I’m a Student! But Still a Crip, Too

Well, I’m offi­cial­ly in school and off to a run­ning limp­ing start. 

I made it to my sta­tis­tics class on Tues­day, but only after a nasty fall. I was only about 20 min­utes late, and the pro­fes­sor was more than under­stand­ing. I was utter­ly lost for the first part of the class, but by the end of it, I felt very com­fort­able. I can do this.

My body took over on Wednes­day, though. I slept all day, despite alarms and phone calls. Seriously—I did not wake at all until after 2:30 or so, and I believe that was because my blad­der and need for pain meds final­ly won out over the need for more rest. So much for the week­ly blood test appoint­ment at 11. I did­n’t get much home­work done through the rest of the day, either, though I did try. Hope­ful­ly eat­ing the whole day is enough to appease the fibromyal­gia demon.

So today has been giv­en over to doing all of the week’s assign­ments for tomor­row’s course, Comp100. That’s the “learn to use Win­dows, Word, and Excel” class that’s required for every­one at this school. I’m real­ly annoyed at hav­ing to take it at all. There are lots of lit­tle assign­ments, and while I know this stuff inside, even make­work takes time. 

Right now, I’m tak­ing a din­ner break. I deserve that much.

The biggest chal­lenge of that course (oth­er than fol­low­ing the *exact* direc­tions rather than doing things in more effi­cient ways) is that the text­book is too bloody big and heavy. I had prob­lems with that at my last school, too. I need a seri­ous book­stand because hold­ing these big texts real­ly is a phys­i­cal chal­lenge for me. They’re increas­ing my pain, which makes it hard for me to focus on read­ing the assignments.

In hap­pi­er news, my admis­sions “advo­cate” called me today to tell me that the tran­script eval­u­a­tors had revised their opin­ion of my cred­its and giv­en me anoth­er 13 cred­its! So I’m anoth­er semes­ter clos­er to grad­u­at­ing. I think that puts me fair­ly close to senior lev­el, which means more finan­cial aid eligibility. 

Katie and I have fall­en into a pat­tern of doing our home­work togeth­er every day. That’s nice, and it helps a lot with my miss­ing the time we spent togeth­er homeschooling.

I’m hop­ing that I can get caught up and stay there by the end of this week­end, and then have time to breathe and do fun things again. This is just a half-time sched­ule, so I real­ly need to build a lot more sta­mi­na before I try to add two more class­es next semester!

Do you know what I want? A trike. Real­ly. A great big trike with a nice big bas­ket. I think I could ride to school near as fast as I could get there on MARTA. I might have to spend the night there before I could ride back home, but give me some time and sure­ly I’d build up some kind of sta­mi­na again. Eventually.

I know how to ride a bicy­cle, cer­tain­ly, but my bal­ance has gone to heck thanks to the FMS and I don’t recov­er from falls well, so I’ll give in and ask the uni­verse for a three-wheel­er. Sure­ly they’re less expen­sive than the scoot­er I need, right?