Just Meandering

Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps, for he is the only animal
that is struck with the difference between what things are and what
they ought to be.

– William Hazlitt

Gosh, it was a beautiful day today. Bright blue October skies and crisp fall air the way only Wisconsin can make a blue sky in September and October. As I walked Igor down to the dog park late this afternoon, shuffling through the leaves that had been falling all day, I was transported back in time to another day with another dog.

The only thing that was missing was the smell of leaves burning. Well, that and Gram’s apple butter simmering on the back burner, turning into a tasty sludge that I would happily slather onto her home made bread in the winter.

My friend Kathleen and I walked Igor up to the Capitol Square tonight for the last potty run of the evening and enjoyed the relatively warm temperatures and the waning Hunter’s moon over the shoulder of Lady Forward. You could definitely see the face of the “Old Man In the Moon” tonight.

I did four loads of laundry so I definitely got my exercise in for the day. I stopped in at the chiropractor,Aaron Abplanalp,who has set up in the Metro politan Place retail space as Life City and asked if he accepted medicare and medical assistance. He does so I made an appointment. He’s awfully young but then anyone my son’s age and younger seems awfully young and my son is almost 37.

I feel a bit guilty about taking business away from the chiropractor I have been going to but this guy is just around the corner and it would be so easy to pop in to see him. So if he’s any good, I’m going to switch because I know I would get to him more regularly.

Patches is still residing on the dresser but she is getting braver about the dog. Boy if she had claws, he’s have a very sore snout! She has walloped him hard enough to hurt a couple of times so he backs off when she gets that dainty little paw into position. I wish she’d come back to bed with me. I miss the nightly interaction we had with her massage and the purring.

B

Fickle Weather In Wisconsin

I should be in bed but I took a 3 hour nap this after noon and I sort of doubt I will be able to get to sleep. Especially since I drank 2 coups of coffee. <derr>

I was in so much pain when I woke up this afternoon I could not believe it. <Ouch omigawd Ouch> I finally got up and took a skelaxin. I don’t like to take those if I don’t have to. They aren’t addictive perse but as with any medication you can become dependent on them and tolerant to their effects. I don’t want to use up my tolerance factors. :^/

I turned on the radio and found out why I hurt so bad. I meant to go to ZuZus for open mic this evening but there was a tornado watch. In October! That’s awfully late in the year.

That means the barometric pressure was either high or low. I forget which way the mercury runs when a storm system is coming through. I think it’s high but won’t swear to it. Whichever it is, it has a tendency to give people with rheumatological disorders conniptions. All their connective tissues start swelling up and aching. I wish I had a cigarette.

Since I don’t know how the dog would react during a storm I decided I better stay home. Damnit. It would not be good to go off and have a bad storm hit and the dog get scared out of his wits and make a mess. There was no storm, the dog didn’t get scared and he didn’t make a mess. However, Patches has thrown up every time she has eaten since Monday night.

She has come out from under the desk though. She is sitting on the dresser watching the dog watching her. He wants to play. She wants him to get off of her bed and vacate the premises. They are adjusting to each other. I like having a dog.

The Vet recommended a Gentle Leader Headcollar to help train him to walk at a heel and keep control of him on busy city streets. Pure magic! It was an instant success. He is walking at a heel now and not pulling my arm out of the socket. He doesn’t like it because it takes the control away from him but we’re both much safer with it.

I think tomorrow I will have to pull the alpha dog bit on him because he has settled down and started trying to run the show. Not in a totally obnoxious way just sort of being obstinate and rebelling when he doesn’t want to do something. He’s not very treat motivated either.

I hope the tornado watch means that a warm front has moved in.  I would like very much to take Igor and go for a walk along the lake tomorrow–up towards Picnic point.

B

Of All These Things, to This One Be True: Be Responisve to Change

 It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.

Charles Darwin (1809 – 1882)

I’m an atheist.  I don’t believe there is any great cosmic reason for being here.  Life is all about living, procreating and dieing.  What is love but the ultimate drive to survie in the hearts and minds of the generations you leave behind?

What do you do when Darwin’s prime directive leaves you staring at yourself in the funhouse mirror?  Let me make myself perfectly clear, I am a firm believer in the pricipal of survival of the fittest.  It makes perfect sense.  I think  that the weak and unviable should die out.

In fact, I’ve even gone so far as to declare that those who know that they have genetic weaknesses should take themselves out of the genetic pool.  I can make that kind of declaration because I am such a person.  Unfortuantely, I didn’t know that until I had already reproduced but I have advised my children that given the genetic cesspool that we sprig from, it would be better if they did not produce anymore than the one grandson I already have.

I  didn’t come to that conclusion easily or logically, frankly.   I want a whole herd of grandchildren.  I would love nothing more than to see a reproduction of my duaghter’s funny little face gazing up at me in rapt adoration.   She has been such a wonderful mother to my grandson that I would love to watch her with the little girl she is longing for.  Not that there are any guarantees she would get a little girl but heck, we  another  little boy would be grand too.  Don’t even get me started on how much I would enjoy seeing what kind of babies my son would make.

I can think of all kinds of reasons why they should have children. Physical beauty–my gawd my gr-son is a handsome child if I do say so myself.  If my daughter had a daughter and she looked anything like her mother combined with her father’s genetic good looks–ooo lala!  My son was a beautiful child himself and I’m sure he would have equally beautiful children.

Then there are the brains. May I just say that there are some heavy duty brains in my family tree and leave it at that? Musical talents. Artistic abilities.  Any potential grandchild of mine would be in the running for inheriting  the potential for a great many gifts.  Plus parents who are motivated to cultivating those gifts.  They would be cherished and loved and nutured as much as any middle class child in these United States of America can be expected to be.

But these auto immune disorders can not be ignored. They can’t. It is not fair to saddle a child with them. Had my family talked about them when I was growing up, I might not have had my children. I’m hoping the new strides they are making in genetic research will make a difference in my childrens’ lives but we can’t count on that.

Survival of the fittest. If my husband and I had spawned a bunch of kids (unlikely since I had probelms carrying a pregnancy to term) but say I hadn’t given up after two children and had had five or six which I would have liked to have had. Maybe three of them would have inherited this disorder. The others would have been OK. They’d go on and produce kids that are OK. But the two or three that have the disorder have a 50/50 chance of passing it on.

I think my son has it. I’m pretty sure he does although he won’t go get tested. He’s gone to Egypt about the whole thing. De Nile is so very wide and long.  He won’t talk about it when I tell him that his chronic fatigue is worrisome or that the fact that he is losing weight should not be dismissed or that the fact that he is cold all the time is all to familiar.  He doesn’t want to know.

Well, what is there to know?  If I can’t get a “real” diagnosis then he won’t get one either.  All he will know is that he has elevated anti-nuclear antibodies which mean that he has an auto immune disorder like the rest of the family who have mysterious maladies.  He’ll know he has Bi-Polar mood disorder.  He’ll know that he’s his mother’s and  father’s son whose families both have auto immune disorders.  Maybe he’ll curse us both for having come together and procreated him.  Maybe he will be grateful for life because life is good no matter how painful.
B

Living In the Here and Now with Gratitude

Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace and gratitude.

Denis Waitley

What you are about to read may not sound as if it is about gratitude at first because I bitch a lot but really, it is. I get there eventually. Honest.

I’m cleaning my bathroom. Really, I’m taking a rest from cleaning my bathroom. sigh… I can’t clean the whole damn thing without tuckering out anymore. I have to sit down and take a break. It used to be a cigarette break but I don’t smoke anymore so I can’t blame it on that anymore.

I’m just too damn tuckered out to stay with it. This sucks.To be fair to myself I did go over to the southside to see Harry today which meant a long bus trip both ways and then when I got back downtown I went to the Community Pharmacy (my goodness, a whole month has gone by already!) and while I was waiting for my order to be filled I wandered down State Street to Steep and Brew in the hopes I would meet up with someone I met recently. That didn’t pan out but I did meet up with the person who introduced us and I asked him to pass the message on to her that I was very much interested in seeing her again. He will. He’s good people.

All of that meant a very big tiring day. For me. For normal people that probably sounds like not all that much. No big deal A hassle maybe with the bus-ride down to the coliseum but not really much of anything to exhaust you the way it exhausted me. :^|

My get up and go got up and went somewhere in the mid 90’s and it never came back. I can actually pinpoint the approximate time it left. My son had a severe car accident in Oshkosh in 1996 around 9PM on a cold February night shortly after his 25th birthday and by the time I got hold of his sister and girlfriend and we got on the road it was nearly midnight.

We got there just in time to greet him when he came out of surgery. We stayed up all night with him trying to keep him calm and steady as he suffered through the pain of losing his spleen and a head injury that made him kind of goofy. For the next week and a half I used up my vacation time running up to Oshkosh every other day and spending the night and getting up at gawd-awful hours to get to work on time while the girls took the other days.

Basically I wasn’t sleeping much at all which is not a good thing for someone who is Bi-Polar. We can do it. Oh yes indeedy, we can. We feed off of lack of sleep. The less we get, the more hyper we get. Eventually we start running on fumes, believing we are super heroes who can do anything and have to be shot down by family and friends and dragged off to the hospital to bring us down to earth or we collapse in a heap of sodden dross like I did.

I caught a cold that turned into bronchitis that wouldn’t go away. It took three weeks to recover from that and then when I went back to work I would be there a day or two and get sick again. This went on for two months before the doctor recommended I take a leave of absence and just rest until I felt like my old self. I never got well enough to work full time again. I’ve never felt like my old self again. I came to the sad realization that I never will some time ago.

My Doctors (boy you wouldn’t believe the specialists I’ve seen) discovered my anti-nuclear antibodies are elevated which probably means I have some sort of auto immune disorder. It hasn’t been diagnosed yet because auto immune disorders are extremely difficult to pin down. I’ve since discovered that there are many many people on both sides of my family who have auto immune disorders and on my father’s side with which I seem to have the most similar symptoms in common the various doctors who are treating these people all disagree about what is going on.

What they do agree with is that I have the symptoms of chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, arthralgia (similar to arthritis) and neuropathy. I also have something going on neurologically but they aren’t sure what so there isn’t a name for it but I have vertigo aometimes not all the time. I fall a lot. I have some short term and long term memory problems with language. It’s not really aphasia because I don’t have a lesion but at times I just can not say or write a word I want. It’s there but I can’t get it out. Maybe it’s early onset Alzheimers. Ugh… I was being treated for suspected Lupus of the central nervous system for five years, including a low dose of chemotherapy for more than two years but Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN does not believe I have Lupus which is a relief because Lupus is one nasty disease. I’m going with their opinion simply because the other option was so depressing.

At any-rate, eventually I had to give up and accept that I would probably not be able to work at all. Not only that, I had to give up driving my car and my moped. I had to get used to the fact that instead of being able to function on 5 hours of sleep a night I needed at least eight and sometimes ten AND a two hour nap in the afternoon if I was going to stay out of the doctors office with minor ailments.

I was only 44 years old when this all began and this was not what I had envisioned my middle-age would be like. AT first I thought the Doctors would figure out what was wrong and the miracles of modern medicine would fix me right up. WRONG.

I had just moved in with the man of my dreams a few days after Christmas just before my son had his accident. Our whole lifestyle was meant to be built around the outdoors and playing golf, swimming in his in-ground pool, riding in his T-top convertibles, taking care of the landscaping on the ten acres he owned and gardening and they tell me I probably have Lupus and can’t be in the sun? WTF?

It still took a full year for that to fully sink in and take hold. I had no idea what Lupus was. Then I went to the library and got a few books. Meanwhile I started having massive headaches and couldn’t read the damn books! I found out that for the first time in my life my better than perfect eyesight was going to hell and I had to get glasses to read with. OK, I WAS middle-aged but still, on top of everything it was just another blow.

What kind of cosmic joke was this? My perfect guy’s got a five bedroom McMansion (OK it’s not all that fancy but it’s huge) that needs to be cleaned and even though he is doing half of it, I was still not up to keeping up with my half. He was understanding and all that (we’d been dating for better than a year) but you know what, I could tell he was feeling cheated and I don’t blame him. Instead of a partner to share his early retirement coming up soon, the asset he was looking for, had become a liability. NOT GOOD.

I left. He argued with me about it but not too hard.

Sometimes I still get mad about all of this. Like when I have to take a break cleaning the bathroom for gawd’s sake. I used to be able to thoroughly clean a whole house without taking a break because I was tired. That was Saturdays. On Saturday when I mopped the kitchen floor, I pulled out the refrigerator and stove and cleaned behind them. Every Saturday. I was just a little obsessive compulsive. But it bugs me that there’s a bunch of dirt lurking under there now. eeeew!

I’ve learned to accept it more because what the hell, I don’t have much choice do I? This is my life. It took me all weekend to recover from spending the 4th of July and the day after with my kids. I fried chicken for them on the 4th which is the only day all year that any of us eat fried chicken. My daughter and I fry it out on the front porch and we all giggle about being rednecks and wave at all the people driving by in their antique cars. The Gr-son and his Daddy shoot off some of their fireworks.

The next day I flew a kite with my Gr-Son in the morning and took him swimming in the afternoon. I’ll treasure that memory for a long times. I hope he does too. We had a good day. He was really good for me. My son and I went out for dinner at A&W when he brought me home and we had a good talk. I had a good time with my kids but it was exhausting. It took me all weekend to recover. I pretty much slept the whole weekend away.

I wanted more for myself than this but this is what I have and I’m grateful I have this much because it could be worse. It could be much worse. All I have to do is look around me and see how much worse it could be. Each day is a gift and I’m happy. Really, when you think about it, what is there to bitch about? I have a nice soft bed to sleep in after I get home from visiting the kids. I can walk down State Street and say hello to people I’ve known almost twenty years who don’t have families or don’t know where their families are, who are homeless and don’t have the luxuries I have. Life as I know it IS good.

B

I need a Transplant!

Today I went to see my chiropractor, Dr Ted Week at the Week Clinic on Winnebago Street. I have been going to see him or his sister, Dr Laura and a few times even his father who is now deceased for 10 years and remember his daughter as a tiny toddler following her grandfather or grandmothr around the office as they brought Xrays in and out for the younger Doctors. He told me she turned 12 today.

Laura has an office near her home in rural Verona now and I rarely ever see her anymore. I’m glad they are so successful they can support two offices but I miss Laura and the chats we used to have. She is such a sweet person with such a warm and vital personality. Not that Ted isn’t nice but I had a “connection” with Laura that I don’t have with Ted. He’s Doctor Ted and all business which is amusing really because he’s probaly not that much older than my son if he is older. I don’t think he is taking after his Dad either. His Dad liked to chat too.

At any rate, I got my spine adjusted since I had aother fall. This one was scary. I was crossing Broom Street and fell into a pothole when a car came speeding around traffic that was going the speed limit and was in no danger of colliding with me. The speeder startled me and I began to hurry to get across the street and didn’t take care to watch where I put my feet. I was out of the way of the speeder but directly in the path of a car obeying the speed limit. Had it not been for a young man who saw me fall and came to the rescue I might have been roadkill.

As it was my knees are bruised and battreed and the shoulder of the arm I kept myself from landing face first in the street with felt jammed into my neck. Everything hurt. I tried to get there Thursday but Dr Ted closes up shop at noon and I got there at 1pm . Drat it, Friday I was in far too much pain to go by bus so I waited it out until today when I had another cab ride set up. It was a long, long weekend.

I saw medical Doctor on Thursday and she has ordered me some opiates to take for emergencies like this but I dread getting addicted to those things. I know that once I start taking them it’s a slippery slope. I’d rather wait until I absolutely have to and that’s going to come soon enough.

The weather has been damne awful for someone with fibromyalgia and arthralgia symptoms lately. A new storm front moving through every 24 to 36 hours. Damn but I ache all over in so many differnt ways. I want a transplant. Could someone please direct me to the body shop? <groan>

B