Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Re-re-shuffling my plans & to-do list for the first half of the week. While the dizziness continues to mostly stay away and to be chased away with meclizine when it does approach, there are still the matters of fibromyalgia pain and sleep-wackiness: despite having a no-dizziness/no-migraine day yesterday, by the time I got pain levels in my legs and back down enough to really feel like coping with being upright, it was a bit late in the day to make the trek to Bowie to visit Mom. (I hope one of my siblings did something nice...) So I rearranged my expectations, including planning to do today a couple of things I'd previously intended to do on the way to or from Mom's. Then I utterly failed to sleep last night; if I'm lucky, I'll fall asleep before the morning gets much more stale and be up again early enough to take meds in time for them to be working before this evening -- and whether I make it out this evening or not, what I'd re-planned for this afternoon is gonna be re-rescheduled for tomorrowish (except for a couple of writing and filling-out-forms tasks that I can do at home if I fail to get to College Park tonight, but at the moment I'm assuming they'll be Tuesday tasks).

Not absolutely excruciating pain yesterday -- God knows I've suffered much worse -- but enough to make me feel somewhat less than mobile.

I did manage a brief outing this weekend to spend some of the grocery money a friend sent via PayPal, but I only got as far as a convenience store, so I've got bread and milk but still need to do a proper shopping run for cat litter, yogurt, potatoes, etc. Knowing I've got most of a loaf of bread and a few ounces of cheese downstairs does cut the stress level a little -- enough to notice. As does knowing I'll be able to pick up a few other essentials shortly. I hate asking my friends for that sort of help (okay, I suck at asking for help in general, I know), but I am very grateful for the help I got in response.

I wasn't sure how much I'd wind up using the cane after the dizziness receeded, but my right leg was bothering me enough when I went shopping, that I decided I ought to take it with me just in case, and see how much difference it made. That was the right call, though my right arm got a bit tired. (Using it just for stability, I could switch hands if I wanted to; using it to take the stress off a hurting leg, I wanted to keep it on that side.) I'm not sure how I want to manage the cane on days when the drugs are enough to make the cane superfluous (or when the pain is mostly above the waist): take it with me in case I start hurting more while I'm out, or leave it home (or, more likely, in the car) because it's one more thing to get in my way and take up a hand when I don't need it, and a small additional drain on spoons up until I get to the point where it can start saving me some spoons. The amount I hurt does vary quite a bit.

It did occur to me to rig a strap so I could sling it across my back when not using it. Then I got this mental image of myself with all sorts of Things I Might Need arrayed around my body, looking like the "well-equipped adventurer" figurine one of my college friends got and painted, and I thought that might not actually be the way to wind up ...

The Plan, of course, is to continue to try to time my meds and my sleep such that I'm feeling well enough to get around normally when I need to go out -- so, at least with my current thinking on the subject, y'all will most likely see me on days when I don't need to use it, especially if I also need to carry the double bass or a couple of guitars -- but the cane does nudge the hurting-too-badly-to-go-anywhere threshold in a useful direction, at least when I'm not carrying much. And it comes in handy when the VCR spits out a tape at the wrong moment and I want to push it back in. Anyhow, where before you could use my footwear as a clue to how well I'm doing (in flats but not in boygarb == hurting quite a lot but not quite badly enough to keep me from leaving the house at all), now there'll be an additional visible clue in the absence or presence of a cane. I'm not sure yet exactly what the order will be (I haven't experimented enough to know whether I should switch from heels to flats before or after picking up the cane (and I'm not going to assume without experimenting)).

And I'm now starting to sound a little less coherent to myself and feel inclined to ramble and add lots of extra parenthetical bits, which means sleep is probably finally catching me. And that's a Good Thing, since I've been waiting to be able to fall asleep for about the last nine hours. Here's hoping. Gonna post this and close my eyes instead of making another editing pass, lest I miss this sleep-window. Hope this makes sense as-is & I didn't leave off half a sentence somewhere.