Signing off

The hair that fell out of my head from all the steroid shots is back. When it's down, it's in cute little curls, like Audrey Tautou minus the face. But it doesn't stay down. It mostly does this.

It looks like the wind is blowing, but I promise you, it needs no wind.

There's been no change in pain since I started the IBS med.  But I am only taking 2 pills a day right now.  I can take up to 4 per day but they have to be 6 hours apart which goes against the recommended daily allowance of 8 hours of sleep per night so I've been writing to Stephen Hawking about how we need better math.

I quit my desk job to go back to serving full-time.  I've been thinking about going back to serving for over a year.  It never made financial sense.  I had very little breathing room in my budget and a lot of debt, student-loan debt from a graduate degree I never finished and credit-card debt from car repairs and medical expenses.  I got a weekend job at a restaurant back in August and funneled all my extra money toward my debt, which alleviated a lot of stress.

But in late winter I started funneling all my extra money toward my savings.  My office's situation seemed tenuous.  Then my cat got sick.  Hundreds of dollars were flying out of my pocket to figure out what was wrong with her.  So I quit my day job.

While I could manufacture 7,000 reasons why I had to leave my office job because my cat was sick, the real reason is that it just didn't feel right to stay.  I had been working seven days a week between the two jobs.  My office job was never going to be a career for me, and I was staying there because I was too scared to make a leap back to full-time serving.  That fear fell away when I didn't know whether I was going to lose my cat.  When I was waking up multiple times a night to get to her with something disposable before she puked.  Everything fell away.

I took my cat to a second vet after an initial diagnosis of hyperthyroidism because I had a feeling her normal vet wasn't being very thorough.  (A little birdie high-school-friend vet in Chicago wasn't convinced either.)  The new vet said, indeed, the first vet wasn't being very thorough ("stupid," she said).  She had me try to figure out why my cat was still puking on the thyroid med -- from the med itself, from the pill pocket she took with the med, etc.  When no changes I made seemed to work and my cat puked four times one morning and I had to work at the restaurant, my dad came over to cat sit and my vet met me that afternoon, on a Sunday when she was closed, to take blood to confirm that the main problem was still hyperthyroidism.  She gave me food for hyperthyroidism, told me to take my cat off the thyroid med completely, and gave me a med to treat nausea if needed.

The first vet had told me there is no dietary remedy for hyperthyroidism.  As this blog has shown...

doctors vary.

Well, puke puke puke, I started giving my cat the nausea med every evening.  Somewhere in there was my last day at the office.  Then, at the vet's suggestion (via email; very modern, this senior citizen), I kept my cat on the med until it ran out.  It's been a few days off the nausea med and of course it's scary to say it, but she hasn't been puking.  And she's gaining weight.  Her face has filled back out (which I can apparently tell despite all the fur).  Her appetite and behavior never changed, so it was as if I was the only one going through all the craziness and she was just puke, eat, puke, eat, run around, jump, I'm a cat, puke, eat, birdies!, birdies!, snooze, purr -- it was so strange.  It's still strange.  I put her food next to my bed so I can monitor her and it stinks to high heaven but it's a delight to see her eat.  A gorgeous sight, like that Cure song says.

It gives me a lot of respect for people who take care of others hand and foot, like my grandma did with my grandpa.  She did essentially what I'm doing for my cat except she did it for years and years and years and years and years and my grandpa lost almost all of his mobility over that time.  He stopped even noticing the human equivalent of birdies! at some point, and it all turned into snooze.  With it came dementia, in which my grandma sometimes became his mother.  In which it sometimes seemed he was dreaming, the house growing floors around him, the Ohio River right outside the door.  I can't imagine what it's like to watch your life partner decline like that, to be the one to force him to take his pills, make sure he eats, weigh him back down to reality, all functions of a nurse and very few of a wife.  But her hand smoothing his hair down, one finger bent from arthritis -- the wife.

I'm still looking for a second job, and I still have to figure out a new medical plan (via the Obamacare marketplace).  And right now, I don't ever want to see a pelvic pain doctor again.  I am so, so, so, so over it.  I am so done.  I am so done that I'm surprised I haven't broken all of my possessions in the process of being HULK SMASH done.

I guess I feel like I'm fighting fate at this point and I need to give up.  Here I am after 8.75 years with pelvic pain, every theory I could muster, doctors I can't number, and treatments upon treatments that have nothing to do with one another.  I've taken jobs, quit jobs, gone off and on psych meds, been single, been in a relationship.  I've dwelt in all four houses asking questions, mental, physical, emotional, spiritual.  I've done more research than I can stomach.  I've been writing this blog for almost seven years.  I've made many friends through it, all invaluable.

I guess when I started this blog, I thought I was writing toward the end of the story.  Someday it would arrive.  I'd be all or mostly pain-free, and it'd be a big happy time for me and for people like me who needed the data I'd gathered.  But while I made some progress a few months ago with nerve blocks on the left side, all attempts to address the remaining pain have failed, and the remaining pain is no less a monster.  Now we're treating my pain as if it's coming from my intestines, which is a fine theory but nothing new.  It's cycle 3 or 4 of the gastrointestinal theory.

If I could, if I had the resources and the liberty, I'd go on a massive vision quest.  I'd hike the Appalachian Trail or drive to every state in the country or kayak from Pittsburgh to New Orleans.  I'd go long enough and with little enough to forget everything and find new eyes.  But right now, it doesn't make sense.

Instead, my gut is telling me to do the same quest while standing still.  And in order to do it, I have to let everything go.  I have to let hope hang by itself, unmoving.

I might be back.  Til then, here's to great storytelling.