I would apologize for not writing anything of substance over the past few weeks, but I’m not sorry for sparing all of you. I’ve had little I’ve wanted to talk about, not just where writing is concerned, but in my daily life as well. When that occurs, I find it is best to retreat inside myself and wait until things are quieter, calmer, less insane, or I reach some semblance of ‘all of the above’. I do have things I will discuss moving forward, things I’ve psycho-analyzed or things I am in the process of psycho-analyzing, but the day-to-day shit? Absolutely no one wants to hear what goes on inside my head. They’d either drop dead from the speed of my thoughts or run screaming into the great unknown. I know, because I’ve tried to do both. It turns out that, at times, your mind is your own worst enemy.

I have been busy working on my passion project. I rebranded it, as I have been doing it for three years and wanted to make it something special and unique to me. I am now able to see it with new eyes. It is becoming rewarding and refreshing, and I believe that with determination, strength, and fortitude, it will continue to grow into precisely what I’ve envisioned it to be, if not end up in a different direction, far larger than I could ever dream possible. I am trying to devote a lot of my “free time” to this because ultimately, it is a career change and is helping break me out of my comfort zones.

My mother used to say “Do not be afraid to dream big, for the dream precedes the goal.” Inspirational words considering I was pretty young when she said it the first time, but she continued to repeat it whenever I’d lose faith and/or get discouraged. There is NO expiration date on your dreams.

Cat and Kitten are slowly making progress in their new environment. Cat is such a sweet, loving, gentle soul, but she’s generally passive by nature, so I was concerned about how she would integrate. I don’t want her to be bullied or get hurt. She’s not a fighter. She has learned how to jump over obstacles, like the pet gate, in order to get to me and/or explore. She’s been dealing with OGK quite a bit in face-to-face moments. Some of their interactions go well, others do not. He chases her out of the living room most of the time, if he sees her at all. Often times, he sleeps through 99% of her living room antics. She’s stealth, I’ll give her that. It’s hard not to laugh as she darts around corners, looking for my approval before she goes exploring. One night he chased her and cornered her in my room. He hissed like a lunatic, but she stood and watched him. She refused to back down and I was so proud of her. She is coming into her own and showing how strong and brave she is. She has finally gotten to a point where she’s back in my bed, sound asleep, whenever possible, and has gone out of her way to remember her kitten days and crawl into my lap, despite the fact that she no longer fits. I know this normal part of our Mommy/Cat routine is why she has often looked dejected and depressed these past few months. It makes me sad whenever I see her big gold eyes staring at me as if to say “Can I come out now? Why is this gate here? I want to be with you.” I know that in another month or so, there will hopefully no longer be a need for the gate, but for now, I can say it has truly been a God-send.

Kitten took much longer to emerge, and she’s the Alpha of the two, so I decided to physically remove her from her foxholes. I had to pick her up, bring her downstairs, and force her to immerse herself in the new. She fought with me like a toddler as I carried her downstairs, and immediately tried to leave the second I secured her behind the pet gate. She discovered almost instantly that the new gate is easy for her to jump over (I’m pretty sure she could scale a six-foot wall with ease. She’s huge, and taller than most domestic cats.), so I often find her un-corralled, but only when there’s food involved. If she senses OGK; if she sees or smells him and no one is with her to get in his way, she will hop right back over the gate and either watch him or hide. She’s still hissing at him on occasion, but it’s an innocent sound, a “back off” warning that she is giving him for getting too close. What bothers me the most is her visible unhappiness and depression over not being with me 24/7. She’s a Mama’s Girl, and she does not appreciate having her access to me blocked, yet getting her into my room practically required pulling teeth. I am proud to say that she is finally comfortable enough to come downstairs on her own, albeit under my watchful eye. I was coming out of the kitchen one day and she was sitting in the picture window in the living room, staring at me. Unfortunately, in my joy of discovering her out and about with such confidence, I locked OGK in the kitchen and when I went to check on him, the doorknob fell off in my hand. I spent a good 30 minutes trying to re-attach it in order to get him out, feeling terribly stupid. I nearly broke a tweezer and a scissor in my efforts. Thankfully, the handyman is quite handy and was able to fix it in less than a few minutes. He then lapsed into a story about keeping a screwdriver in his bathroom, as the very same thing had happened to him one night, leaving him to try to unlock the door in the dark. It was a little TMI, but he was just trying to make me feel better in a time of great stress.

For roughly the past two and a half weeks, she’s been making it into my room safely, all on her own. She is now comfortable getting into my bed and plopping down beside me for a belly rub and kisses. She’s slowly exploring “our stuff” and is so much happier to spend an hour or two with me as opposed to being solo. So, that’s progress. 😀

I miss them because they’re not with me all of the time. They’re my babies and I love them, but the exhausted, drained, Fibromyalgia part of me is glad that I get some alone time because I spend a lot of time these days feeling physically weak.

As for the Fibromyalgia; essentially it means you are fighting a war inside your body. I need to remind myself that self-care isn’t selfish or wrong. I need to stop being so hard on myself. However, I also NEED to push myself physically and not allow this disease to rob every single day of my life. When I hit the point where I am unable to write, which is usually by 10:00 a.m. most days, I feel terrible amounts of guilt. It’s not that my brain is lacking in ideas, it’s that the pain is overwhelming and when you physically cannot do something, the creative process has to take a break.

I stay in bed when I have to, merely to rest, but I’ve been here for almost four months and I have absolutely no social life to speak of. I do nothing fun. 😦 That’s got to change, ASAP! I’m starting to feel like OGK’s vet’s office is my second home. I am by no means ungrateful or unappreciative, I simply need a reminder that I am young and have a life to live. It’s hard doing that when you spend five days a week talking to cats for 8-10 hours, and harder still when the weekends come and you find yourself sick (my migraines have been brutal), or unable to form complete sentences without sounding like a lunatic.

For anyone who thinks that Fibromyalgia doesn’t affect the brain in some way; you’d be wrong. I am normally sharp, quick-witted, loquacious, intelligent, and direct to the point where it makes people squirm, but lately I cannot handle conversations that require a great deal of thought, and I absolutely cannot deal with stressful shit. I’m already on the high-end of having no patience, but I am currently so frayed at the ends that there’s damn near nothing left. To add insult to injury, I fell in the shower a week and a half ago. I didn’t break anything, but I expected an epic bruise. After all, I fell entirely on my left side from shoulder to knee. Surely that leaves a mark? Either I am extremely slow in the bruising phase or the aches under the skin simply didn’t warrant bruising. Who knows. It took a full week for me to be able to sleep on my left side again, and the fall sent me into a terrible flare-up. Even as I sit here now, I am in a world of pain. In that world, pain laws are changing, and not for the better.

I am disgusted at pain patients being labeled as “drug addicts” simply because many of us require the use of opioid pain medications in order to do the simplest things a healthy person can do, like walk the dog, take a shower, take out the trash, grocery shop, etc. When I was healthy, I walked endless miles in Spring/Summer/Fall day. It never occurred to me not to walk ten miles one way and ten miles back, because I was out and doing things I wanted to do. I was an athlete. My world came crashing to halt as the early stages of Fibromyalgia began surfacing. One after another, these evil things made their way into my life, but it took years before I agreed to take pain medication. I’d worked for professional athletes and experienced firsthand what genuine addiction post-injury is like. Many of them lost their lives before age 40. I refused to go the same route over pain, though my doctors were calling certain things “injuries” and sending me to physical therapy and other useless wastes of time and co-payment money back then. It took research before I demanded to be tested for Lyme Disease and Lupus. I’d been tested for everything else, so I was convinced I had one or the other. When both tests came back negative, my doctor told me the only plausible explanation for every single thing I was experiencing was Fibromyalgia. Perhaps I’d heard the word in passing, but I’d never given it personal credence until that day, where I was unfortunately way too focused on the fact that I did not have Lupus, to ask the questions I should have. I’ll never walk out of a doctor’s office with a diagnosis again and come away with unanswered questions. I don’t care if it’s a challenge to the physician or not, it saves me from agonizing over it online, which isn’t always the best resource for someone newly diagnosed with anything, especially not during a time when the word Fibromyalgia was barely used. I think research is an excellent tool once you’ve gotten a second, third, or even fourth opinion, but don’t let it make you feel powerless as you read other people’s stories.

Pain patients are NOT addicts. I have yet to meet someone who suffers as I do, as many of us do, who did nothing but pop pills all day long. We’ve all looked at alternative forms of treatment, we’ve all tried different things in order to manage our pain, but in the grand scheme of things, we are NOT criminals for needing the medication and no one should ever make you feel as though you are. If you meet a pharmacist that refuses to fill your prescriptions, please contact the main office of whatever pharmacy you use and file a complaint against them. Also, call your state’s pharmacy board and file a formal complaint. You won’t cost him/her their job, but they WILL be sent to continuing education courses before they are allowed to return to work handling controlled substances, and in some instances, that might very well be a crucial move to save others from what you may experience.

I had to do this myself when a portion of a controlled substance I take went missing from the bottle after it had been counted and bagged. I didn’t have time to count them in the store, who does? I was encouraged, in fact, by my cousin who is a pharmacist and deals with pain patients regularly where she works, not to worry that I may have cost the pharmacist her job (she assured me that they rarely get fired for a first time offense), and that I had the right to demand the full pill amount that was not in the bottle. If it had been a pill or two, I wouldn’t have said anything, but it was nearly 60 pills missing (an enormous cut from my monthly script) and the pharmacist implied that “Maybe I’d taken them myself”. She actually said that to me. My response was “In three days?! I would have OD’d if I did something stupid like that, and we wouldn’t be having this conversation, would we?” If she’d said it to my face, she would not currently have one. I was enraged and we’re not even talking about a prescription for pain medicine.

My brother, post major open-heart surgery, was given very small prescriptions for pain medication, despite the fact that breathing, coughing, and moving around too much were excruciating. The pain has only recently stopped, but I assure you that it was not properly managed except when he was in the hospital and that knowledge sickens me. He’d never in his life experienced so much physical agony, but the first thing I was warned about in caring for him post-op was to make sure he wasn’t “becoming addicted”. I nearly laughed looking at the pill count on the prescriptions. You cannot become addicted with 40 pills, nor can you become addicted on 20. Not when it’s your fourth time in your entire life taking prescription pain medication. I looked at the hospital staff like they were all mentally disturbed. I suspect the subject, as it floats all over all forms of media, will continue to produce angry moments and thousands upon thousands of stories. Don’t hesitate to take to the written word if you aren’t treated with respect as a pain patient. But don’t get discouraged if more than one doctor doesn’t treat you as the used to moving forward. Nothing would shock me. 😦

I hope everyone is enjoying Spring and had a wonderful Ostara (or Easter). Passover is later month and while I, personally, don’t celebrate it the way I did when I was younger, I find that this year, I care more about being around family than the holiday itself. Of course, this requires energy I don’t currently possess, but perhaps Patient X will visit. He was released from the hospital on Monday, minus the Life Vest he has worn since being released in November post-surgery. I don’t know if that’s a good or bad thing (no longer wearing the Life Vest), especially since the additional surgeries he was supposed to have/need are currently off the table because he is too young. I do know that if my brother ends up dead because someone was negligent, there will be hell to pay. I might very well call one of his doctors myself and try to get some answers. My brother’s not big on words at the moment. 😦

I’m glad that my current state of insomnia finally produced something worthy of being posted.

Wishing you all a wonderful weekend!

© 2016 by Lisa Marino & Blackbird Serenity LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.