ridiculous ailments

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.

So I've been re-reading Anal Pleasure & Health by Jack Morin. It's been quite a while since I last perused it, and while I remembered it being chock-a-block with great information, I'd forgotten how unintentionally funny it is.

He recommends, among other things, keeping an ass journal.

Of course, that this makes me giggle is part of the reason people get fucked up about ass play in the first place. There's no good reason that an ass journal is more inherently hilarious than a food diary. But it is, and there you go.

No ass journal for me.

What a great book though. If you're interested in anal play and shying away because of whatever, this book will go a long way towards getting you over that whatever. Compared to other books on the market, his writing is rather formal and professorial, but in the main, he just comes across like such a nice, kind, smart man.

This post, however, is not actually either about that book or ass fucking.

In one of the sections, one I scanned Friday night, he talks about the fact that many people keep their chronic tension in their ass. So I'm reading along, I've been doing some of the exercises anyway, I take a moment and communicate with my anus.

-Hi anus, you tense?
-No ma'am, we're loose as a goose down here.

Sad that I don't have an ass journal, no?

Now then, since I'm pretty sure I'm not stress free, if I'm not keeping my tension in my ass, where might it currently reside? I do a scan of typical places: shoulders, neck, jaw. Aha. Right. My brain scan is telling me it's knotted and tight, my fingers pressing the back of my ear and my along my jawline confirm this fact.

When you discover that your ass is tight, Morin writes, first you just acknowledge that it's tight. You accept it. Many people will find that once they've noticed and accepted, they'll start actually hurting, because they're finally feeling what the muscles are holding. This is the first step.

My god, those poor people.

If my ass hurt as much as my jaw does right now, I'd be frantic. Crawling the walls, in the emergency room, frantic. It fucking kills: the pain is in my throat; it's crawling tendrils up between my skull and scalp; it's a burning star 1 cm in from the corner of my right mandible, the rays shooting up and across the back of my ear.

Could maybe be something else, but my glands aren't really swollen and I don't have the brain fog that comes with a migraine. And it started about 12 hours after I read that passage and completed step one.

What does my body want to do with all this pain? Well, you guessed it. It wants to truss my jaw up tighter than Christmas fowl. I have muttered the word "relax" to myself more times in the past 2 days than I have in the past 2 years combined.

Let's hope the second step starts soon.

When it comes to food at my work, I’m the office crank. I don’t eat wheat and I don’t eat dairy, and most of what my co-workers eat is comprised of at least one, if not both, of those things. They’re very nice about about my predilections, my co-workers.

A few weeks before we left, the conference manager asked me if there was anything she could do for me. I asked her if she knew if there was going to be a fridge in our office. She didn’t know, but she would ask. “All I need,” I said, “is a place to put a carton of soy milk and some granola. Maybe some nuts and fruit. A bar fridge would solve all my problems.”

She came back a few days later. "We got your fridge!" She was triumphant.

This is what was delivered.

Mortified would not be too strong a word for what I felt.

If you look to the right, you can see that I have placed all my purchased items in the frigo: soy milk, granola, larabar, almonds. Most of them don’t really belong in the fridge, I know that, but when I placed one item on each shelf, at least half of the shelves were taken. I then took the juice provided by the conference and spread it out over the other half. It mollified me somewhat, but I still felt like an ass. A delicate flower asshole.

For a smart person, I am very stupid about some things. Iron, for instance. I am prone to low iron stores. While this definitely goes on the list of Ridiculous Ailments, it still needs treating. The Goob put me on iron supplements. A few times. The same thing always happens.

I start taking my iron. With food, like dinner.

I feel better. More alert. Less groggy. It's like a revelation.

Feeling better starts to feel normal. I stop thinking about how tired I used to be.

I start forgetting to take pills.

I stop taking my iron. With anything.

For a while, normal is still pretty alert.

I start feeling a little tired every so often. Probably not enough sleep.

I feel kind of weirdly tired every so often. It's not a didn't-get-enough-sleep tired, or a pushed-myself-too-hard-in-yoga tired. It's a tired I feel in my bones. Like a dense liquid is seeping out of them.

I feel weirdly tired sometimes.

I feel weirdly tired whenever I am not ignoring how tired I am.

I complain about being tired to one of my friends. They say are you taking your iron? And I say, no, I am not taking my iron.

Sheesh.

Today, there was going to be grocery shopping and yoga. But I started bleeding this morning, and I am crampy and hot flashy. I am bone tired, though I slept for at least 9 hours last night. The grocery shopping happened, but it's like it happened to someone else, to an old lady who had to stop moving every 5 minutes so she could catch her breath and fan herself. I decided that yoga was not going to happen.

Instead, I'm about to crawl into bed with my laptop, watch an episode or two of Freaks and Geeks, and possibly nap, or possibly just stare and the ceiling and moan.

After, that is, I take my iron.

Still with the bites on my ass. And shoulders. And calves. And forearms. Two nights ago, I had two bites so itchy that they woke me up in the middle of the night and I lay there trying not to scratch them. Doing three part breath and letting the thought of scratching them come into my head and then trying to let it go.

Eventually, matter won over mind and I gave those fuckers a good going over. Of course it didn't help in the long run. It never does. But the first moments of relief were on the orgasmic continuum.

After the scratching that didn't help for long I got up and put toothpaste on them, which is what we did with mosquito bites when I was a kid. It helped and I got back to sleep. But I woke up still itchy and not a little frustrated.

I have performed approximately one hundred internet searches in an attempt to figure out what is biting me, all to no avail. So while I cleaned up after breakfast yesterday morning, Eric poked around the interweb on my laptop, looking for more information. As far as we can tell, they're not spider bites, because bites are hardly ever spider bites. They're not bed bugs, because other than me getting a series of bites every couple weeks there is not one whit of hard bed bug evidence. It seems likely to me that after 8 or so weeks of bites, I would have not a dearth of evidence but an infestation.

We narrowed it down to some kind of mite other than scabies* to which we both may be allergic, since Eric gets the occasional bite too. It may also be urticaria, which is a fancy word for hives. Which I know I am already prone to getting, because they pop up after I pet Freya sometimes. And also sometimes on my face after I eat. They can also be caused by microscopic things that cry tiny battle cries while you sleep: slavering dust mites or mold shooting off its spores. Huzzah.

Last night I vacuumed my mattress and emptied the dehumidifier in the basement and we'll see if that stops the whatever it is.

Owing to the pet and food hives, I have already added urticaria to Megan's List of Ridiculous Ailments. If it's going to make your life uncomfortable but not kill you, there's a pretty likely chance I either have, have had, or will have it. Scratch scratch.

*I actually got nauseous when Eric explained that they live and breed under your skin. That is not something I knew about scabies. As an aside to Grace, the thought makes me want to scratch my palm with my middle finger to ward off the queasiness.

I hardly ever get sick. Don’t know if it’s the genes or the clean living or what, but it’s been over a year since I’ve had even a bad cold. The last time I had a flu was probably 4 or 5 years ago.

I am, however, the reigning queen of Ridiculous Ailments. I’ve compiled a list, and it will become an ongoing series here. Because what would you rather read about, world politics or my cysts?

This rash that had me all in a swearing fluster on Friday night? Runs in the family.

I was washing my hair after running on Saturday morning, and when I went to rinse, noticed that the rash had spread all over my arms. I had a sudden vision of my mother standing in her kitchen beside the fridge and holding her forearm out to me, pressing a thumb into the small red dots. “See, I’ve been sick,” she’s saying.

Out of the shower and onto the phone.

“So, Mom, you know that rash you get after you’ve been sick? What happens?”

“Well, it starts on my stomach, and then spreads up under my breasts and over my back and down to the tops of my legs and then when it's peaking it goes down my arms and up my neck and in behind my ears, but not much on my face.”

“Is it itchy?”

“Not so you want to scratch your skin off, but a little. Why? You have it?”

“I dunno, it sounds the same, but I haven’t been sick.”

“Okay, so press your thumb into it. Does it blanch for a second and then come back? You know, the first time I got it, I hadn’t really been sick, just fighting something off for a couple weeks.”

Check, check, check, check. I got the “Told You I Was Sick Rash.” After not even being sick.