I forgot to mention in my last post that, the night I took the larger dose of Tizanidine, I woke up sitting naked on the kitchen floor, panting and wild-eyed in terror with no idea what was going on. My husband and dogs were standing around me wondering if I was okay. I had pulled off my Zeo headband and my cpap mask and still had the tape on my mouth (that I use to stop the cpap air from escaping). I have been sleeping in our basement room and I had managed to get out of bed, open the bedroom door, go up the stairs, open the basement door and make it to the kitchen before I woke up. I know I had a horrific nightmare ~ demons whispering in my ears etc. ~ but it has been a long time since I walked that far while still asleep (I used to do it quite a bit as a kid). The experience kind of turned me off Tizanidine. Melatonin also exacerbates my nightmares, but I still take it. I’ve taken 1/2 of a Unisom (12.5mg) the last 2 nights and slept much better, but today I am very, very groggy, so I’m going try Trazodone again. Keep your fingers crossed for me!
Tag Archives: dogs
The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.
There were definitely repercussions from my trip around the cemetery with my pup. We managed to get back there two more times during the week we had the scooter, but the effects ~ good and bad ~ started as soon as we got home that first day.
The Good:
He is a different dog. Just like that. Even my husband commented on the change. He is not completely back to his normal, carefree, waggy self, but he was immediately happier and calmer. He really just needed to see me happy and out and about to know that things are okay. Over the next few days, he spent hours in the back garden with me, lounging in the sun. He would come close to me, say hello, and then find a shady spot. Every time he got up, I expected him to have reached his limit, had the anxiety kick in, and be headed inside, but he didn’t! He would just move from sun spot to shade like the good old days. For those regular readers, you know this is a big deal. He hasn’t really come outside with me since I accidentally hit him in the eye with a tennis ball. He was already stressed by my illness but that incident put him on a different level of depression. Now, he isn’t lying on the couch, staring at the wall as much. He is more interested in what I am doing. He’s playing little games with me again, like trying to catch my hand when I do “here comes the mousey”. đŸ™‚ He even followed me when I drove the scooter around our garden!
Just like I underestimated the effect my phone screen was having on my sleep and my constipation was having on my overall well being, I had underestimated how blue Bowie’s blueness made me. Since our outing, I have had a woeful week symptom-wise (stay tuned) and my mood hasn’t dipped at all. I haven’t felt happiness, relief and hope like this in as long as I can remember. I have to work as hard as possible to not only get better, but remain positive because we can all bounce back from this. Bowie has shown me that.
The Bad:
He’s a different dog. I’m not the only one who has deconditioned. He does not gallop anymore. He runs in short bursts, looking stiff and out of breath. It seems as if he has aged 5 years this year.
And then there is my body. I woke up the next day feeling like I had been on a rollercoaster. It was very obviously from the jostling of the scooter. My spine hurt from my tailbone up to my skull, my neck was killing me and my head hurt badly ~ a headache that felt like a direct result of neck strain and my brain hitting the inside of my cranium. The pavement around the cemetery was pretty smooth… I thought. It never occurred to me that my body would be so rattled. I wound up taking Tinazidine to help and you know how bad it has to be for me to take a drug.
The Ugly:
Who knows the exact reason, but, after the walk with my dog and taking Tizanidine, my sleep disappeared. I mean, GONE. I went from 7-9 broken, unrefreshing hours to 2-3 broken hours. Here’s a look at a few of my Zeo sleep graphs:
2:45am to 10:45am
3:45am to 10:45am
11pm to 6:15am
Melatonin, valerian, magnesium, Tylenol did nothing. More Tizanidine did nothing. My usual dose of Unisom (1/4 pill) did nothing. I finally tried Trazodone! Nothing. Panic. I laid low, didn’t expend any energy, waited for the horrific crash… After the first night, I was in very bad shape ~ stiffness, muscle and bone pain, breathing difficulty, dizziness, higher heart rate, flu-ish ~ but, oddly, as the insomnia streak continued, my symptoms didn’t get worse. I was laughing at tv yesterday, thinking, Why don’t I feel worse?? I stopped all supplements and, last night, I took 1/2 a Unisom pill (double dose!) and didn’t wear the cpap. And slept 8 hours. Oh, thank god. I worry about not wearing the cpap and I certainly needed more than 8 hours, but I am very, very grateful this morning.
Last night. An hour straight of deep sleep! Zzzzz…
Oh, Happiness is Happening
After the exhausting week that I visited the Good Doctor and had my traumatic trip to the massage, I emailed my family and close friends and said that I wasn’t going to talk on the phone or skype for a few weeks in order to rest up for and recover from my father’s visit. I cancelled all appointments, also. It wound up being 18 days with no human interaction other than my husband and the 4 days with my father and sister here. After such a long quiet spell, I didn’t feel any better physically, unfortunately, but it was freeing to not have to go to counseling or a doctor or physical therapy… the incessant quest for healing is quite exhausting.
During that time, I put away the heavy ME/CFS books and inhaled David Sedaris’s “When You Are Engulfed in Flames” like it was fresh, mountain air (note to people with ME: he writes in short, easy to digest, hilarious vignettes ~ highly recommended for our brains). I injected some music into my daily rotation of meditations, visualizations, brain wave CDs etc. One day, I listened to every Radiohead album in chronological order (bar the very first and the most recent, neither of which I own).
Those schedule-less days helped me prioritize pleasurable activities (reading) over obligations (appointments), which is a very hard thing to do. After the necessities (getting dressed, brushing teeth, putting on sun creme, preparing food, walking up and down stairs to the toilet, a few emails or bills), there is very limited extra energy and it is hard to put it towards a happy activity when the kitchen is a mess and you’ve no clean clothes. I even see my rest times and meditations as obligations. They can be pleasurable, but who wouldn’t rather be chatting with friends, watching a good film or even blogging? For a long time, I had one phone conversation planned a day, but it was too much. Although talking on the phone is pleasurable, it usually precludes all other activities, so I had to reassess. I want so desperately to be a good friend ~ to have some sort of interaction with people that goes beyond their reading about my illness on the internet ~ and I wonder, if I go dark, will I still be welcome back one day?
During this period of reassessment-of-activities, I read Jackie’s post on LethargicSmiles. She articulated this problem perfectly. Her doctor told her to do something pleasurable every day to aid recovery and healing. Jackie writes, “It feels wrong to ask someone to come do my laundry when I was able to go to a park for awhile that day…” I’m a bit more limited than she is, I think, but it’s even difficult to watch tv while your husband fetches you water, so we all have to work at feeling less guilty and asking for help more.
With this in mind, I took a leap of faith on Monday. All year I’ve pined for the days that I used to take my first-born pup, Bowie, for walks in the cemetery. It was our private, quiet time together. As you all know, he is very sensitive and has been severely affected by my ME. He is depressed and nervous and doesn’t understand why the happy pack that went to the beach and the park all the time is now indoors, stressed, sad, scared and sedentary.
Monday, I was going to skype with my Mother and then my sister was to come over in the evening. When my husband wound up taking the day off and offered to rent a mobility scooter and take us to the cemetery, I hemmed and hawed. No, I have plans tonight… I’m about to talk to my Mum… My heart rate is high today… What if the effort of it makes me worse?… We can’t afford it… And then I thought about doing things that make you happy. This would make me happier than pretty much anything else.
Our smaller dog can’t walk off-leash. If he sees a squirrel, the rest of the world doesn’t exist. He would run across highways and through rivers and over mountains and across deserts to catch a critter. And god forbid I leave him at home feeling abandoned or my husband holds him on a leash while Bowie gets to run free. Luckily, the doggy daycare is adjacent to the cemetery and charges by the quarter hour, with no reservation -and the Little Guy loves it. So, we dropped him off and my husband assembled the scooter and … Bowie and I got to go for a walk for the first time in 11 months.
Weekly scooter rental: $160
Doggy daycare: $5
“Walking” with my baby: Priceless
A Room With A View
All photos taken with my phone (and some help from Instagram) on different days in May, while lying on my meditation mat, where I spend the majority of my waking hours.
All Aboard the Brain Pain Train!
It’s been about a month since I wrote a decent update. I’ve been trying to keep my readers entertained with short posts, NY Times articles, and reblogs of others’ writing because I have been in a sorry state ~ mostly because of crippling headaches. I think I’ve said it before: bad headaches are, to me, the number one most evil and debilitating symptom of this disease. I’ve written about them before here and here and here. Don’t get me wrong, PEM is by far the most disabling and cruel aspect of ME (I will write a rant about this one day), but, it is somewhat controllable… Muscle pain can be beyond everything you’ve ever imagined… I’m sure vertigo, if bad enough, would be as incapacitating as these headaches… The complete loss of life force when your mitochondria simply can’t keep up with the energy needs of your organs is more handicapping and terrifying… But, none of those, in my experience, blot out existence like the headaches.
Not only do the headaches affect me, but my family has to tip-toe around, talking softly, closing doors carefully, opening soda cans outside, watching tv with headphones, jumping up to distract the dogs when they bark. One of my neighbours had their hardwood floors sanded and varnished during the last few weeks and I stayed inside with doors and windows closed, griping about the fumes tearing at my brain. Another neighbour seems to have purchased the loudest weed-whacker available and insists on using it on the patch of grass closest to wherever I happen to be sitting, whether it’s in the front or the back of our garden. I texted my husband (who was nearby, but I can’t yell out with this headache and I always try not to get up needlessly because of ME): “There is a $100 bill in my bag. Please, please go give it to whathisname and bribe him to stop that noise. When I get better, I’ll do his yard work for the rest of my life. Can you die from noise?” My husband reminded me that we have the loudest dog on the planet and, so far, nobody has given us any grief. So, I kept the $100 (a birthday gift) and turned my attention to being grateful I don’t live next to the airport or a nightclub or a war.
The headaches alternate between throbbing aches and all-encompassing migraines with blinding auras. They are always accompanied by extreme noise and light sensitivity and never able to be touched by medications. On a day like today, I am able to function, but, as the hours progress, I become more and more grumpy, silent, and still. My body tenses, brow furrows, and I stop being able to communicate. On middling days, I move very carefully, I can try to interact wearing earplugs and sunglasses, staying well away from phone and computer screens. And, on the worst days, I can’t leave bed, I can’t speak or see very well, I have ice packs on my neck and eyes, I pant, I sweat, I moan.
This current journey into headache hell started 22 days ago. The worst of it was a few weeks ago and caused me to stop taking all drugs and supplements in an effort to abort the pain. The multicolored, zigzag aura disappeared and the headache lifted enough to function, but, even today, it’s still a doozy. It is the first thing I noticed before opening my eyes this morning. Ugh, headache is still here.
I had quite a few theories. It started with my period, so I thought it was hormonal, but has continued too long. I started Nasonex about a week before the headache came, so I stopped that (and won’t try it again now that it is “tainted” in my mind), but I’m still suffering 2 weeks later. I thought it was from stopping Pantanase nasal spray after using it daily for a year, so I started that again. I thought it was from the new bottle of Chinese herbs (which looked and smelled vastly different from the previous bottle), but I stopped taking them for 4 days with no respite from the pain. I thought it was from overdoing it in general, so I rested a bit more ~ to no effect. I thought it was due to my chronically messed-up neck, so I used my traction device, my tens unit, tiger balm, hot pads, cold packs etc. Nothing. From sitting in the sun? No, it’s still here on cold days. From being on the computer? No, it’s still here on days that I’ve mostly avoided the computer. All the strawberries I’ve been eating lately? No, I haven’t eaten any in over a week. I refuse to believe there is no reason. I don’t want to take prophylactic migraine drugs. I just want it to go away. So I can continue to enjoy my exhausted, stiff, achy, fluey, brain-fog-filled summer days.
I have a lot of other stuff to report on, but it’ll have to wait. Apparently, it was far more important for me to get some company on this brain pain train. Thanks for joining me!
Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart 