Dropping the ball… and kicking it along for a bit

To cut a long story short, I wound up with insufficient medication before my next pain doc appointment, and had to cobble together my full dose by using 3 smaller-dose tablets. Periodically over the last month, I’ve been peering quizzically into my bottle and wondering if all those little pills were going to last long enough.

Late last week, I finally had few enough that I could count them. (Due to perceptual issues, looking at a lot of little identical objects makes my eyes swivel, and I can’t keep track of them, even if I pull them out a few at a time. They appear to dance and swim without any help.)

Well, I had a problem. I couldn’t parse what to do about it because I didn’t know who to ask. My pain doc had been a bit more high-handed than usual at my last appointment, so I didn’t expect sympathy there, especially as it implied his math was wrong. I knew my GP would feel understandably uncomfortable prescribing a med he didn’t know well and didn’t normally use, which was normally prescribed by a high-flying specialist in a narrow discipline. That’s a lousy position to put a GP in.

I froze.

So, regardless of the record heat and shocking floods elsewhere, New England has been cooler than usual, perpetually cloudy, with the Spring rain pattern (3 days and nights of constant rain, one and a half days of sun, a day or two of mostly clouds, 3 days and nights of constant rain, rinse and repeat.) This does tie in — really.

The reason it ties in is because summer gives me my recovery time, which involves sun and warmth and outdoor activity. 3 months of sun, warmth, and outdoor activity is what makes me strong enough to endure a New England winter.

It was so gloomy and chilly this summer, we dug up the money to go to California to recharge our bodies’ batteries. That didn’t go according to plan at all. As some of you know, I had viral meningitis from the day after we landed to 2 days before we left.

So, not much recovery, just a whole heaping helping of extra damage to recover from!

Then, of course, I had a relapse 10 days later, just in case I was getting too perky.

This summer has left me with a brain that’s just not up to par. So, rather than doing my usual thing of targeting the issue and parsing its components and figuring out what solution solves most of the elements, I … froze.

I started cutting the third of the 3 little pills in half, and taking two and a half, so I could buy a little time to think. Since that works out to my normal summertime dose, I didn’t question it much. It occurred to me, just as I’m writing this, that it has really crippled my ability to think, so that was not my usual problem-solving level of skill. Sigh.

I honestly can’t remember how I wound up on the phone with my doctor’s office on Friday. Wait, after 5 minutes’ cogitation, I do: I hadn’t heard from referrals my primary doc was supposed to have written 2 weeks before. Usually right on top of things, he had documented that he intended to make the referrals, but forgotten to enter the orders to do so.

The compassionate office lady asked how I was, and it wasn’t until then that I said, “Actually, I’m kind of in a bind,” and explained about the meds. To my complete lack of surprise, given how things have been going, it turns out my primary doc is on vacation this coming week. She left a note for whoever’s covering for him.

Since then, of course, I’ve been trying to work out whether I should call during the weekend, when coverage is even weirder and less accountable, or wait until Tuesday and the first day of business this week, and try to coherently answer the question of why I didn’t call sooner, and hope and plead to get my meds from someone who doesn’t know me and is working too hard to feel for one more sad case.

So … I’m froze.

Meanwhile, my feelings and my disease-driven propensity to worry paralyzingly, are all honed to a ridiculous edge. Once my pills get past the cannon-ball feeling in my stomach (almost past the half hour mark; 15 minutes to go) I’m going to do an hour of meditation, which I expect to roughly track the pattern of the meditation I did during the meningitis episode: 20 minutes of pure inward flail, breathing quietly while my mind and emotions just went off like a carton of firecrackers spilled on a brush fire; then, once that calmed down, my thoughts chased each other like frantic squirrels for another 20, not slowing appreciably until the last 2 or 3 minutes; then 10 minutes of one or two issues or ideas holding fairly still, allowing me to turn it over until it’s transformed into something peaceful by the pure attention; and then the rest, finally, gradually, moving into a pure and floating calm.

They say that one should meditate for an hour every day. If you don’t have the time for that, make it two hours. I hold this as a constant goal. Sadly for me, I can normally only push myself to sit down and shut up like that when things are so bad all I can think to do otherwise is scream.

I need to work on that.

This was going to be the year I learned to meditate and do t’ai chi pretty much daily, no matter what level of peace and calm there was in my life. I’m embarrassed that, even at my age, I still seem to need some chaos to let me bring enough pressure to bear on myself that I’ll do these key self-care activities at all.

Something to mull over in the contemplation stage of some meditation!