The Forgotten Draft: It Was Scribbled Back In May

Monday surely was a wonderful day.  I will remember it, draw upon it, make it a point de repère. 

If you missed my wonderful Monday because, possibly, you were busy enjoying your own wonderful day, allow me to summarize:  Due to violent spasms, mostly in my left leg, oddly enough, I took BOTH tizanidine and baclofen around 2 AM, something that is not advisable and that I'd never done before.  Normally, I sleep in discrete increments of 45 to 90 minutes, after which my body and mind like to take a break from all that restorative good stuff and thrash around for a bit, maybe bake some bread, do a load of towels, or scrub an already clean floor.  However, after downing a double dose of muscle relaxants -- Oh, Sweet Oblivion!  I slept for 8 hours, uninterrupted.  You'd have thought I had undergone both a complete body and personality transplant.  Pain?  Who cared?  I could deal with it -- I could do anything.

("I can do it;  I can do anything!":  Words for which I am famous, having once sat upright while still asleep and made the announcement in a strong, loud voice, after which I laid back down and resumed snoring.  I was in the middle of my first semester in grad school and feeling rather... challenged.)

You know how the story goes.  Monday came, Monday went.  Monday night?  Sleepless.  Jerking leg.  Having already baked, washed, and scrubbed, I settled for distraction and finished off one mediocre mystery novel and started another.  Tuesday proved difficult.  The spasms shifted gears, ignoring the musical rules of tempo and the physical limitations of gravity -- while the regular pain battled my best intentions and asserted its coarse familiarity. 

I picked a fight with Fred over one of the Militant Existential Feminist Lesbians and badmouthed a Straight Uncontemplative Non-Feminist Woman he likes a lot.  He was disgustingly kind and accepting in response.  Grrrr.  I was shorttempered with Buddy the Kitten, spraying him in the face with The Dread Yellow Water Bottle when he bit down on a data wire --completely forgetting to try "No!" first.  He responded by licking my nose, curling up on my chest, and purring.  Grrrr.  I fired off a snotty email to my half-sister who promptly replied with some nonsense about neverending love.  Grrrr.  What?  Will no one let me pitch a fit, and help to fuel it with an in-kind donation?  Are they all, prepubescent felines included, going to ignore and squelch my Maladaptive Sick Behaviors?  Grrrr.

But as more and more people are saying, "at the end of the day," we made it through... 

Let's see.  That brings this fascinating LifeLog to Tuesday night.  I had a major CRPS shift, going from shrunken, blue, burning, freezing cold... to swollen, red, throbbing, burning hot.  Before the pain became so bad, years ago, we used to entertain ourselves by watching my right foot change colors, and considered its temperature variations a potential boon for all those camping trips we were going to take one day.

I consider the Red Phase to be an anachronism, simply because that is how CRPS initially presented itself, back in 2002.  The slow shift to the Blue Phase was accomplished over years, and my new ability to rapidly cycle between them is... well, new.  And by "rapidly," I mean a range from mere minutes to a course of several hours.