Better (-ish) (sort of)

Not quite into the light yet, but out of the depths of darkness.

Qi gong today... my practitioner blames my current downturn on the season, which is very much within my own history, many years pre-Diagnosis. Winter... squashes me. Autumn is always wonderful. Winter is just plain bad, energetically (for me, at least). Thank goodness I don't have the usual spate of Christmas concerts this year, they'd just plain do me in.

Something I noticed today at the treatment, which I have noticed before but wasn't quite at the top of my consciousness... Electrical heating, radiant heating, I don't feel in my legs very well at all. I put a heating pad on my legs at night, it vaguely helps; at qi gong, he puts a heat lamp over my legs, I barely feel it.

But the warmth of his hands, I feel. Same at night, the warmth of my wife's hands or legs, I feel. The heating pad, not so much.

Don't know what it means, but it's interesting.

Feeling good enough to work on music for the winter play... I'm feeling a little (a lot) behind on this whole show, I think I can still pull it out, but I'm not really in touch with the production or its schedule, and the combination of "lost," "under-informed," and "behind my own schedule" is not at all adding to my general comfort level.

But at least I'm getting something done tonight. In the words of the farmer at the end of Babe, "That'll do." And right now, that's good enough. But then again, isn't "good enough" good enough, by definition?

I don't know if I'll have the wherewithal to deal with going back to work Monday... we'll see what Sunday offers. The week before Thanksgiving is never one where people do a lot of quality concentration, so it won't be such a bad time to be absent, but I do miss my students, and I think they'd be good for me to be around, but the hurly-burly of the school day... I may not be ready for that yet. But, I got a couple of days. We'll see what happens.

If there's one thing constant with MS... it's its variability.

Just not interested

A very uncomfortable day, so far.

The first thing I want to make abundantly, perfectly, and completely clear, is that I have absolutely zero interest in dying. None. Zilch. Totally none. Absolutely none.

What is making this day so uncomfortable, so far, is that "zero" is pretty much the amount of interest that I currently have in living.

If my wife hadn't been so insistent upon it, I probably wouldn't have eaten anything at all today. I'm just not interested.

I'm (vaguely, sort of) handling some obligations... Writing source music for a production at the high school, and experiencing (almost said "enjoying," but that's a little more enthusiasm than I can actually muster) at least some success at that. Probably will make it to a handbell rehearsal tonight, since our first performance (a date I picked) is Sunday and one of our number is absent and I'll have to keep the rehearsal running and play her part, so that everyone doesn't get totally discombobulated by the missing player.

I really wish I could have taken a full "get out of life free" week, but I just didn't see the way to do it given what all was going on. Sure, if I had been hit by a bus (the paradigm unforseen disaster is always "hit by a bus," somehow) they'd get along fine without me, but I'm just not yet willing to play the "hit by a bus" card. Although I may play the "I need to leave rehearsal early" card tonight, we'll see how things go.

Music usually makes me feel at least a little better, it always has in the past. Even with what I found out after the fact was a mild case of measles and nearly-full-on-hallucinations, rehearsing made me feel better. We'll see where it takes me tonight.

Hope springs eternal. If I only had some... But, somehow... I'm just not interested.

Qi gong on Saturday, we'll see where that takes me.

But at the moment... I'm actually almost enjoying a really, really good cup of oolong, some sort of tea that came with the moon cakes my wife got in the Chinese part of town. Easily the best feeling I've had all day.

And y'know, given the way I've been feeling today... I'll take what enjoyment I can get.

Turbulence

Halfway through the first fully MS-related week I've taken off work. It's not working the miracles of recuperation I had hoped for. Frankly, I'm not exactly sure it's doing me any good at all, although I'm quite positive it's doing me more good than the week of work would have done me.

I had to spend a lot of today taking care of a migrainey wife; that took far more energy than I had wanted to spend on... well, pretty much anything, actually. I certainly don't begrudge her the effort I had to spend--God knows, if I needed help, I'd want my spouse to take care of me, and I'd do it again in a heartbeat if she had a relapse and needed me again. But it cost a lot.

I'm way more sensitive than I like. Little noises, little anythings, make me jump. It's pretty uncomfortable. I just took another dose of beta blocker, but those don't seem to be intercepting whatever it is that I'm reacting to.

And oh yeah, the sadness. There's something about how the MS is getting in the way of things I used to do without even thinking, and somehow, I kinda feel like it has been forcing me to face my own death, one tiny piece at a time. I've been dealing with that for a while, but there's a difference between facing the idea of your own death and the actuality of your own death, and I think all of my "good attitude" about the disease has been because I've only been facing it in the abstract. Somehow, taking the step of saying "I need to take this time off because of MS" is forcing me to deal with it in concrete terms, and I feel like I'm teetering on the threshold of a lot of sadness.

Which, in a strange way, I take as a good sign. It's probably a place I have needed to go for a while, but haven't been ready to face. And frankly, I don't know if I am (or if anyone ever really is) "ready" to face it.

The only reason I wish I could face it... is because when I get out of it what I'm supposed to get out of it, maybe it'll go away.

Hope springs eternal.