Tag: physical health

I Got A Dog

Bones

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As the COVID lockdown loomed, I sped out into the back country of New Zealand to one of the largest sheep and beef stations in the North Island.  There, I was met by a woman and a dog.  A dog named Flash.

A dog who will, hopefully, become my “helper dog”.

I call him my “helper dog”, because here in New Zealand we have very strict legislation about what can be classified an Assistance or Service Dog.  Despite the training he will receive, he cannot be classified as an Assistnace Dog until one of the named charities certifies him.  There is one named charity that certifies owner trained dogs, and they are not taking new applicants at this time.

But that’s okay.  I don’t need him certified for him to help me around the home, or at work, or on the farm.  I just need him to be gentle, willing, and trainable.

After two days with him I can confirm he has all of that, in absolute spades.  He is a collie cross, a purpose bred heading dog, bred to stare at sheep until they move.  He just … didn’t do sheep.  At all.  So at the grand age of one, he was fired from basic training, and passed over to me.

It’s early days yet, but I am cautiously optimistic that he will fit in with the rest of my hairy horde and complement our lives.

Fibromyalgia, Stress, and Exhaustion

Bones

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I had some news on Wednesday that reminded me of my beloved pets’ health, the fact that they are old, with many of the associated diseases, and had a realisation about their mortality.

You don’t think about it that often.  Or at least I don’t.  I’ve had one of my cats since he was barely a month old, and my other since she was 2.  I’ve had my dog since she was 6 months.  My derpy boy is now 13, my girly cat 15, and my pupper coming up to 6 years old.  They’re starting to get into their ‘geriatric’ years.  Both of my cats have geriatric diseases – hyperthyroidism and renal failure (to differing levels) – and my girly cat has other serious problems with her back and legs.

It hit me like a Volvo truck to the face.  They’re old.  They’re going to die.  If I’m lucky I’ll get another 3-6 years out of any of them.  But sometime soon they are going to die, and I’m not ready for that.  I’m not ready for my babies, who I’ve had since they were so young, to be old.

So I did what all people do when they’re faced with mortality: I had a meltdown.  I sobbed.  I curled up and rocked for a bit.  Then I sat and put on high quality distractions so I could just exist as a brainless blob for the rest of the day.  By the time I was due to go to sleep, I was already aching.

The next day, yesterday, was agonising.  The stress kicked off a flare.  All my joints were stiff and muscles burned.  My head was foggy.  I could hardly see straight, let alone keep my eyes open.  After a few hours of fighting the fatigue, I curled up on the couch and slept for 5 hours.  I was still incredibly dizzy and exhausted, so I continued my blob.  I slept like the dead.

Well today I’m still overly fatigued and my entire body feels heavy.  Even typing is hard today, and I strongly suspect another nap is in order, despite the long sleep I had last night.  My joints are still stiff and achy, especially my knees and hips.  My motivation levels have completely bottomed out.  My ability to do even easy things, like play a game, is completely nonexistent.

And the only thing I can do is ride it out.  I’ve had to put on hold all the things I needed to get done because I just can’t.  Some of them involve driving for hours and heavy digging, which I can do on a good day, but holy hells bells I can’t do when I’m like this.

When this kind of thing happens you can either fight it or relax into it and embrace it.  I’m still working on the relaxing into it, I really have to force myself.  But it’s better to relax into it than to try and fight it!

The Importance Of The Outside

Bones

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I moved house three months ago.  Well, I should say, we moved house three months ago.  We moved from a small, 70s built house with a very small lawn (2x3m, with a 1.5x10m run down the side) into a large, 60s built house with retrofitted double glazing, a catio (a patio that’s fully enclosed to allow cats outside time without them being free-roaming), three lawns, multiple edged and established (but overrun and very confused) gardens, a rose bush taller than the house, and two raised garden beds fenced off down the back.  We have apples and pears, an olive tree (I still don’t get this one), so many magnolias of different colours, roses popping up out of trees, and a loquot.  We also have a fig tree stump with a lone fig stubbornly growing on it.  Oh, and a grape vine!

This garden is a mishmash of things and it is very overgrown with ivy and jasmine and weeds and I have never gardened before in my life.  The closest thing I had to a garden before now is my small collection of succulents who, despite all neglect from me, have continued to survive.

Now I have an established and overrun garden to manage.  And I never knew how much I needed it until I had it.

I grew up in a large, old, draughty villa with a 1/4 acre section and a veggie patch.  There were trees I would scale all the way up until I was too “cool” to do so (around aged 15-16, I was a slow bloomer), a cinderblock I would use to contain any fires I lit just because I could, and an overgrown section down the back end of the garden that I could hack at with my trusty home made wooden samurai sword (whittled out of a branch courtesy of one of my friends).

My holidays were spent at the beach.  We had a small, lockwood holiday home within 5 minutes walk of a quiet beach.  There was no TV, no dialup internet or world wide web (in fact, some of this took place before those days!), and mobile phones were still a pipe dream.  We had to make our own fun.

What I’m trying to express here is that I grew up in and around nature in every part of my life.  I was a hippy child, a wild child – give me some rocks and I’d scramble up them faster than you could say “that’s a big rock”, and I would try to climb every tree.  Most of the time I was even successful.

As I got older I withdrew from the outside more and more, finding solace for my teenage angst on the internet and the people there.  I had an Angelfire Page – actually I probably had about five.  I was onboard when MySpace first came out, and Live Journal.  I was on Yahoo Groups and DeviantArt.

I stopped going to the beach for the holidays.  I stopped going outside.

I moved into a tiny little cupboard of a room in an awful little apartment with only concrete and horrifically overgrown “gardens” to speak of.  Then into a house with a single tree and a lawn you couldn’t even swing a cat in.  Next up was a house with a bush back section and a small raised lawn, then apartments.  I became “modernised”.

That little wild child who lit fires in the garden and ran on the beach and screamed into the wind because it was fun just … withered.  And died.

Looking back knowing what I know now, I suspect a lot of that was to do with my fibromyalgia, the incredible stress of working full time in a highly demanding job, and the stress and anxiety of being with a narcissist.

Regardless, I neglected an important part of me, that little hippy girl, and it took moving to this house to realise it.

She’s slowly coming back, that dirt grubber, with every step I take on soil without shoes and every weed I pull out without gloves.  With every time I sit in front of the open doors to the catio and breathe in the fresh country air and admire the green that creeps everywhere.

She is slowly coming back, and with her, I become more grounded.  More robust and at peace with my life.

The importance of the outside is, to me, immeasurable.

Deep Tissue Massage for Fibromyalgia

Bones

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My acupuncturist had a family emergency last month which meant he was off for about three weeks.  During that time I had some fairly considerable trigeminal neuralgia flareups and, in a pain induced panic, decided I must see someone … just not someone with needles.

I looked around online for massage therapists near me and stumbled across this one particular one that had good reviews and wasn’t overly expensive.  I got an appointment for the next day and went in, hoping some massage would ease the fire in my face.

It didn’t.  Oh boy did it not.  What it did do, however, was loosen some knots that haven’t been released in decades, knots my shiatsu massager just would never be able to reach.

Now I’m not talking about your normal relaxation massage where you go in and they kneed you for an hour.  No, I’m talking about the massage where the therapist actively finds the painful spots and then digs her thumbs into them for an hour.  It’s painful.  I make some truly spectacular noises and groans of “oh god” while she’s doing this.  It’s amazing.

I left feeling battered and bruised and nauseated, like I always do with any body work that releases tension, but after a few days I felt revivified!  I went back the next week.

This time she discovered even more knots.  See, now that she’d begun relaxing the superficial layer, she was able to find the deep knots, the ones that cause problems.  The ones that haven’t seen the light of day (or rather, felt the “tender” touch of a massage therapist) for decades, nay, eons!  Well after this session I felt so light headed and dizzy I couldn’t quite function for the rest of the day, or the next three days after that.  She’d knocked something loose in my back that had really done my head in.

I’ve just revisited her today and I am definitely noticing an improvement in how my body feels, despite the pain from coming off Tegretol (another blog post in and of itself!).  I’m also noticing an improvement in how my body moves, which is really rewarding.

My theory is this:  I have a lot of knots.  I have a lot of muscle tension.  I have a lot of muscle fuckery.  This will all be amplified by fibromyalgia, causing me both excessive pain, and excessive stiffness.  If I can work out these knots, release this tension, and improve my muscle health through deep tissue massage and gentle exercise, this will reduce the level of pain I will experience from fibromyalgia, because there is less muscle pathology.

So far I think it’s working?  It’s a bit hard to tell, what with exams, the stress of losing a friend, and coming off Tegretol.  To be honest I’m just throwing everything I can think of at my fibromyalgia and trigeminal neuralgia and hoping something sticks, so identifying exactly what is having exactly how much of a positive impact is going to be a bit tricky.  Here’s hoping the deep tissue massage sticks!

Either way, it’s making me feel better, and that’s the most important thing right now.

This Is My Life Currently

Bones

christopher-windus-ys_PVhkEC6c-unsplashThe alarm goes off.  I groan, hit snooze, and roll over to steal some warmth from my amazing human who also doubles as a walking space heater.  The snooze alarm goes off and I whinge some more and convince myself I’m only going in for a little cuddle.  Several minutes later I get a nudge awake and I roll myself out of bed.  I stand up.

And promptly tilt over into the dresser.

That’s fine, there’s only a few centimetres between where I stand and the dresser, I’m not hurt in the least.  I stand myself back upright and lean on the bed as I grab my pants, put them on carefully one leg at a time (I’m also deeply inflexible first thing in the morning, so this is sometimes quite difficult), put my jumper and slippers on, and totter out.

My right eye is just a blur, like I’m not wearing my glasses.  My left eye works fine.

I stumble and list several more times on my way to the kitchen, but I manage to catch myself each time, usually with my feet, sometimes with my hands on a wall.  The cats yell at me to feed them.  Kettle goes on first, dog loses her shit because I’m up and that means breakfast, and the cats continue to yell at me.  They all have me whipped.

I continue to teeter my way around the house, feeding the various beasts, making my coffee, my amazing human’s coffee, my breakfast, until at last I can sit down and not expend additional energy catching myself as I start to tip sideways.  I subconsciously plan my routes to ensure I have either something structurally sound I can catch myself on, or something soft I can fall on, as much as possible.  I’m glad my floofy creature (cat, she rules our lives, and she knows it and loves it) is more interested in floofing in front of me – tail up and elegantly tipped to one side, glancing over her shoulder as she chirrups to make sure I’m following her – rather than doing a surprise floof directly in front of / under / between my feet as I’m walking.

By the time I’m seated with my breakfast and coffee my right eye is back to normal, if feeling uncomfortable (I’ve been to the optometrist who says it’s all beautiful and fine), and I spend my mornings relaxing and waiting for my body to stabilise a bit more.

Throughout all of this my jaw burns.  Well, not so much burns, as feels like it’s being eaten away.  It’s a diffuse ache with no distinct boundaries but a tapering off around a central pain.  Sometimes it’ll crawl down my mandible and into my chin.  Sometimes I’ll have flashes of sharp pain across the roots of my maxillary teeth.  More often than not I’ll have a frozen burning patch along the side of my nose.

I’ll browse through Facebook on my laptop.  My fingers will lightly spasm as I go through, so I have to make sure the mouse is off to the side of the screen so I don’t accidentally click on something.

After a little while I’ll get up, wind my way to a shower, and get on with my day.  I will have difficulty recalling things I did moments ago.  I will stumble over words.  My brain will supply me with an alternate word for the one I’m wanting, and I will have to logically work my way through an number of other words before I get to the correct one.  I will sometimes have intention tremors.

If I’m lucky, the wobbliness will be done by 10am.  Other times it lasts all day, and I will have to rely on my cane for balance.

I don’t know how much of this is the Tegretol or if this is an increasing severity of whatever is causing my trigeminal neuralgia.  Hopefully I will find out soon!