Just Call Me “Relatively Healthy But Sadly Consistently Broken Gal” (title does not come with super powers or a cape)

I can’t believe women had to lead productive lives while wearing one of these.
(and…I can’t believe I’m envious how much better looking these are than modern back braces…)

Remember that whole “stuck in a wheel chair for six months and really should have been longer, but I started having horrible back pain, because we apparently weren’t evolved to sit on our ass for half a year” thing?

Well, history repeats itself.  Not the wheelchair, thank goodness.  But the back giving me trouble – if you define trouble as feeling like I’ve been kicked or beaten (or both) in the lower back and breathing hurts.

Physical Therapy is my continuing part-time job (but a really sucky one, where I pay instead of getting paid, and twice a week have horribly painful things done to me for which I say thank you to Mr. M when he is done making me cry).  And I have pills that help a bit, but interfere with my ability to do important things like drive, or have a cocktail.

So my newest accessory is a back brace.  And my new hobby is trying to dress so no one knows I have a back brace on.  Because after almost two years of casts and wheelchairs and crutches and canes, this is the lamest ugliest thing I’ve been stuck with yet.

Big, white, velcro and polyester, lumpy, and weirdly noisy. So not what is in style for 2013.

ARGH!!!  It suddenly occurred to me that I wasn’t really sure what is in style for 2013, and I thought I should check to make sure corsets weren’t suddenly on the ‘hot’ list.  Do Not do this!  Because you might find photos of women – contemporary women! – who clearly have overdone it on the corset lifestyle and have freakishly tiny wasps waists.  I’m not sure how they haven’t’ snapped in two.  Or ruptured internal organs.  (Yes, a graph of how corsets move internal organs around popped up too.)

I think I need to wash my eyeballs.  Mostly because that is as close as I can get to scrubbing the images out of my brain….

 

The One Where I Talk About A Day In 2011… Because I’m Current Like That

Well, it hasn’t been quite this long…

Remember that time I was reading in bed and suddenly I had a sharp sever pain in my jaw and my back?  And how when I tried to go to sleep an hour later my heart was beating so hard I couldn’t sleep?  And how after several hours of my heart racing so fast it felt like my body was shaking the bed?  And how I finally got the blood pressure cuff out my blood pressure was really high, and my pulse rate was stupid high, and how after hours of this I finally called the nurse advice line to find out if A) I could wait till the local urgent care clinic opened at 8am, or if B) I should drive two towns over and go to the one that opened at 7am, and the nurse was all option C) hang up and call 911 to go to the hospital?

Because, hello?  Heart attack?

And how I woke up my husband and he drove me in (because, hello?  An ambulance seemed sort of overkill at 5:30am when there really isn’t traffic.  And yes, totally stupid, and no, not a good plan, but here I am writing about it, so not my worst decision ever, but don’t try this at home…)

And how if you show up in a wheelchair talking about jaw pain and back pain and elevated pulse and blood pressure you end up rushed in to a room in front of everyone, because it turns out that people stuck in wheelchairs sometimes get blood clots and that is so not a good thing, and it’s all so dramatic and full of blood tests and EKGs and drugs?

And remember how it turned out that I did not have a blood clot, or a heart attack, or anything wrong with me other than a major panic attack, because it turns out months in a wheelchair is super depressing and eventually I hit a breaking point, and this was it?

And how I got anti-anxiety drugs and things have been better since then, but updating this blog seemed less than fun because life kinda sucked even with the drugs?

Good times.

What’s new with you?

In possibly related news, my husband is an idiot.

Dear law enforcement officers, this is just a depressed rant, no need to show up on my doorstep. Also, I live in Cleveland. Or maybe Texas. One of those. And I'm seven feet tall with curly red hair. So easy to spot if you are looking for me. Which of course you don't need to be.

Some of the amazing bloggers I read talk about their depression.  And they are elegant, funny, loving, and inspiring.

Me?  I fall into the pit of despair, and I start wondering why there aren’t more news stories about wheelchair users going ballistic (literally) with automatic weapons.  I can’t believe I’m the only one this angry and frustrated.

Then the voice of common sense kicks in.  Not the one that tells me to calm down and realize it isn’t so bad.  I don’t have that voice.  I have the logical voice that points out that I have a hard time getting my lunch out of the refrigerator.  How on earth would someone in a wheelchair get to a densely populated space with a rifle?  And once there, it takes two hands to shoot a riffle, and two hands to move a wheelchair.  So unless there is an angry four armed no legged person in a wheelchair, the odds of that happening are pretty low.  (Though I can see that person being pretty freaking angry if they do exist).  Plus the kickback from the firing would send the chair backwards with every shot.

Turns out there are oh so many reasons we don’t hear about wheelchair user violence.

Plus, there is a good chance other people aren’t feeling as insane as I am right now.

Also?  Most other people probably aren’t having over fifty people over on Saturday night, and even if they are, their husband probably isn’t saying things like “we have plenty of time to get everything done” even though there are a million things I usually take care of that I now can’t,  and the parts that I can do take twenty times longer, and he hasn’t done anything in days.  Oh, wait, he has done things.  They just aren’t helpful things.  Like dumping an entire container of orange juice on the sofa and not noticing for two days, and then deciding that putting the cushion covers in the dryer was a good solution.  Because he is a giant two footed freaking idiot.

UPDATED:

Wow. I was wrong. You can take an assault rifle on a wheelchair.

Okay, no points for subtilty.  But I guess lack of ability to transport an assault rifle has to be crossed off the list of reasons why we don’t hear about more wheelchair users snapping.

Even my dad thinks it looks like I’m applying for a position as Imperial Stormtrooper.

I’m feeling oh so fabulous and fashionable right now.

I have a boot problem – which normally refers to the fact that I own to many pairs of boots (which might not seem insanely over the top, even though I have six pairs, if four of them weren’t black.  Oh, wait, even if they were all different colors, it probably is a sign that I have a problem.  Though in my defense (weak as it is) one pair was bought with the intention of being able to walk easily in the rain.  Which was a great theory, but then I got caught in quite the downpour, and ended up with boots that were oozing water through the leather (so fail)…. and one pair I bought to keep my knees warm while biking in the winter wearing skirts (which admittedly might be the weakest justification of buying expensive over the knee leather boots ever – but? Surprisingly the most amazingly wonderful warm and functional footwear I’ve purchased in years.  More than surpassed all my hopes)

Oh, and the cowboy boots, they were just super cool, and they were purchased at the store that funds The Global Fund For Women [an amazing organization – the founder actually came and met with my Feminist Christian Reading Group, and she is just as amazing as GFW] which is a lame excuse for excessive boots, but as long as you are being a horrible over consuming American, at least a good group is benefiting from my greed.

Wait, what was my point before I started babbling?

Oh, yes, my boot problem.

The current boot problem is new.  And very not fashionable, in the form of a walking cast, aka: my right foot looks like it is trying out for the role of an Imperial Army Stormtrooper.  Oh, also the right foot has a tendon that is having structural failure issues, manifesting in pain and swelling.  So, rah.  Hopefully only five days to go.  But maybe 12.

All of this is just in time for the drive less challenge, which I was getting so excited about.  But instead I’m having my very own ‘drive way more’ extravaganza.  Last night we drove to our friends’ house for dinner.  Five doors down from us.  Because five houses is actually pretty far to hobble at the end of the day.  I suck.

This was also going to be my ‘if I only say positive things life will be better’ experiment week (which I’ve totally blown by reading the news, and calling my beloved at work to explain just how insanely stupid people are, and how we are all screwed).  I’ve been practicing saying things like “But on the bright side I was able to get an appointment with the really great podiatrist the day after I called, and got in to see the best physical therapist in the world three hours later, and I have health insurance, and I don’t have a job where I have to be on my feet even though it hurts, and I have a wonderful husband who is sweet and kind, and I have a wonderful neighbor who when she found out that the sweet husband had a moment of insanity and thought I didn’t want my chocolate easter bunny Aunt J brought me, so he took it to work and gave it away – the wonderful neighbor brought me chocolate bars (and even offered to try carving it into bunny ears so I could bite them off).”

So really, life is good.   On an unrelated -okay, maybe totally related – note, I’ve started reading “The Happiness Project”