Tuesday, July 12, 2011

THE CHAOTIC TIME OF YEAR



My last post was over two months ago! Not surprising, given everything that’s been going on: installation of a multi-tiered network of soaker; picking up my friend Kelly’s dog from doggy daycare twice a week, since Kelly had a stroke and couldn’t walk him for a while; reducing, organizing and storing The Poet’s hoard of books that had taken over every square foot in the second bedroom, in order to set up a bedroom for my stepson, David, which required buying new furniture; and, since April, practicing and for the Fremont Solstice Parade. All of this culminated in Daniel’s arrival on June 11 and the parade itself on June 18th.

Throughout it all, my body has been on its own break-neck healing schedule. I got up to the full dose of 12 amoxicillin capsules per day, plus two tetracycline and one giant diflucan pill at bedtime. There’ve been killer headaches, and the insomnia has persisted. Everything I’ve done to get myself sleeping again has worked—for about three or four days. Then the insomnia bounces back—after increasing Vitamin D, stopping monolaurin, restarting monolaurin, increasing quercetin, doing coffee enemas, drinking liver detox tea, adding Sacro B…. Needless to say, the steps in my Lyme treatment routine have become baroque lately.

By early June my ever-expanding to-do list became so overwhelming I had to write out not just a daily list on a palm-sized note pad as I usually do, but create a multi-tiered flow chart that showed which tasks were highest priority for the coming week, and which could be put off until the week after. Said chart took up an entire page in my writing notebook. Doing this actually made me feel calmer, since the tasks were no longer swirling around in the whirlpool of my brain on five hours sleep, but instead anchored to a sheet of recycled wood pulp, where I could clearly see which ones I had to worry about today, which next Wednesday.

There were times when I caught myself longing for the good old days when I had just started my antibiotics, back when my life was much simpler—when I was too sick to write or care whether The Poet was turning the apartment into a mausoleum for moldy books, or consider landscaping a garden. This was before I had the energy to take on things that approximate a normal life, something I’ve done over the past couple years as I’ve gotten stronger and had more energy and sleep has been fairly reliable. Back before all that, my big event of the day was walking the four blocks to the mail box and back, at which point I’d finished my to-do list and gotten all the exercise I could handle.

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