Year: 2018

Writer Down

Miss Poison Writing , , , , ,

Hello everyone! I want to thank all the new readers who have come on board in the past month or so. I appreciate each of you and hope you will leave comments and participate in this aspect of my life as a writer.

I rarely apologize for not posting regularly, but this time my body is just plain DONE in the sense that I’m way beyond stressed out. I’m dropping things I normally have no problem handling, I’m rarely hungry (I feel like my taste buds have died.), I’m bottling way too much inside, and nothing seems to help.

For the past few weeks I have been on medication for a health issue I desperately tried to avoid getting. I mean it; I did EVERYTHING right in order to avoid being diagnosed with it. Having a nurse tell me “There’s nothing more you could have done. It’s here, and now we have to try to fight it and/or keep it in check.” I would have had a better reaction if she’d broken a foot or a hand with a moving car. 😦 Some things don’t bother me, but other things I just have this emotionally painful reaction to, and this part of my health is one of them.

Bone-deep exhaustion set in right about the time I started taking the medication. As in, I can sleep for eleven hours (or longer), wake up, write a little, catch up on some things, and by noon I need to sleep for 3-4 hours because I cannot keep my eyes open or my head up. I am SO embarrassed to be SO ill that I can’t function. There are a lot of times I’m not asleep, I’m just lying here unable to move, unable to speak, and I’m fully aware of the fear coursing through my body that I might be completely paralyzed in some way. Alas, the paralysis wears off after a while and I’m able to move, but I’m still struck with being wide awake and unable to do anything. It is painful and scary, to say the least.

When someone suggested that my exhaustion might be related to the flu, I definitely wondered if it was a legit possibility. However, my symptoms don’t match up at all. They do, however, match up with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis. I made an appointment to see my doctor, after I was informed that it’s definitely NOT a side effect of this new medication. Because this diagnosis (ME) is predominantly NOT one you see in the United States (virtually every article I found about it was out of the United Kingdom), I am going to bring some documentation along with me. Hopefully she can diagnose this herself or refer me to someone who can, preferably before I keel over from the insane exhaustion I feel. Even now, I just want to crawl under the covers and SLEEP for the next month…or five.

Not being able to make important phone calls, do laundry, clean, and handle normal daily tasks is upsetting when you’re sick like this. It leaves me with zero purpose, because if I am going to be faced with a lifetime of this, I’m not accepting that. This CANNOT be my sole purpose in life. I can’t agree to suffering for the rest of my life. That isn’t the kind of life I signed up for.

Please know that I DO have posts I am working on. Unfortunately, at the moment, I’m too sick to finish them.  I’m around, barely. I’m doing my best.

Has anyone else been diagnosed with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis? If so, who diagnosed you and how long did it take for you to respond to treatment, if available?

copyright © 2018 Lisa Marino & Blackbird Serenity, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

This Is An Important Lesson

Quote Miss Poison Inspiration, Quotes , ,

“This is an important lesson to remember when you’re having a bad day, a bad month, or a shitty year. Things will change: you won’t feel this way forever. Sometimes the hardest lessons to learn are the ones your soul needs most. I believe you can’t feel real joy unless you’ve felt heartache. You can’t have a sense of victory unless you know what it means to fail. You can’t know what it’s like to feel holy until you know what it’s like to feel really fucking evil. And you can’t be birthed again until you’ve died.” ―Kelly Cutrone

Another Caturday

Image Miss Poison Caturday, February, Images/Photos/Quotes , , , ,

IMG_20180206_213432_501.jpg

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I am really struggling today. 😦 My insurance company denied my doctor’s request for an MRI, so even though he got on the phone and argued with them, I received two separate letters “explaining” the denial. They want me to do six weeks of physical therapy in order for them to agree to an MRI. Does this sound even remotely cost-effective to any of you? Yeah, I didn’t think so. I will be writing my own appeal letter this coming week because, quite frankly, I don’t appreciate being told “Unless you have cancer…” as one of the reasons why they would be willing to pay for it. Most of their reasoning is bullshit, and they know it as well as I do. My doctor was at such a loss, because he didn’t understand their explanations, either. He asked me if I wanted to even pursue this further and I said “I need to know what is causing this and how to proceed. I don’t want to live with un-diagnosed damage.” He agreed with me, and I was glad that he’d spent a week arguing with them before calling me back. Very few doctors would be willing to do that.

My father experienced a lot of pain in his shoulder for months before finally listening to me and going to the doctor. He kept thinking, much like I often do, that he’d slept on it funny. An x-ray showed a broken shoulder and bones in his arm were also badly broken. The doctor was confused, because these aren’t normal breaks one gets without an underlying issue. Because x-rays only show bone (my x-rays show nothing but perfect bone), it was an MRI that showed a baseball sized tumor on his shoulder, which is what caused the broken bones and resulted in major surgery and reconstruction of the bones. It was a tumor that, when removed, it took additional time to get it out because it was bigger than what the MRI showed. I believe the words “It was more like a softball than a baseball.” were used. I don’t know what is going on with my neck at this point, but I do know I am in excruciating pain, experiencing a lot more paralysis (Most nights, I cannot move or vocalize the paralysis, so I just lie here, hoping it will pass. I am awake the entire time, even though it looks as though I am asleep. I’m not, but I can’t scream out for help.), and I can’t deal with it for another minute. Physical therapy will only result in me screaming the second someone touches me. This should be an interesting experience for someone trying to assess me.

There is legitimately too much stress going on in my life right now. Jumping through hoops for my insurance company isn’t on my list of “things I’d like to do”, but I am NOT forcing myself to do anything until I exhaust the appeals process.

As I sit here bone-tired from lack of sleep, feeling guilty that I can’t run errands like a normal person, I desperately want to sit and cry. Unfortunately, I currently lack the emotion to do so.

A rainy Saturday being ignored by my cats. When two feels like twenty, it’s terribly exhausting on top of the fact that I couldn’t sleep, have a migraine, and everything is dull and uninteresting to me. I hope I come back as someone’s beloved cat because being human isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. 😦