My brain is a whirlwind. So much so, that I had written a long post about my overloaded brain, but I forgot to save it and it got deleted! Kinda ironic, don't you think?
Christmas is always a whirlwind, despite the previous year's commitment to not let it get this way. How is that? But, legitimately, the last few weeks have been a little crazier for different reasons that usual. Most years I'm recovering from a surgery. It's become a somewhat sadistic tradition I do for myself come birthday, Thanksgiving and Christmas! I'm grateful that this holiday season I am surgery free.....knock on wood! I know it's always a potential at any moment.
This season brings its usual parties, shopping, decorating, etc. Like usual, I'm vexed with my constant sore throat, congestion, and headache due to my allergy to Christmas trees and the dust on decorations stored year after year. Tis the season for mucous!
The Van
Of late, we've been slightly inconvenienced with our van again. It's been in the shop 2 times this month. 'Tis the season for giving. We've given the mechanic $1000 this month. They love us. We jokingly tried to come up with a nickname for our Mazda MPV. We're thinking Penny, the Most 'Pensive Vehicle. Penny because we feel like we sink too many pennies into it. 'Pensive is Doug's nod to our local dialect's way of saying expensive.
Vacation!!
Doug and I will be going on a much-needed getaway next week for 4 nights. Audrey is most excited for an extended sleep over with Grandma and Grandpa. We hope to get some rest and some work done on the adoption paperwork. We're thrilled to have a few days of respite from websites, housework, and most importantly - from doctors! Although excited, I'm working frantically to get some shopping done, projects finished, and extra school accomplished for Audrey in anticipation of our absence next week and a week spent in GA during Christmas.
It's Winter Time!
On a more literal note, the wind here has been fierce the last few days. Wednesday the wind was just whipping, creating the most bizarre, slightly ominous sounds outside. Sounds akin to that of siding being torn off my house and slammed into the neighbor's house! I was sitting at our computer, which faces out our front window, trying to snatch up some good on-line Christmas deals. It was dreary and kinda dark outside but I could see leaves being blown between two houses across the street. It was a creepy, crunchy cyclone of brown leaves. It's amazing how huge the whirlwind would get. It was a bleak reminder of beautiful, verdant, Knoxville summers now passed and onto the season of a dismal, overcast winter.
Winter here is merely a doleful, blah few months. It's not cold. It's not warm. It doesn't snow. And it doesn't rain, despite the frequent, precarious gloomy skies. (Plug your ears, local Southerners, I'm about to speak heresy). I LOVE snow. I do. On the rare occasion that we do get snow here, I love it! It actually stays white. Ok, that is before the sun comes out and melts it away. But it's so pure white and sparkly for those few hours! And life here just comes to a screeching halt for even a slight dusting. Doug gets to stay at home. Maybe that is why I love it so much! Having grown up in Michigan, my brain associates snow with gray yuck because of all the cars and pollution. Michigan winters conjure up images in my head of cars and shoes coated in a gray, gritty salt solution.
And I remember the winters lived in Michigan and its back-aching shoveling. Shoveling is just not that fun. I think parents trick kids into thinking it's "playing in the snow", while it's really child labor. As a kid, I just recall after a few swaths of the driveway, thinking it was all for the birds. My back would hurt so badly. And then I'd have that sick feeling after having looked down for so long thinking I'd really made progress, but then I'd look up and survey the entire driveway and realize I'd actually only done about 1/5 of the driveway. My arms would get so tired of the scooping and heaving, that I'd decide it'd actually be better to put my hands in my pocket and lean into the shovel's handle with my stomach and just run, letting my bodyweight scoop the snow. But then, I hit a crack in the pavement and the shovel would come to screaming stop into my gut and knock the wind out of me. Really dumb idea. Little lack of understanding of momentum! You can't really shovel with mittens because the threads sort of rub your skin raw. But taking them off makes them bitter cold. Snow would drop into my groovy moon boots, making it nearly impossible to yank those things off without pulling out the lining. Between perspiration and snow, I'd be so wet. My poor body was so confused - I was hot from the exercise and cold from being wet!
Drug Study
Weeks back my rheumatologist talked with me about joining a drug research study. It's for a drug called Xyrem. It's being studied to see if it's helpful for Fibryomyalgia patients. After doing some of our own homework, Doug and I decided that this study might prove beneficial. In order to start the study, I had to go through several weeks of medication wash-out and agree to maintain a life without any pain meds, muscle relaxers, and sleep meds. I have to keep an electronic diary 3x/day and send it in nightly. Each Monday I've been going to doctor appointments lasting any where from 2 - 4 1/2 hours. I'm actually the only person at my rheumatologist's office who qualifies. You can't snore, smoke, drink alcohol, be over a certain BMI, etc. So I passed all the tests- blood tests, EKGs, Xrays, drug tests, psychological tests for depression, etc. I endured several tenderpoint tests.
The timing of the study has been difficult because it spanned from before my birthday, to Thanksgiving, through Christmas. Not good timing when I'm sleep deprived, sore, and on the verge of tears 24/7. Not so festive.
We were hopeful that I'd find relief. I had a 2 out of 3 chance I'd get the real drug and not a placebo. The medicine is designed to help me fall asleep quickly, stay asleep, and get deeper, more restorative sleep. Because this medicine is liquid and goes into effect so quickly, I was instructed to take it while already in bed and then not to get up. Kinda freaky and yet hopeful all at the same time. Most nights, I take anywhere from 40 minutes to 3 hours to fall asleep. I wake up in excess of 6-10 times. Often I wake up and it will take 10-60 minutes to get back asleep. I wake up feeling like I never went to sleep!
Because the medicine is so crazy, quick effective and so paralyzing to your muscles, they played around with the half-life of the medication. I was instructed to wake up to an alarm 2 1/2 - 4 hours after taking the first dose in order to take the second. Sounded slightly counter-intuitive to me to wake myself up from sleeping to take more sleeping medicine. But, whatever. I was game.
You see what I'm gearing up to say, right? You detect a growing sense of doom? Yipper. I'm the girl with the placebo. At least I'm about 99% sure. They said after the first night of taking my medication, I'd be able to tell if I had the real thing. On that first night, the alarm went off for me to take the second dose and I was still awake. I took the nasty salty-tasting solution and just broke into tears.
It's all just makes me feeling like I'm losing my mind. I finally fall asleep when the alarm goes off for me to take more medicine. Then I finally fall asleep again when I hear the alarm go off to wake Doug up. I finally go back to sleep again when I hear the alarm go off on the electronic diary for me to fill out. I fill it out, go back to sleep when Doug comes in and says I need to wake up to take care of Audrey (who's sick) and get school done.
Funny, the diary questions my fatigue level and my pain level. However, it fails to ask me about my sanity level, which, if answered truthfully, might possibly alter how I answered all the other questions. There's never a question that says, On a scale of 1 - 10, how angry are you that you have the placebo!?!?!
I have the option to drop out at any moment. If I stay on for 14 weeks I'm guaranteed to get the real medicine and doctor's care (& a palm pilot) all for free for 10 months. It's a nice incentive. But when I'm so sleep deprived and hurting so badly, my brain can hardly see the light at the end of the tunnel. When the nurse said to me, "well, you're on day 8 and only have 91 more to go", I almost asked them to send me right on over to the CRAZY ward!
AUDREY'S Congested brain!
She's been under the weather all week. One night she had us up 8+ times! When we weren't in her room helping her, I was lying in my bed listening to her fitfully sleep - coughing, crying out, etc. It's strange how she can be up all night sick as a dog, and the next day proves much more detrimental to Doug and I. Her sickness, mixed with my sleep study ordeal, is a bad brew!
I think the congestion is seriously messing with her brain this week. It's been a week spent in la-la land! She seems most content to ask countless off-the-wall questions, and most notably, content to receive the most bizarre answers from me. I just will never understand what goes through her head when she asks the most obvious, elementary questions, only to be pleased with the most obvious answer. She words questions that I could in no way possibly even anticipate what type of answer might satisfy her!
Case and point: She and I are sitting at the piano and I'm playing out of a music book. She asks me, "I don't really need that book because I can't read it, and I know you need it because you are reading it, but could you give it to me because I don't really need it because I can't read it?" WHAT?! What in the world do I do with that? Most importantly, do I give her the book?
I potty trained this little gem of a daughter well before she was 2. She's been going potty all on her own for over 900 days. What is she possibly thinking when she starts hollering to me from the bathroom at the top of her lungs. I turn off the washing machine, turn off the CD player, stop curling my hair, and walk down to her bathroom to hear what she is saying when she asks, "Momma, I'm all done going potty. What should I do?" So I simply answer with "Finish" and she says, "OK" and she gets done and walks out. What dilemma did I just solve here?
Her above mentioned bathroom scenario would have been more than enough strangeness in one day, when she did it AGAIN. Because she had been a little touchy and scatterbrained that day with her sickness, I tried to be a little accommodating. I know every mother in the world is familiar with this situation. You see, only mothers are excluded on the un-said tradition of going to the bathroom unannounced when the need arises!..........
I go into Audrey's room and say, "I'm going to go into the bathroom for a while. Please do not cry. Don't try to reach something you can't get to or open something you don't know how to open. Only play with things you don't need help with. Don't call me for help. Entertain yourself quietly. Don't call me to ask me if I'm done yet. You'll know I'm done when I come back here."
Off I go. Just when I cannot be interrupted, I hear "MOMMA!".
"WHAT?" I yell.
"I'm going potty too!" Audrey yells back.
"Great!" I yell again.
"I need help, NOW".
I'm thinking now that she's being really serious. Surely she's really needs help, because she heard what I told her before I went to the bathroom. So, I finish very quickly and run down to the bathroom to see her sitting there on the toilet. Cute as can be with her pants all around her ankles, legs swinging, and she's singing "Alas and did my Savior bleed and did my Sovereign die....."
"What's the matter?" I ask.
"I pottied, I wiped, and I'm done."
"OK!!!!!"
"Should I get down?" She says so incredibly nonchalantly.
"Where you hoping I'd bring you lunch in here?" I ask.
She giggles, hops down, pulls up her pants and just starts washing her hands, as if something totally bizarre has not just occurred, all the while singing "Would He devote that sacred head for such a worm as I. At the Cross, at the cross......."
Tell me why this child would ask me these questions. WHY!? She often answers her own questions in her attempts to just get the question out of her mouth. She asked us once, "Why am I washing my hands because they're dirty?" She asked me today if we were eating because it was lunchtime and we were both hungry. Generally, that is why folks eat! :-)
SHE'S ALWAYS ENTERTAINING
Audrey likes watching a little show called Charlie and Lola, a little show about two British siblings who use their imagination. Audrey has very quickly learned an impeccable British accent. Times like these, I must laugh. Her impersonation skills are coded into her DNA straight 'way from her father! She runs around the house calling Doug " 'ello, Charlie" and wants Doug to call her Lola.
She still loves to dance. She has a great running man move that would put her uncle Craig to shame! And she loves to play on Playhouse Disney on the computer. The other day, she was working away at the computer while Doug and I were washing dishes. She comes running into the kitchen proclaiming something about this hysterical character she had made. She asks Doug to "come in the other room and see what I made and you can 'abominate' it!" Doug and I just look at each other with a complete loss for words. We follow her to the computer to see this crazy looking, robot figure she's created. Under the figure we see a button "ANIMATE".
2 weeks ago we had a new vocabulary word. Catastrophic. No, not the experience of teaching her the word. The word was catastrophic. So, she's having fun using the word with folks. She told my mom not to bang into the Christmas tree, because if it fell over, it'd be catastrophic.
While working during school on a craft, I asked her to cut something out. When I realized that it looked a little more intricate than I had first thought, I offered my help. Audrey comes back with the retort, "Dear woman, I do have skills!" Alrighty then, cut on sister girl!
Audrey still loves to play with Sadie. The other day they played dress up together. I do mean together! Audrey put slippers on the dog's feet, a sun hat on her head, and her leopard print PJ shirt on Sadie's back. I'm grateful Sadie can be so lazy and sleepy, she just lays there while Audrey gets her all decked out!