It's been a while since I looked at the state of my body, so why not do an accounting tonight? I agree with Jeffrey Combs in The Frighteners, so I'm not going to go into old injuries. Just the current state of things. We're going to start with my bad foot, and in case you're unfamiliar, you can read this GF from a half-year ago about the cage. If you want to go further back, you can check this out.
Some of those lines are because I just took my sock off, but those dark spots and dents are going to be with me for the rest of my life. Which is OK with me because I'll still have my foot, which I was convinced I was going to lose. And here's what the bottom of it looks like:
No hole! I forget if I posted a picture of what it looked like when wound care expanded the hole after the GF I linked to above, but it was a lot bigger by then, maybe the size of a quarter. And there were two holes on the bottom of my foot. When I first got the cage taken off, I marveled at how smooth and soft the skin was, which is weird because I've had callused feet from years of walking everywhere. It was like I had new skin, which I sorta did. The dead toe is even fixed. The holes in my bone are still healing, so I'll wear the ankle brace for quite a while longer, but most of the pain from the foot is gone.
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| Photo by my podiatrist. |
(I should also mention that there was a hole on the side of my foot. When they took the cage off, it had healed, too. Now it has opened back up a little tiny bit, and it's not closing. I may need surgery to seal it up, in which case I'm going to have to go back to sponge baths for a month or so. See? It really is open just a sliver.)
Moving up to my guts, I'm glad to say that I haven't suffered my mystery illness since I lived in Joliet, where I took the picture of the cage in the first GF link above. There are times when I feel like it's coming back. A couple of weeks ago I puked--still not sure why--and I freaked out, thinking I was going to suffer it again. Joliet was bad, too. There had to be something there setting me off. I suffered it just about every day for a while there. I suspect it was sleeping on the air mattress that did it.
I am, however, backed up like crazy. I've been on opioids for years, and that is a sad but real side effect. It comes in liquid form, as we learned that it can actually stop the mystery illness if it hasn't already progressed too far. I call it my laudanum, and I'm grateful to have it. Because pain has been a constant in my life for a good long time.
Because my back is fucked the fuck up. I have bulging discs, and the spinal injections are no longer helping. I went to PT for a couple of months, and I'm still doing the exercises I learned there. It does help, but I suspect the only thing that will cure me is surgery, and I really don't want someone opening up my back. I live alone, far away from any friends or family who might otherwise help me get through recovery from such a surgery. To say nothing of the risks.
And then there's my hands. A few years back I had a form of tendonitis called trigger finger in the index on my left hand and the middle on my right hand. Surgery fixed that up, but I developed it again, this time in the middle on my left and the index on my right. I got injections for those, and they worked wonderfully. I spent a few months free of pain in my hands, and I thought I was finally done with that bullshit.
And then I bought a bookcase off Amazon. I figured it would be easy to put together. I've done it before, and I expected to do it again, but the bookcase was a piece of shit. I had screws I had to put into the base of the bookcase, screws that were supposed to hold the bottom together. Guess what: there weren't holes where the screws were supposed to be inserted. No problem, I thought, I'll make my own holes, which I did. Oddly, that was the sturdiest part of the bookcase, because as I moved along, it fell apart because the material was so shoddy, it might as well have been built of matchsticks.*
What I didn't know until the next day was that I'd fucked my hands up again. In trying to get this piece of shit to stick together, I'd given myself trigger finger all over again. In both hands. And look at that, the doctor who did the injections for me just retired, so now I have to go through the process with another doctor. I don't expect to get those injections for a few more months.
I'd actually been slowing down taking my laudanum, but now that my hands hurt again? I'm very glad I managed to squirrel a little extra away. It's not great. My fingers lock up and click all the time, and I use them a lot. I'm using them right now, in fact. While the pain is numbed reasonably well, the laudanum doesn't stop my fingers from locking in uncomfortable positions.
Moving on up my body, we come to my teeth. They've never been great, but I chipped one of my crowns in the back of my mouth, one of the two implants I have, and because it would be so expensive to fix it, I've let it go for now. Half of the crown is still there, and it's still anchored in place, but the jagged edge is doing no favors for the side of my mouth, and I have to be careful when eating, lest I chew on my beloved mucous membrane.
Which brings us to my eyes. I'm fairly certain I'm going blind. I've been warned that I'm showing signs of glaucoma, and one of my eyes is developing a neat little cataract. But my problem is with the floaters. Both eyes have giant floaters in them, which gives me a lot of trouble when I'm doing my absolute favorite thing to do on this planet: reading. I'm told there is a cure for it, but I'd have to be blindfolded for two weeks while staying in bed, face down the whole time. Again, I don't have anyone in my life right now who could help me recover like that, so that's out, too.
This and a bunch of other things have me feeling exceptionally depressed right now. It was so bad that on Monday and Tuesday this week, I blew off my to-do list. I worked (which led to its own set of frustrations), and that was it. I couldn't even pick up a book. I didn't want to do anything at all, so I sat and stared at the wall for a bit, thinking about my situation. Thinking about going down the block to the liquor store, because if I was failing this badly at life, I might as well fail all the way.
But that would have required the effort of leaving my apartment, and I was so demoralized I couldn't even do that.
That's a thing I don't like about me. When something starts going wrong, and my immediate efforts to fix it don't work, I spiral and start thinking, well shit. If I'm going to fuck this up, why not make it the biggest fuckup I can possibly make it? And then I watch in horror from somewhere in my head as I tank the fucking thing on purpose just to satisfy this wretched impulse.
I've gotten my shit together (somewhat). I finished my to-do list yesterday, and I'm almost done with today's (this is one of the three last things. After this I have to mark the day off my calendar (because I swore to myself this year I'd pay more attention to passing time), and I have to go to bed. So I'm reasonably sure I'll succeed at that. I don't recall if I've gone into it before, but if I complete my to-do list, I reward myself with putting a dollar into an enveloped marked FUN FUND. Money to be spent solely for fun purposes. Not to be used to pay bills or buy groceries, etc. I've gotten so good at it that those two days I blew off earlier this week were actually a little painful for me.
But it's evidence that I'm at least moving in the right direction. For now, that's good enough.
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*I got my money back, but they said to not bother returning it. I don't suppose anyone out there wants to come by my place in DeKalb and help me put it together . . . ?
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