The Good With The Bad

I’m having an incredibly bad fibro day. The pain started yesterday evening and just kept increasing until everything hurt. I do mean everything. Even my butt cheek muscles seem to be screaming out in pain. Last night I couldn’t even pet my poor dog because just the task of lifting up my arm to make the petting motion was agony.

And I didn’t sleep well at all last night. The Flexeril didn’t appear to do any muscle relaxing and the Melatonin didn’t make me sleepy enough to be able to sleep through the pain. I couldn’t find a comfortable position because everywhere hurt and no matter which way I tried to lay on the bed, this or that limb or muscle group complained angrily.

So, I’m cranky today and I don’t feel like being on a diet or sticking to my 12oz of caffeine or drinking 24oz of water.

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Sucking It Up With Help…Finally

The appointment with my GP yesterday afternoon went better than the one in the morning. I always feel better when I actually see her and not just her staff or a nurse practitioner. I’m just going to have to be more insistent about that in the future; I don’t care how busy she is. She was far more open-minded and understanding than the Rheumatologist, especially when I told her that I didn’t feel like I was getting the kind of care I felt I needed from him. I told her that I felt that his basic message to me was “Suck it up.”

Oh, yes, I get what he was saying about how we need to treat the depression and the sleep disorder and that will help the pain overall. I’m not stupid. I do understand the connection all of these things have to each other and how it’s easy to get caught in some sort of whirlpool drowning effect where the pain makes me more depressed which affects my sleep which causes more pain which makes me more depressed and so on… I got it and I told her all of that. However, I also said that I can’t foresee “sucking it up” if things continue as they are because things are only getting worse and not changing anything isn’t going to help matters as I see them. Certainly, I don’t see my depression getting better or my sleep improving if nothing is changed.

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Melatonin No More

I stopped taking the melatonin last Wednesday. I had determined that it was causing some sort of daily rebound headache/migraine that my usual migraine meds couldn’t seem to work on. As my mother pointed out, I was kind of damned if I did and damned if I didn’t since I was getting really excellent sleep results with the melatonin, which turned out to be 3mg not 1mg, but was making my migraines worse as a result.

Unfortunately I have not slept at all well since.

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Lobbing Lemons

Someone once told me that when life sends you lemons, lob them right back.

It’s been an incredibly frustrating and stressful week.

Sunday for about 3 hours or so, my cable and thus internet was out. Because I am on-call for my job, I require the use of the internet at a moment’s notice to be able to dial into the computers at my workplace so I can fix the problem. It actually is an emergency when such a thing occurs and it affects people’s lives. I take it quite seriously. When I talked to their support people then, they said that it was an area thing or rather that someone else in my area was having a problem too and that they were sending someone out to fix it. It was fixed that afternoon.

Monday morning when I woke up, there was no cable or internet. I called again. They said they’d send someone out. I have no idea if they did because there was a huge electrical storm across the state that afternoon and that’s when all kinds of weirdness started at work. When I got home, there was not cable or internet and the message on the support line said that my town was experiencing outages.

Tuesday morning when I woke up, there was no cable or internet, but there was no more message on the support line, so I talked to the support people again and they said they’d send someone out.

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Revisiting Alternative Medicine

I’ve been thinking a lot about (re)focusing on alternative medicine lately as a means of improving my health. I got to thinking about it because of a bad experience at the doctor’s office where I didn’t see the actual doctor but a nurse practitioner who’s “advise” was basically useless. Plus, my anti-depressant medication doesn’t appear to be working anymore and I’m having a flare up with my fibromyalgia with the extreme heat and humidity from last week.

So, I pulled out the diet recommendations from the Alternative Med Doctors I saw last November and December when I got my IgAN and fibro diagnoses. I figured now was a good time to check in and review how I’m doing.

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