ridiculous ailments

For some reason, I stuck my finger in my immersion blender this week.

While it was on.

It was not the first time I've done that.

The first time I did that, I was still dating my ex, but we had stopped living together - a period that lasted 6 months 4 years ago. I had just finished mixing the banana stuff together for cookies, was cleaning the blade and had my thumb on the on button. I pressed the on button by mistake when my finger was in the way.

It cut through the nail, fairly deeply, though I didn't know that at first because there was a lot of fucking blood. And my brain had gone blank from the pain that was such a shock I couldn't feel it in my finger.

So what do you do when you're alone, and you're bleeding a fair amount, you have no bandages or first aid gear and you're insensible from pain?

You call your mommy.

To be fair, my mommy is a nurse. So it's like calling TeleHealth Ontario except with more maternal sympathy. Except that my brother, who is very nice but not a nurse, had my mother's phone.

"Hello?"

"Um... Mom?

"Meg? Hey! How are you?"

"Dave? Is Mom there? Why do you have her phone?"

"No she's babysitting."

"I need to talk to her. I cut my finger really badly and I don't know what to do. It's bleeding a lot."

"Hold it above your head?"

Eventually, I walked the couple blocks over to where my ex was working and used a bandaid from their first aid kit. And then I went home and slept.

I didn't lose the nail, but I did come away with a small warning scar.

++

This time felt the same. The blade hits and it doesn't really hurt, it's just this weird thunk. And then I hear myself yell - this time "I did it again!" - and then there is a sensation of extreme heat, followed swiftly by extreme cold, followed by a short period where you pull into yourself and it's purpley dark and the horizon is very flat and wide.

People keep asking me how it happened. The last time, I had a reasonable story. I wasn't paying attention and I fucked up. This time.

Yesterday morning, I got an email from that ex that I was dating but not living with regarding the interview for the article I'm writing. It was a neutral email, required a short reply, which I sent off just before getting up to clean smoothie remnants off the immersion blender.

I turned the water on, pressed my thumb into the button and ran the blades under the water. My ex in my head, I thought "Man, can you imagine if that happened again? And with all this writing to do? And the conference my work is putting on? That would fucking suck."

And then I have a vague memory of thinking "There's a bit of schmutz on the outside there, it'll come off with my nail, maybe." And like a far off sound, like someone in the back of the room under layers of white noise, there is a tiny tinny voice saying "You should put your finger in the blender."

Then there is a blank 30 seconds.

Then blood, and heat and cold and purpley dark.

I'm not entirely sure what to think about the whole thing. I mean, obviously, I did it on purpose. Or not me, not the core part that knows how to keep all my parts safe and manages generally well. But it's somewhat disturbing that the part of me that wants to step in front of moving vehicles managed to take over long enough to get an oft-used part of my body sliced up pretty good.

I'll put it down to stress and remembering; try not to lose too much trust in myself.

I could write you a post about what's going on in my front yard that's got my neighbours all curious, or about the perennials that Shelley and I bought today. But what happened when we were buying perennials is that someone dragged a fence across the pavement just a few feet away from us and I squinched up my face and said "God, what a terrible sound." and Shelley said, "Do you think you maybe have a migraine?"

And I said "No, I don't think so." And then remembered that usually when people ask me if I have a migraine, I have a migraine. So I said "Oh, maybe yes." By the time I got home, it was definitely yes. I'm home now from the Hartman's where I replenished my stock of ibuprofen and talked to the pharmacist about trading off between it and acetominophen and tried not to squinch my face up because his voice was so grating against the rest of the white noise in the store.

So. Since I'm not going to tell you about any of that, I'm going to ask you for your opnion.

I'm doing a reading on the 31st, as you all know, for which I'm hoping to have something new done. But I'll also read some of Your Weekly Dose, because I got 'em and I likes 'em. But there are quite a few, and it's always hard to pick.

How I'm going to pick this time is by the comments. A few of them, though not so many, have nice little tidbits of appreciation appended to them. If someone likes them that much, they deserve to be read.

Now's your chance to tell me what to do. Go on over to Your Weekly Dose and put a comment on the post(s) you'd like to hear me read, whether you can make it or not. Put them on as many posts as you'd like, though I'll delete any more than one per person on each post.

I'll pick a handful the night before, and I may read the comments out loud too, if I like them particularly.

I could probably have written that more succinctly. Blame it on the fact that the ibuprofen hasn't kicked in yet.

++First: What I Expected++

Not entirely true. The doctor didn't tell me to figure out what my triggers were. She said that I wasn't having a classic migraine, and that it might not actually be a migraine, but that it was certainly some sort of reasonably severe episode centred in my head, and docs really know fuck all about migraines.

Okay, so she didn't actually say that last part, but her very expressive shoulders told me what I needed to know.

Because I've been having them pretty consistently and with the same set of symptoms for about 8 years, she wasn't that worried. If I get new symptoms, I should go back. She could prescribe me something stronger, or I could just be more aggressive with the Advil and Tylenol.

For the same reason that because my father is a mechanic I start stopping about 500 metres before a red light to save the brakes, I did not ask for a brain scan. My mom works for the provincial government in homecare, working damn hard to manage health care resources responsibly.

I feel like me having a brain scan for something that's been stable for 8 years is a waste of resources. So, no scanning for me.

Also, the little bump that is in the middle of the ball of my foot? It's not a wart. Which is good, because warts totally give me the willies. What it is is a callous, from yoga, from turning from front to back and back to front in the standing postures. Yes, I know I should probably be turning on my heels. But yes, I am pretty pleased with myself nonetheless.

++Second: Kinda, Sorta++

The first 20 minute writing exercise went pretty well. Mostly in that I did it. Took the full 40 minutes to get the 20 done, but do them I did.

I expected that I would get through them, but I did not expect what came out to come out at all. No fucking wonder I've been shying away from writing. There's ugly stuff in there. If I keep doing this, I think it's going to be a hard winter.

But thanks to everyone for your nice comments, for your support. L. dropped off The Artist's Way for me yesterday. I've only just flipped through it, but man, does it ring true.

Most of the time when we are blocked in an area of our life, it is because we feel safer that way. We may not be happy, but at least we know what we are - *

That describes so much of my life, past or current: the comforting ruts of depressive episodes; staying in relationships saturated with anger and hatred because my training for those was thorough and long, my navigation skills honed razor sharp; not writing because I would rather coast on reputation than prove people wrong; not writing because I am scared of what I have in me to write about.

We know what we are, unhappy, constrained, quiet. Safely discontented. Striving towards happiness and fulfillment is terrifying: we might not make it. Probably won't make it, in fact, or only for moments. And the bitterness of that can be sharp on the tongue.

Cameron, Julia. The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. 10th Anniversary Ed. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 2002. p. 30.

Today has been quiet. No music on, just the gentle trickle of my aquarium, dulcet-toned chatting, the hum of the fridge. Up early to check on some work stuff, I went back to sleep and didn't get up again till 10. I'm still kind of tired, fuzzy around the edges. The storm cloud is still circling, but it's much higher, and landing fewer lightning spikes into my soft spots.

I'm not feeling capable of much, but I'm not feeling terrible.

Last night was an example of what your body will do to you if you do not take its warning signs seriously. Because my brain is still tired, let's just say I was in the Back House with a small gathering of friendly friends having a good time. Well, they were having a good time.

I figured I'd be okay. After all, I wasn't in pain. My head ached a little and I felt fuzzy and odd, but I didn't feel honestly ouchy.

Around 9:45, I noticed that everything had become much sharper, as if some unseen hand had painfully upped the visual contrast in the room. The darks swallowed everything in front of them, the brights were jabby stars. I'd stopped speaking many many minutes before this point, but then lost the conversation altogether. It was funny, I gather, because people were laughing.

I remember the laughing because it felt like sine waves, all with different amplitudes and frequencies. Not the smooth hills and valleys of your Grade 12 physics textbooks. Sharp, jagged, all gathered into a blithering knot on the same 3-D graph centred 4 feet away from my forehead. I couldn't see the waves. But I could sense them tearing through my time-space continuum.

It is very uncomfortable when your time-space continuum is torn.

I got up to suggest to Shelley that maybe we could serve the cake now. What I said instead was "I need to go home." Right before my face crumpled up. Shelley whisked me upstairs and lay me down on her bed in her quiet quiet room, got me some more ibuprofen, and shut the door. I touched my face to make sure that the bones hadn't actually gotten too big for my skin, even though that's very much what it felt like from the inside. My browbone, my cheekbones, my jaw, my teeth. They felt huge and spongy. I let fat tears leak out the corners of my very gently closed eyes. I moaned. Every second breath.

That's when I started hearing the dog in the closet. It was walking back and forth in there. I could hear its long nails tap tapping on the hardwood, the sound coming loud through the gap between the floor and the door. It wasn't a bad sound, not menacing, in fact it was rather comforting.

Except that I was pretty sure it wasn't real, and that was not comforting at all.

I figured it was probably just a house sound. But it didn't sound like a house sound. It sounded like a dog. A small dog, in the closet, hoping I would feel better enough soon to open the closet door and give it some pets.

That last bit was enough to get me off the bed and back to the Front House, where I probably should have stayed all along, or at least not strayed from for long. Where I don't even hear the house sounds anymore because my brain has them filed under "not important enough to register." I crawled into bed, didn't hear the dog, and giggled weirdly to myself for a little while before I fell very deeply asleep.

So yeah, I'm not so much wondering if I had a migraine anymore.

What gets me, fucks me up, makes me think I'm not having them, is the lack of anything I would describe as pain. There were only a few points last night during which I would have said "Oh oh oh, oh. That hurts." Other than that, everything was just out of whack and fun-house awful.

When Shelley was laying me down last night, when I told her I didn't understand why I was acting like this because I wasn't in pain, she said "You are in pain, chica. Your body is just processing it differently than you're used to." It is a very disconcerting and terrible feeling to be in excruciating pain and yet not able to locate the its source anywhere. It throws you off completely, makes it feel like everything is either coming apart or being interminably kneaded over into itself.

Or both, at the same time, the opposing forces held together with fine stitches of white hot, but blessedly sensible, pain.

You know what I always do when I get home? I check the mail before I go inside. Always. I always check the mail. Sometimes I check the mail before I go inside after I've already checked the mail before going inside. You never know.

What happened tonight after I did not check the mail and walked inside is that my brain had an enormous cramp.

I think that what I had yesterday was not The Eeg. I think it was a migraine.

But I don't know if it was a migraine. Once or twice a year, all this happens to me at once: I get extraordinarily irritable for no apparent reason; I mix my words up quite a lot; I feel hazy, slightly nauseous and out of sorts all over my body; I forget how to do things I know very well how to do; I get sharp pains in my brain, like a thundercloud circling circling then raining down random strikes of lightning. These symptoms are usually preceded by about two or three weeks with two or three episodes of ice-pick headaches.

Obviously, I've taken some extra-strength ibuprofen.

Though it took me twice as long to type that sentence as it should have.

Usually, at some point during all these symptoms, before I've noticed that I'm having them or at least having all of them, I think "Do I have a migraine?" and then I immediately think "No, I do not have a migraine. My vision is fine, my head doesn't hurt much. People who get real migraines get auras and terrible head pain and throw up. I feel weird, but I don't feel like really throwing up. My head would hurt more if I had a big giant killer mig- aaaaaagh! the lightning! gah! pain! pa- whew. No, it's not really a migraine."

Hint: if you ask yourself if you have a migraine, you probably have a migraine. In my experience, people who don't have migraines don't feel the need to ask themselves this question.

Hint: if your brain hurts enough to make your entire body malfunction, it will hurt enough to give you the wrong answer.

When I got home, had my giant brain cramp, realized that I hadn't checked the mail and thought about my fingers stumbling all over the keyboard today, and how I spent the day feeling like I was about to explode over nothing, my poor ol' brain 'fessed up: "Yes, yes I do."

But okay, really, my question: do other people experience this set of symptoms? If you do, what do you call it? Is it really a migraine, or am I just being overly dramatic?

The period between finding out about my low low iron and the supplements kicking in was something else. Everyone gets the regular tired, and I tend to be on the tired side of normal. This was weird tired though, tired like after I had mono tired, tired like I weighed 103 tired.

You, not being me, don't know how I felt during either of those periods. I've been trying to figure out a way of describing it, but am at a loss.

This is the best I've been able to come up with: that I felt wrapped in layers of tissue-thin lead.

Shelley's verdict? "You were catatonic!"

I'd forgotten what energy felt like. I was making myself do everything. And yknow, I'm pretty okay with making myself do stuff. Most of the time, I don't actually want to run or go to yoga. Honestly, I'd be pretty happy spending most of my days organizing and reorganizing various things around my house and the internet.

I make myself do other things though, because I know that Future Megan will be happy they happened. I don't actually want to do dishes or sweep up cat hair or clean the bathroom or make myself nutritious meals. I still do it though, because that Future Megan is one demanding bitch.

However, it's one thing to make yourself go for a run, do the dishes. It's another thing when you're making yourself keep your eyes open. On a daily basis.

I'm still adjusting to the fact that I was quite sick, albeit in a creeping, inconspicuous, high-functioning way. I wouldn't say I'm necessarily all better - I'm still oddly short of breath when I feel like I shouldn't be, where I wouldn't have been a few of months ago - but man, a week and a half on iron, and I'm having actual bursts of energy.

It's kind of like a ghost limb reappearing. Like I was wearing leaden gloves, pretending I had hands, and now my real hands have grown back.

Shelley read my Quiet Times post just before we were to head out to the dress up birthday party. She called me.

"Are you okay to go? You sound so tired. Are you sure? It's fine if you don't. Have you been taking your iron?"

She'd asked me that a couple of times before, that last question, and rightly so, because I have been quiet and tired for a little while. Mostly putting it down to moving. And not getting enough sleep, which I don't, which is bad for both my brain and my skin, but I don't seem to be able to fit in all the things and people I want to see and do and get 8 hours of sleep besides.

I was convinced it wasn't the iron. See, after my bloodwork in July, you might remember that the doctor's office called me to say my iron was slightly low and I should get it tested again. I did. They didn't call back. I assumed it was fine, and went about my business, albeit in an increasingly slow fashion.

Today I walked into the doctor's office, sat down. My doctor looked at my file and said "Ah, you're here about your iron."

Wha?

"Um, no. The second test wasn't fine? "

She was visibly shocked. "It was lower than the first test. It was 8, your first test was 17."

"What's it supposed to be?"

"40."

Oh.

Luckily, this is a problem easily fixed. I'll take iron pills for 6 months and get re-tested. Apparently, the iron kicks in after a few days and your pep will start pepping once more.

Today, now that I know I'm tired because of the iron, now that I know it'll be better in a few days, that it's not something I have to live with, well, fucking hell, I'm feeling twice as worn as I'd normally be this time of day. It's made me realize how much tired I've been powering through and pushing aside because I just didn't know I had the choice.

Don't get your chocha waxed, for the first time, the day before your far flung lover comes to town. An angry red poon is not sexier than a hairy one, Q.E.D.

That's what she said to me, my new doctor, after she'd poked around in my throat and ears and nose with various instruments and lighted probes.

She stood back a couple feet and gave me a once over. "I'm just not seeing anything. I know we don't know each other or anything, but you look viral to me. I feel like if I met you when you were feeling better, you're eyes would be brighter than this."

"Yeah," I said. "I don't feel so hot."

"Yeah, you don't look-" she said. And then turned a little red and laughed. She's really quite lovely, so I smiled.

And came home and napped.

Today I'm feeling much better. Better enough that I'm going to go to a Canada Day Brunch, better enough that I *will* make and drink the mango sangria on the front porch with Jennifer, as I have been looking forward to doing for about 5 days now, even though I know it isn't good for me. Better enough to bike to our first delivery of vegetables from the Santa Farmer. Better enough that I'm going to go see my friends' band play in their own living room early this eve.

Not so much better that there won't be a big nap somewhere in there, and it's a pretty safe bet that I'll be appreciating the fireworks aurally, from the comfort of my bed.

It's 2:35 am. I woke up about an hour ago in excruciating pain.

Now that it's subsided a bit and I seem to be finished crying, now that I'm off the phone with a brusque but reasonable nurse from Telehealth Ontario, who told me, among other things, that I didn't need to go to the emergency room, but that I needed to see my doctor tomorrow morning, now that I'm waiting for the magic blue pills to sweep their gelcap love through me, I am distracting myself from crying, from shaking my head to try to loosen the barnacle of pain on it, by writing to you.

Here's a question that stresses me out: On a scale of 1 to 10, how painful is it?

Is 10 the most pain I've ever been in? Or the most pain I can imagine? Because I've been pretty lucky and have an active imagination, so there's a pretty wide gap between the two.

I split the difference and said 7.