’ve already read and spark some vestige of memory.) Besides all of that, keeping up with my meds is a full-time occupation.

Who knows what it’ll take to launch legal action against the giant. And while I’m angry, it only flares for a minute then leaves me spent. Most of all, I’m tired. Beyond tired. I have no words for the depth of my fatigue, how overwhelmed I feel. But it is officially spring, and better days are ahead.

So How Do You. . .

At brunch with my wife our teen daughter & my super-conservative in-laws this morning my kid pipes up about her new bf's parents never having met gay folks before. How we got on the subject is lost to me now but I guess they have a lot of questions and that makes the bf nervous. My wife & I have answered just about every question a straight person can come up with & are as happy to dispel myths about lesbian families as we are Lyme Disease. My mil (who asks no questions) was surprised but then decided we must be like some foreign emissaries. "I guess it would be the same as if you were from Africa or someplace they've never been. Asking, you know, how do you do this and how do you do that?" Leave it to my sweet mil to hit on the one question we refuse to answer.

Snow Day

The dry winter has broken with a blanket of snow on the ground this first morning of March. The weather forecasters have been predicting it for about a week now, and the air has carried that biting edge that usually foretells the fluffy white precipitation. But so far, only a few fat flakes have fallen and not stuck.

Some folks go crazy for a white Christmas. I enjoy a white birthday, especially since mine falls at the end of March. When I was a child and we lived in the foothills of central California, I’d get a white birthday every once in a while. My sister, whose birthday is in mid-January, never got this coveted birthday surprise. Which made those few times I awoke to a blanket of white on the ground on my birthday all the sweeter, even though it meant canceling whatever plans may have been made for my day.

Today I have no plans, just some errands that need to be run. It’s also my day to exercise. I think. Keeping up with an everyday routine is difficult enough with Lyme disease, but these every-other-day tasks may prove to be my undoing. I could be organized and write it down in my calendar, but I’m currently going through a disorganized slump, where I forget I even have a calendar and mislay my various lists of things to do. I’ll switch into high gear soon, if my past experience is anything to go by, and an aberrant wind of physical stamina will blow through me and I’ll have cleaned off my desk and organized my living spaces in a single, exhausting afternoon. Also based on past experience, I’ll probably do myself some physical damage and be laid up in bed for a week afterward. Perhaps it would be better to go at it in small chunks, but that isn’t the way this game seems to work. It’s feast or famine where my physical and mental strength and focus are concerned and I stop only when my body makes me.

I am a bit disappointed, though, that I slept through the snow fall. I hope it snows more today while I’m awake to enjoy it.