I hit the wall after about 4 hours of methodical mild to moderate activity – always with purpose, something I knew needed to be done, while simultaneously enhancing my environment. I’m in the perpetual motion of redesigning my living space – never satisfied with the way it looks or functions, always finding a better way. I couldn’t do much else.
My brain was freezing up like my lungs did. I could barely complete a sentence, or when I started, the sentence seemed to drop into nothingness never to be finished. Moving furniture as physical as that was didn’t require completed sentences, or problem solving. Design comes natural to me.
Always pushing myself with every movement as if my life depended on it. If I thought it didn’t, I would have sunk deeper into unfamiliar territory and I’m not that much of a risk-taker nor do I trust the unknown. I needed to be wide awake and let my senses absorb my environment and let my body be still if that was required and it was.
Starting, stopping, resting after each stage of doing whatever it was I was doing, multi-tasking, but so methodical, unusually so, till about four hours later I hit the wall knowing I was done till bedtime.
Once at the wall I sit in a wide awake coma watching movies – no needs, no computer, no nothing. I can hear my labored breath like my lungs are hollowed out – nothing there but air. Motionless, yet if I went to move I could, but didn’t want to. I was satisfied to be in that wide awake coma state. I could feel gravity on my entire body – that’s a first for me.
My mind appears fine till I search for a word and can’t find it. Usually I end up solving half of it, then make an exception by searching the net on my phone till I find it. That relief of finding the word I searched for in my mind on the net is necessary, also that I got it half right. I had to insert something right that led me to the answer. That speaks to me about my future recovery.
My brain stammers and sputters like my speech. Sometimes I just give up talking and walk away from what I was saying. I noticed Steve does that too.
Someone telling me I am or will be fine gets rejected by my brain. I’m the only one who can do that and the only one who can determine my progress.
As I sit nearly motionless in my wide awake coma mind my body screams for me to help it. I keep saying I can’t help you and my body keeps asking why not.
It hurt me to have to say that to myself. I’ve never had to do that before. I’ve had a few injuries, but I was never so connected to every cell of my being as I was now, while simultaneously helpless to do anything except exist in it. The fatigue was that overwhelming.
I could feel the invasion in my bones, all of them. Not all at once. They hurt in unfamiliar places, like something was eating me, like a rush of something was moving sideways across inside the bones, rather than lengthwise from top to bottom, like waves of the tiniest molecules, that I could actually feel. But that was just a sensation, mild compared to the pain when I touched the bones.
My skin hurt to touch, even when brushed ever so lightly, like every nerve ending was being artificially excited or activated. Maybe it was the antibiotic or what was the other thing, um oh steroid, but I’ve had both before and nothing like this happened. After a few days the skin pain vanished as quickly as it appeared, the bone pain too.
Nausea appears out of the blue. Yeah, I just ate something. Why when I eat and not before I eat. It’s like my body is rejecting food, any food. The nausea medicine I got later didn’t help much, in fact it gave me such severe heartburn that the nausea was nothing in comparison, so I didn’t take much of it. I tried a few times, but the same thing always happened. I’ll live with the nausea and eventually figure it out. That’s what I’m saying today as I’m writing this, many days after my ONDANSETRON experience.
One food I tolerated and Steve kept in stock was dairy-free ice-cream, any flavor, no toppings, just the ice-cream. When I should have lost weight, during this sickness, I actually gained from eating so much ice-cream. Dairy-free. Animal-free.
One day forward toward the light, the next day back to where I started with me always wondering why return to the exact same place, rather than return to a version of it? That’s a disturbing feature that I never experienced when getting well from anything. I never slid back to the same exact place, like I have with this virus/bacteria that invaded me. It’s like it comes back to finish the job when it knows it’s losing. It’s angry. It’s giving me a rough ride.
Eventually my body stopped asking me to help it. I knew then that it understood that I couldn’t. That hurt beyond what I can explain in words so I won’t.
FAT-FREE CHEF™ 