New prescription

Some good and bad to share.

Oh, let's start with "bad" for the moment. I'm all but out of catheters, the sine-qua-non of "life in the Cath Club." I called the people the urologist's office said were "The" cath people. Well, I asked for some, but it's taking a long time because y'know, the insurance company, they have to decide whether I "really need" them, or something like that. I told the cath-company people I talked to on the phone that yes I need them, I'm the one driving this bladder around and they aren't, how can they possibly know whether I actually "need" them or not? There's a special place in Hell awaiting them, I said... somewhere they really need to pee but can't, they could if they were allowed catheters but--alas, they don't "need" them, so they don't get them. Ever. And thus, they get what's coming to them.

A long pause over the phone, and then the cath-company person said... "We'll see if we can fast-track this." YOU are wonderful, I told them.

There was just a knock at the front door (which I can't get at in any kind of "quick" response time, house ain't built in a way to let a wheelchair get to the front door at all), but perhaps there are caths waiting there? We'll see when we see.

That's the yukky. Now the good...

I had quite the dharma talk with my acupuncturist/neurologist/MD/can't-say-enough-good-about-him health-care-provider yesterday. I'll spare you some of the technical details, they were hard for me to hear and they'll not really make you happier, so let's skim over the details for the moment... Some attitude issues (mine!) need truth spoken to (at) them... Something that definitely needs consciousness-raising is the relationship between the cared-for and the care-giver. It's hard to be a care-giver, especially with the MS "moving target" of illness, you gotta care for yourself if you're gonna care for someone else, and I need to care for her more explicitly. Not just in "give her a day off just to hang with a friend" when said friend contacts her and wants to go hang (or the other way around, my care-giver calls her friends to hang with her) but it's small stuff like wanting my choice munchies to be obtained and kept handy (to me, of course) in the freezer, and yet when she says "I'm too tired to go get stuff tonight," I need to find it 100% true in my heart to say "Waiting until tomorrow will be just fine." Not harbor resentment about how there's never enough time to get me the stuff I want when I want it, to find it 100% true in my heart to be able to honestly say "I can wait."

When we're in the world of "I need my fill-in-the-blank drugs so I can take them tonight," that's a different place. And yes, there aren't many things that I actually want, and on some level, damn it, I want what I want since I want so little. But really, does that make anyone more enlightened, to insist on wanting what I want? Well, honestly, being honest about it kinda does add to my own enlightenment, but that's honesty for you.

So that's my important project. Finding truth, love, and compassion about things that, were I not to become compassionate, would make me smaller and unhappy.

I think I saw on Facebook some sort of graphic about "The greatest physician says that the prescription for this problem is love. Someone else says it's not enough, it's not working."

So the doctor apparently says... "Then increase the dosage."

And that's my new prescription. With, I'm anticipating, side-effects that everyone likes!