A personal catch-up post

[cleolinda]

First of all! In order to lock in better fee rates, I've gone ahead and launched a low-key tip jar Patreon; I also have a Ko-fi page for one-time tips. Once I've counted my spoons and gotten back into the swing of things, I may add other/higher tiers. Right now, it's a single $1 tier, because I'd rather be able to use my Patreon as a de facto homepage/newsletter where you can see where and what I've posted. The first thing I'm looking at is adding voice posts (short; not excruciating podcast-length), and, in fact, I may record this entry as a voice post. I think it might help to hear the "ayyy, it is what it is" tone of my voice while I discuss health setbacks. Because, believe it or not, while I am dragging my achy carcass around the house, I still feel a lot better now than I have in a long while.

 

@cleolinda: I'm trying to get back into social media and/or blogging after taking A While off due to an array of health problems; basically the Magicians post just provided an impetus. And now I'm out here like, "....................hi, so" 

 

[The social media in question is Twitter, and occasionally Tumblr.]

@cleolinda: I would like to get back to writing about pop/media culture but also I am not in a real good place to get into Controversy Thunderdome rn, so I'm looking either at older media (y'all know me, this is was always a thing I wrote about) or personal entries.

 

@cleolinda: ("Controversy is not good for me right now," she said, two days after a few thousand words of "THIS IS BAD AND YOU SHOULD FEEL BAD")

 

@cleolinda: I have always written, sincerely but also purposefully, about being bipolar/depressive in a very "hey yeah this is how my doctor and I manage it, nbd" way, but I dropped several other things in that post and am considering addressing... all that, maybe

 

@cleolinda: So now I have this giant four-dimensional tesseract of personal topics and anecdotes in my head and I have NO IDEA where to start. Maybe with the Stop Bullying Me For A Kirk Cameron Sticker I Didn't Even Want story, which 1) explains a lot 2) is kind of hilarious

 

@cleolinda: So at this point, I'm looking at (numbered lists make me feel secure) 1) a catch-up post on where my health is now (neuropathy intensifies!) 2) a brief Magicians follow-up 3) hilarious and/or harrowing personal stories (hilarrowing?)

 

 

Detail, because I know hearing about someone else's health problems is always exciting! 

 

My doctor and I increased my Lamictal and accordingly lowered my Wellbutrin! On a subsequent visit last month, we lowered my Zoloft as a further adjustment! Because I casually mentioned in the last five minutes of my visit that I was pretty sure I was hypomanic because my scalp was crawling off my head! My doctor was like "wait your what."

 

I'm doing pretty well on the lower Zoloft dosage now! I had a definite mood cycle upswing for a few weeks, but I was a lot less irritable and, uh, crawly. However, anyone who has ever been on Zoloft, a much older drug than a lot of things prescribed nowadays (twenty-one years on it! why am I using so many exclamation points!), can tell you that it's not the smoothest medication in the world. So far, I have not had any of the famous Brain Zaps... probably; I'm not sure what they feel like, exactly. I suspect that if you're not sure, you haven't. 

 

I want to add, if you read the Magicians post, that I'm all right. I mean, still baffled and infuriated, but in terms of the Raw Personal Discussion, I'm all right. I either posted that entry (as calmly and concisely as I could) in the middle of a hypomanic episode, or plunging into such an endeavor triggered one (I have observed this happening before). It's spring, it was about the right time for one, and I mostly have hypo-mania, so it was manageable and productive and pleasant. I was not in any kind of actual crisis. Really upset and pissed off due to A Thing Happening (and wanting to say how unusual for me for that), sure, but writing that whole business out — dumping it from my mental cache—made me feel a lot better afterwards. That post doesn't and wasn't intended to "fix" anything, but I hope it was at least a little helpful for people to hear they were not imagining things and they were not alone in feeling that way.

Then I promptly had a post-hypomania crash, which is why it's taken me a minute to pull this post together. I mean, it was fine, it wasn't an equal and opposite depression; I just kind of slowed to a halt like a run-down wind-up toy, if wind-up toys also liked to eat and sleep a lot. But over the last week, I've picked back up a little, started taking short walks outside, and so on.

Except, see. About that.  

As I have mentioned several times elsewhere, I had spinal surgery for a surprise herniated disc in January 2018. The companion entry just before this one has a selection of tweets from the six weeks before my surgery, and they are far more lucid than I remember them being.

@cleolinda: Reader, let us draw a veil over the rest of my evening, and simply note that now, all is well. I mean, not “all,” because I still have too much nerve pain to sleep and now I know what Barbie legs taste like, but you take what you can get.

 

My surgeon told me very candidly that, if I chose to have this surgery rather than waiting for the disc to resorb, "You will always be someone who has had spinal surgery." At the time, I was in a wheelchair white-knuckling through this consultation (on my birthday!), and I still gave waiting it out a shot for 2-3 weeks. Eventually we called up the office and said, "Do it, do the thing, I don't care, A Person Who Has Had Spinal Surgery is infinitely preferable to A Person Who Screams For An Hour At A Time And Cannot Assume A Sitting Position, DO THE THING." And then I still had to wait about a month for them to work me into the surgery schedule (I was lucky to get in that soon). I spent three months on hydrocodone, which I at least kicked without much distress; however, it did mess up my short-term memory for a good long while.  

 

Roughly six weeks of this also gave me sciatic nerve damage in my right leg and particularly foot, due to where where my disc (diagnosed as "an impressive bulge") was pressing. During that phase, I had a wonderful combination of numbness but also shooting lightning pains that were honestly harder to cope with than my back, because at least if I lay very, very still, I could manage not to trigger the lumbar agony for a while.

After the surgery, I was able to walk; I was up on a walker either the very next day or the day after. But I did spend a few weeks having to train myself out of a severe limp. Mostly I do walk evenly now, although I have to take stairs very slowly; that leg is still pretty unstable, and has gone out from under me more than once. I do not know that I will be particularly able to go on a convention trip again, and that's before you even get to how weak, unstable, and achy my back continues to be. 

 

I then spent 2018 learning what "someone who has had spinal surgery" actually means. It means that you (I) recover a lot, lot more slowly than you expect, and you worry that you have permanently lost the ability to move in certain ways, and lifting things is Right Out, and you get tired very easily and you ache a whole lot. Sometimes you re-strain your back and end up on a heating pad for a few days. I am flexible enough now to actually sit at my desk again (this is a big win, after several months of only tolerating a chair at the kitchen table for using my laptop), and that's partly why I'm thinking about when and how much I could start posting again. 

 

And honestly, I talked to many of y'all on Twitter, and this is the kind of thing many, many people deal with. I've done my best to say, yeah, this is just one more thing among many that I'm dealing with, and, given that I'm putting in a good faith effort to do my best, everyone else is just going to have to work with me on that. I've had to learn to be more outspoken about needing to rest or walk more slowly—advocate for myself, in fancier terms—and all this while looking at the exercises I can be doing to improve the situation as much as I can. All that while pushing past those doubts and fears, you know? I am at that desk now, after all. Which I already hadn't been able to sit at for a year before that, due to sciatic pain I hadn't realized was a herniated disc in the making.

What I mean to say is: I'm also bipolar and, as I discovered, on the spectrum. Even before I knew that in so many words, I was used to figuring out what my limitations were and how to work within them. Because, no matter how much people bristle when I use that word, as if they think I'm just giving up, I don't think of "limitations" as a bad thing. They're an informational thing. A strategic thing. I think of it as, my map is different from the maps of people who don't have this or that issue. Let me figure out the lines on my map, the pathways that I can thrive in. And "thrive" may mean something different for me, or for you in your own life, than it means for someone else. Learning what I can't do thereby tells me what I can. 

 

This is the lay of the land for me these days, is what I'm saying. 

 

And that land, by the way, has a new and exciting feature! The thing about the nerve damage in my leg, which is also still with me, and for which I'm on Gabapentin for long-term maintenance. I already had hereditary neuropathy, which up until this point mostly consisted of "Huh, all my toes are kind of burning tonight. Not last night, not tomorrow night, but tonight. Don't like that." It was sort of a curious side note at that point. More recently, though, I've started having these hideous cramp-like spasms, as if my nerve-damaged ankle was possessed by demons and also turning inside out. Like, I have literally had to grab hold of my foot and pull it back in the right direction while waiting the spasm to pass. I've also been having occasional but severe pains in that calf, kind of like a charley horse. Then, one week, I had such acute, constant pain on the top of that foot that I couldn't wear shoes for a day or so—hobbled around the house a good bit. So finally, I tell my mom about all this. And she's like, "Yeah, I have all that too." "wait you what." "Yeah, that's the neuropathy." Fuck. So this was probably exacerbated by the sciatic nerve damage, since I'm not having it in the other leg. But it's not necessarily something that's going to improve even if my back does. It's hereditary, a thing unto itself that I already had even before the herniated disc, and—when it flares up, which is not always—it's keeping me from doing the walking exercise I need to strengthen my back. And, I mean, I did go walking yesterday! For 5-6 minutes in my own backyard because that's all I could handle before my back hit the "you have two minutes to get back into the house before the crawling begins" ache. I'm having to build back from a similar point I was at earlier on in recovery, and I eventually got up to about thirty minutes. It's a process, and sometimes it's a process you have to repeat. This is why I like the Wheel of Fortune card in tarot so much, actually. What goes up will always go down. But what goes down will also go up. 

 

So this is where I'm at. I'm keeping various comments sections and inboxes closed for now, because, as you can see, my spoons are more limited than they used to be. I do set aside some time every day now to hang out on Twitter; that seems easiest for me to manage. My day at the laptop is starting to look a lot more like it did 3-4 years ago, although I did have a close call last night: 
 

@cleolinda: Bad news: a random power outage last night apparently fried my (very old) uninterruptible power source/surge protector. Good news: it apparently took that bullet for my laptop, which needed a restart to fix the wifi connection but was otherwise fine.

@cleolinda: My mom: "How can you tell the UPS is fried?" "Well, it screams and shuts down every time I turn it on"

@cleolinda: The UPS was old enough that it had stopped functioning as a battery, just a glorified surge protector, but clearly, that was its true destiny, and it will be buried with full honors
 

@cleolinda: I'm not happy about having to buy a new one, but I'd rather spend $50 instead of $laptop. Unfortunately, it won't arrive until MONDAY, because apparently Amazon Prime has to go out to the battery fields and harvest it first

 

However, I persevere. Well, I also have to lie down a lot between perseverings, but nonetheless. We persevere.