The Lyme Light

I'm really, really tired today. I'm just wiped out all the time lately. I sleep so much and am still so tired. I feel woozy all the time now. Leaving the house feels weird, just really weird. It's like that disconnected feeling you get after you take cold medicine. Running a quick errand leaves me breathless and heavy and exhausted. I feel like I'm seeing and moving through water, like I'm sleep walking. Even getting up to go into the kitchen last night felt bizarre. My face looked tired, like when you have a cold, and my voice sounded like I had just woken up all day. Lights seemed too bright, I was really jumpy, I had constant muscle spasms and twitches and everything was too loud. It was especially bad late last night. After 4 or 5 hours of not moving at all, I felt like I was inhabiting another body. When I dragged myself out of bed to use the bathroom and get some water, I felt like I was moving through water. I had been unwilling to move for so long, even to pee, that my bladder was so full it hurt. Moving and not moving felt weird. I wish I didn't have to be awake at times like this. I just want to be knocked out for 6 months and wake up when it's over. But, that's assuming that it will ever actually be over. Lately, I've been wondering about that a lot.  What if this 6 months doesn't help? What if I actually have MS and not lyme? What if? I worked so hard to accept this illness and move on with my life, but then this 6 month break happened so I put all that on hold. One of my antibiotics makes me cry and feel overly emotional and the other causes panic attacks and constant anxiety. The combination is really messing me up. I stopped them a few days ago. I'm going to take a break. I can't stand feeling upset all the time over nothing. But, drugs or no drugs, sometimes I get little flashes of the full weight of what I'm going through and I nearly collapse. I guess most of the time I deal with it in little pieces. There's a huge amount that I'm used to and then moments of severity throughout the day. So, I have general pain and fatigue today with episodes of severe, overwhelming exhaustion or feeling like I might pass out then flare ups of SI joint pain then maybe a little extra muscle pain in my neck. Then, an hour later there's blood sugar to deal with then maybe I have a stomach ache. I can deal with it, kind of, in little pieces like that. But every once in a while, and lately way more often than that, I think about it all at once and it makes my stomach drop and gives me chills. It's too much. All of it. The panic is obviously making it worse than it really is and there are pills for that. But there aren't pills for the fact that the weight of all of this is crushing sometimes. How the hell is this real? What am I doing ever getting out of bed or attempting to accomplish or learn anything? How is it possible that so much can be wrong with me? I've been thinking about it a lot more lately. Sometimes it just doesn't seem real. I'm so frustrated and sad I could scream. I can feel a true panic attack coming and I don't even care enough to try to stop it right now.

It's been an hour or so since I wrote this. I had a meltdown. I vented and cried on my mother's shoulder. Literally, she hugged me and I cried on her shoulder. Then we sat and talked about everything. I made a hundred different points, each one at a frenzied pace, each one leading to another. I kept saying, "what it comes down to is ______." Each time I filled in the blank with some revelation or question. Usually, just being asked what's wrong and saying it out loud helps. Sometimes I need real advice and direction but more often than not, I just need to get it out of my system. This time, I listened as she told me story after story of how she dealt with extreme poverty, despair, divorce, and a spinal injury when she was raising me and my siblings. They are all stories I know well. But this time they were brought out for the purpose of relating to me. She really tried hard to relate to me and validate my feelings. I understood those stories a little better. We talked about guilt over burdening people with our troubles. She related but explained that it doesn't apply to her, that she wants to know what I'm going through, that it's so much better than being left in the dark. And I believed her. I suppose what it came down to is this, am I doing this right? Am I good at being sick? Is it reasonable or normal to feel the way I feel? She said yes, of course. But that is really what I so often want to know. Where do I stand? Give me something to compare this to or statistics or charts and graphs. I don't care, just something. I want to know how I'm doing. Should I pull it together or let it all out? Am I weak? Do I think this is worse than it really is? Or, is it worse than I realize? And on, and on, and on. I'm exhausted. I've cried all I can over this today. I've asked every question twice. I do feel better. I don't want to feel like this tomorrow. I'm trying to convince myself that these feelings come with the territory. But how can I know for sure? And, more importantly, why do I need to?