While it’s Still Thursday…

Well, I got increas­ing­ly wifty and con­fused due to fibro fog dur­ing the day. In fact, sam­bear called shad­owkatt and set her to super­vis­ing me, insist­ing that I eat, take my meds, and not attempt dan­ger­ous things like, oh, walking.

I’d called the rheuma­tol­o­gist’s office every day this week with no response—hadn’t been able to get through to a human and my mes­sages weren’t returned. (They just got a new phone sys­tem, and the doc today said things are still problematic.) 

After being for­ti­fied with food, meds, and water, I tried call­ing again. I final­ly reached a human by punch­ing in ran­dom exten­sion num­bers. I was told that for break­through pain meds I’d have to come into the office. I explained that I had no way to GET to the office because I cer­tain­ly was­n’t in any con­di­tion to be dri­ving. My choic­es were to get there today, some­how, and be “worked in” at the end of the day—or wait ’til next week because the doc would­n’t be there tomor­row. Well, that answered that question.

My hero endured an odyssey of train and bus trans­fers, then a taxi ride, to get home to me. sam­bear is the most incred­i­ble part­ner in the world. And shad­owkatt is a bet­ter daugh­ter than I deserve. She should­n’t have had to take care of me for anoth­er 40 years or so!

So he got me to Lawrenceville. The office felt like an oven for some inex­plic­a­ble rea­son (they swore that the heat was­n’t on, and the rest of the build­ing was nice and cool). I was even fur­ther out of it by the time I got to see the doctor—who, by the way, is an angel for see­ing me after 5 pm anyway.

Then she tried to send me to the ER because she had trou­ble even fig­ur­ing out what my pulse was and my blood pres­sure was ridicu­lous­ly high. The physi­cian’s assis­tant could­n’t quite get the pulse at first, either. I stopped doing any­thing but focus­ing on bring­ing it and the BP down, and suc­ceed­ed in get­ting the pulse down to 108 (they did­n’t retake the BP). There are some advan­tages to that old biofeed­back train­ing, even if it can’t over­come this lev­el of pain.

Sam con­vinced her that the heart rate and BP real­ly were due to the pain I was in. I think I remem­ber her say­ing some­thing about nev­er hav­ing seen me so out of it before, but I’m not sure. Maybe Sam knows. Again, she wants to send me to a pain specialist—and I don’t have any way to afford that. Any new doc­tor is going to want lots and lots of new tests and is not like­ly to be amenable to me pay­ing what I can here and there. In fact, the only one I’ve found local­ly who is list­ed as an FMS spe­cial­ist who is real­ly good won’t accept unin­sured patients at all, period.

I have a pre­scrip­tion for hydrocodone-APAP, stronger than what I’ve had in the past (I think that’s gener­ic Lortab). It works and it was cheap. So now I have a pain med I can take at night (only at night, really—I can’t dri­ve or any­thing while on this stuff), which should help with the sleep­ing and maybe help stop this par­tic­u­lar pain flare.

We stopped at Sam’s Club to fill the RX, and my Sam bought Club crack­ers for me, which I’m nib­bling on as an alter­na­tive to Saltines. I may get real­ly wild tomor­row and try ‘nil­la wafers.

Doc’s office is sup­posed to be fax­ing a let­ter to my school tomor­row. I hope that’ll help some with the accom­mo­da­tion issue.

I men­tioned that I am mov­ing for­ward on the dis­abil­i­ty claim and that she should have some kind of request for info from them soon. She said she def­i­nite­ly sup­ports my claim, which is A Very Good Thing.

I haven’t got­ten the girl to the aller­gist’s office this week for her shots. That is NOT good. sam­bear is going to take her tomor­row. Hope­ful­ly, he’ll be able to go to work after that (the aller­gist clos­es at noon on Fri­day). I feel guilty for pulling him away from the office because I’m puny.

Obvi­ous­ly, I did­n’t make class today. As much as I detest the speech class, I did­n’t want to miss it, either. Oh well.

To bed now, to cud­dle up with my sweet hero.