black lab – FibroM.E.-Awesome

2020 Hear Me Roar! Or Meow, Just Depending on Things

Published on January 3, 2020January 3, 2020 by Mary Gelpi1 Comment

Even if the Holidays are officially over, (although Mardi Gras is just around the corner) there’s nothing like the mood set by a lit Christmas tree in a dim living room. Monty is sleeping beneath it, his long breaths almost in sync with the fade on-off feature of the lights–it all sets quite a scene. Like a Norman Rockwell painting in here.

There’s something about quiet nights like this—just the dog, me, and the glow of the tree, that I feel I’ll remember for a long time to come. Maybe it’s this hidden fear that it’s all about to change, which is true, it is. You always end up missing the ordinary things.

I’m trying to ignore this headache and concentrate on the smell of the fern. It’s not really working, the headache tends to win out a lot. But I’m enjoying the atmosphere nonetheless. This has been quite the Giving Tree. I only watered it once!

I say it every year, I know, but the Holidays still thrill me because people do nice things for no other reason than “Hey, it’s Christmas” and it’s always been one of my favorite things, ever. I’d been attempting to get a Christmas tree since Thanksgiving weekend but my health wouldn’t cooperate. Two weeks before Christmas my stepdad Marc showed up out of the blue at 2 pm, knocked and swung open the door jokingly singing some Christmas tune. He had a 10 footer in his truck just for me. What a gesture!

I named her Carol and we put her in the corner and she has been a real treasure. It was all the gift I needed really. Kidding—it’s about having family and friends to share Carol with, and having them here was great. Of course, it came at great risk.

A week before my brother and his family of five in tow were to arrive, their oldest came down with a stomach bug. Then the youngest. And on and on. One by one, each day, another would vomit. Another bit the dust. My mom and I would dart our eyes back and forth with news of the next man down, calculating their arrival date in our heads. Then on Friday, my brother Nick finally succumbed to it–they were arriving Monday. The ominous question no one wanted to entertain entered the conversation. Was one dang Holiday worth the rest of us barfing all night? Of course it was! It’s Christmas for Gosh sake!

Who could do without these cotton headed ninny muggins?

We justified it. We convinced ourselves. No, they wouldn’t be contagious by Monday. Couldn’t be. We’d wash our hands. We’d drink hand sanitizer and bathe in vinegar. Many people convinced me with enough handwashing we’d be in the clear. My mom was more skeptical, but eventually she said a bit defeated What can ya do? If we get it, we get it.

Well, at 1:30 am on December 28th, we got it. Or, I got it. Snuck right up on me. I puked so much tinsel I thought I’d puke again. And I did! It wasn’t tinsel, it was kale, I just thought tinsel painted a more festive image. I cursed Christmas, just for a moment, but then thought eh, what the heck. They’re worth it.

Luckily the same fam who gave it to me, took care of me just as well. I thought Jeesh, being sick is so much easier with people around! That thing knocked me out. Since everyone left three days ago, I’ve spent every day in bed with a weighted exhaustion and deep ache in my bones. BUT, today was the first day I woke up migraine free and my old lady bones had calmed down at least a little. Progress!

I was thinking how it’s difficult to be in a position of needing help. Chronically that is. A stomach bug leaves, but this chronic illness stuff, it will ware you and your loved ones out. The idea of being a burden is a constant fear I fight. It’s so reassuring to know your own autonomy and be able to rely on yourself. Losing those capabilities through illness is hard to know what to do with. Asking for and accepting help was more difficult than I expected, especially when you were once so independent. One of the tougher lessons in all of this, I think. But, it becomes easier when you stop resisting it. What you resist, persists, as they say.

Once you start to release the idea of your self that doesn’t quite exist (healthy, reliable), you ease into the reality of being just the human you are. (A wasteland) The best way to handle this is with humility and gratitude. No one likes to help an ungrateful pain in the ass. But someone who is aware of what they require, can reach out for it with grace and acknowledge those who help them with humbleness, is more likely to receive kindness. People are more apt to tolerate and even enjoy your pain in the assness. That’s where being sick surprises me. It can bring out incredible things and open the door for doing good– not just in yourself but in others too.

Speaking of doing good, I wanted to end on a note about advocacy. Namely, what an absent advocate I’ve been this last year. I was sort of on a role, going to D.C., circulating the petition, begging for signatures like a desperate vacuum-cleaner salesmen. Do those still exist? Sending thousands of pages of names and stories to the NIH. Then what?

Besides spending the first three quarters of 2019 in the physical state of a trashcan lit on fire, it was more than a lack of physical health. I lost my footing. You have to find a very particular headspace with ME advocacy, and I sort of lost myself. I became discouraged at the federal responses, the intolerably slow pace of things, and increasingly saddened hearing the repeated stories of such insanely debilitated people being dismissed, doubted, and deserted by the medical world. Shamefully I admit, it was just easier not to fight. At times I thought What am I doing? Is this going to achieve anything?

You can’t unring the bell, is the thing. Once you see how bad it is, how desperate this situation is, it feels negligent not to fight to try and change it. There are no guarantees in advocacy. But like always, I know inside it’s better to try. Maybe it won’t make a difference today, but our collective efforts are going to change things eventually. All a matter of when.

In the meantime, the fight is infuriating. You have to remain hopeful despite receiving responses from the NIH, like the one below, that tried very hard to list all the ways they were getting serious about MECFS, and even included a Press Release from 2015 to prove they meant business! Effectively their letter said this: We. Still. Don’t. Get It! Orrr, maybe they do get it, in which case their letter said this: We. Still. Don’t. Care! But thanks for writing us, and sending that cute box, haha! What a crock. You can (click) and read the letter below, or someone can make a fart sound and that would effectively be the same thing.

This letter can suck it.

Best be summed up

With a fart sound.

Their response wasn’t infuriating because it didn’t include a promise to immediately allocate $100 million bucks. (Although, that really would help us out GUYS) It was immensely tonedeaf but most of all it just didn’t hold true. I read the words over and over, grasping at vague promises and past “efforts” trying to convince me that they really do care. OK, great. But you can’t just take their word for it, so when you do your due diligence and learn things like NIH funding dropped 25% since 2017 for MECFS research— it’s easy to think OH What in the name of SAM HILL HELL ARE YALL THINKING? Ahem, excuse me. Like I was saying, proper headspace.

So, you get it. It’s tough. But the work is too important. I’ve seen what this disease has done to countless strangers, I’ve lived what it’s done to me, and I continue to watch what it’s done to my mom and most recently my sister. I just wanted to remind myself here at the beginning of the new year, and the twelve or so readers, that this fight is desperately still in need of all our help. It’s absolutely clear the NIH won’t act without a lot of outside pressure and heat and noise; I believe we can bring it.

I’ll do my best to stick with it and continue to try and be creative and positive throughout this fight. As always, I’m open to ideas! The petition is still live and well, but I’ll work on new ideas of how best to work with it.

Being shown and gifted so much kindness in my life, I think the best possible way I can pay it forward is to remain dedicated to this campaign, regardless of how little I think it may matter on one day or hopeless I may momentarily feel. At heart I believe the change we seek is possible. And Monty does too.

Health, Happiness, and the Roaring 2020’s

I’ll Take ‘New Years Eve From Bed’ for $1000, Alex

Published on January 1, 2019January 1, 2019 by Mary Gelpi1 Comment

Sometimes life is so tragically hilarious that you could laugh or you could cry, but when you’ve shed enough tears to fill a pool, laughter is nearly the preferable way to go. If you can swing it.

I’m laughing because it’s New Years Eve, I’m in 5 day old pajamas and have only left the house by being driven by my parents to urgent care over the weekend and for x-rays, blood work and an ultra sound at the clinic today. Now I’m at home, listening to the coonass neighbors set off what sound like homemade bombs, Monty is never more than a foot away from me as he’s afraid of what I can only assume he must assume are the end times out there…

This is basically the funniest picture of Monty I’ve ever seen. It’s like he’s *trying* to play it cool like he’s not scared, but it’s all gone horribly wrong

OK so then on top of this somewhat sad, funny setup, there I was watching The Antique Roadshow with my parents. Marc was already half-asleep in his chair. Well, I’m 34, I’m going to kiss Monty for NYE, and it’s anyones guess how late I’ll stay up. Then around 10ish my mom told me she was exhausted and going to bed. I’m at home now, attempting to write, which I’m deathly afraid I’ve forgotten how to do so excuse the caca that may emerge through the next few posts while Stella gets her groove back. The point is, I’m 34 and peeing every 20 minutes and I doubt I’ll make it to midnight. Now that’s comedy! At least we’re not watching My 600 Pound Life…that show can really get you down.

Anyway, I wonder how many other asses were kicked besides mine due to the intrinsic chaos attached to the Holidays. Because you can considered mine booted. Crashed and burned. And it’s raining outside! Some easy reasons to be blue, but rain is actually a huge part of why I love living in the south. My dad always said rain was a sign of balance–and on every occasion some small shower falls from the sky and comforts us all in some way that he’s still there…still looking out for things, even when they’re a catastrophe. Maybe this year it means the scales will tip a little further in the direction of help for the MECFS demographic–help even the ‘playing field’ when it comes to our efforts for change. Maybe I’m just a hopeless romantic. But hey, he’s helped out before.

The biggest bummer besides my body failing is that cognitively it’s been spaghetti brain all over the place a lot of this year. Especially the last 6 months. And it seems like the brain needs rest the same way a physical crash requires one. But writing is my outlet. I feel angst when I don’t write here. Doing it forces me to remember, be patient and grateful and most of all, to help restore my hope. It’s aways been something I can do despite being sick. So to not feel like I can creates a void among voids I’m already fighting. It’s hard to know when to just stop and take a break, or when to just keep writing through it, even when it seems to kind of…suck.

I write through a lot of it and post very little. I tell myself I’ll stop doing that because that fear of bad writing can really tailspin into no writing, and that’s the worst you can do. Inspiration can hit you in the middle of doing what feels like crappy, worthless work. And it seems less likely to be struck by anything meaningful when you’ve turned your back on trying because you’re afraid it will be bad. Sometimes it will be…I think you just write through it. Or you become a lowly loser blogger whose only readers consist of your sister and your aunt Amy. They were the first followers of this blog :)

Writing and thinking and speaking coherently have become so much harder this year. Half of it do to the meds I have to take to control the RLS and skin crawling, where life is just not possible without the treatment. When I picture my brain I see a six lane highway with bumper to bumper traffic that spans for miles with no way to exit besides getting out and walking. It’s so cluttered up there, forgetful and all out-of-order. Luckily it is the pace of writing, its’ patient ability to wait for me to think of words, that allows me to continue. Unluckily, it takes me so much longer to write than before, and by the end I can’t gouge if it makes any sense so I skip it and say I’ll come back to post later. Guess who doesn’t post later? So there’s about six….thousand… of those suckers just open on my computer, waiting to go somewhere. I just need to stop being a pansy and post. What’s with this damned hesitation? Good grief.

It hit me this year how hard it is to be around people who aren’t sick simply because it brought me up close to what a typical life looks like. I tend to forget how dysfunctional mine is. I watched as they would make breakfast and listen to loud music in the morning and carry babies and take showers like it was nothing. Of course it’s nothing. That’s what a healthy life permits you, and so it can be a bitter reminder of the things that are marathons for you, when you see just how easy they could be thoughtless tasks. But this is why sickness is always encouraging consciousness if you’re to live with it and find peace at the same time.

If you kept a list of “can no longer do’s’, you’d run out of paper and possibly lose your mind. In day-to-day life, you have this *creative challenge* we’ll call it, to just hang tightly on to what you can do, what you have, and squeeze the hell out of that lemon for all the juice inside it. Years ago I had to learn to start counting up, not down, in my everyday life in order to keep going. To find momentum, purpose, laughter, creativity–all that cheesy crap they write on picture frames at TJ Maxx–you’ve got to find your small pieces of joy and feed them until they start to return the favor tenfold.

It would be easy enough to be depressed on a day like today. It’s New Years Eve, and I know my friends are picking out fancy outfits for the night. They’ll drink and dance and party. Since we spent most of today at the doctor getting x-rays and ultra sounds and blood work after a bladder infection seemed to move to my kidneys, I think it’s safe to say there’s no partying for my NYE. But that’s OK. I mean it sucks, it’s OK to say it sucks, but it’s OK too. I mean here I am talking about my bladder to strangers on the internet! Should I get into my bowels? I won’t, they’re fine.

I really wanted to write tonight because I was thinking of all the people in similar situations as me–particularly all the sickley’s out there. I just wanted them to know that if you’re feeling low, well 1, that’s understandable. But 2. try hard to remember you’re not alone in all this, even if you’re by yourself. I know it’s difficult to take that seriously. But I also know how isolated it can feel when you turn on the TV and see two million people partying in Time Square while your miles away in PJ’s, in bed, etc. I hope you remember how many others of us there are, going through the same or similar experience, missing out on overhyped parties and whatever else is happening out there.

We’re still connected to each other in some way, and I don’t know how to convey it exactly in a way that really eases the loneliness that nights like these tend to reinforce–but the numbers don’t lie. There are millions of us, all in similar boats. And we don’t have to know each other deeply to know we’re out here. I’m one right here!

Let’s also not forget, we tend to imagine these elaborate parties with tigers on leashes and super models serving champagne on a rooftop with views of NYC, but they’re never as good in reality as they are in our minds. Tonight is just a change of numbers. Tomorrow will be back to normal.

The difference is that it’s 2019, and I plan on working so hard and creatively with my efforts in getting the NIH to see what they don’t appear capable of seeing. -We’ve already made a breakthrough, (more on that next time) and established an important connection. Was their response satisfactory? Haha, NO. Not by a long shot. But this was just one of the first steps, and there will be many more to come.

I would ask anyone at midnight to just stop and focus their attention for even a few seconds on major change for MECFS. Think about the things you want to happen, even if it seems obvious, and send it out into the world. Maybe the desperate changes we need will converge somewhere in the universe, meet over some remote place above the Atlantic Ocean and help make things work in our favor. I believe we can do what we’ve set out for. We just have to continue to help each other, support and carry one another through when the work is too heavy, and never lose hope that we will get through to the right people and that the work we’re doing is crucial. We will attain the change we need, I know it. At midnight that’s what I’ll be thinking of, and I hope you’ll join me.

I truly hope everyone had a happy holiday, sick, well, or in-between. I’ll see you tonight in the stars somewhere. I wish you all the best, and if you’re like me and you’re going to kiss your dog at midnight, maybe also make your wish, kiss your fingertips, and blow it out into the cosmos. I believe in the power of energy if nothing else. Whatever you do, don’t lose hope, as impossible as that can feel. Try to imagine how amazing it will feel when our efforts come to fruition. The advocacy world has made some major progress this year. Now, we just need to get the government to follow our lead :) easy peasy! I think 2019 will have much bigger things to come, so hang in there with me. I need ya.

Health, Happiness and HapPEE New Years!

**I promise this is the last blog that’s so long. I’m fixing it, ok? My brain is thinking in non-sequiturs. I’ll fix it.