So I’m still sick. Too many days to count at this point. If you’ve been here before you might already be sick of my whining, but to be totally honest it’s hard for me to think of much else.

When I’m at work, since sitting is the worst thing for a back with a slipped disc, I’m supposed to get up every twenty minutes or so. The thing is, thanks to my acute pain, it takes around fifteen minutes for me to concentrate hard enough to get stuff done. If I were to get up every twenty minutes, I would get absolutely nothing done. So work is a total mess. I am pissed that I’m not accomplishing work and I am pissed that I’m in pain. The more pissed I get, the more pain I have; it’s a fun cycle.

Each night, I come home and lie in bed. Work to subway, subway to bed. I haven’t gotten a word of reading done. I’m still not signed up for all my classes. I don’t care what I eat, whether I eat. Maybe this is what they call depression. Maybe I’m losing my mind. Maybe I’m just whining. Who the fuck knows.

What I do know is that I need to get work done. I need to go to my volunteer assignments. My sign language class starts Tuesday and I’ll fail if I miss classes. I need to sign up for my courses or I won’t be able to get in.

I know that people who know me and love me will say that none of those things matter and my health is the only important thing. I agree. I would give so much to have this pain stop. To be able to stand up again without cringing. To get a full night of sleep.

But I’m tired. I don’t want to be sick anymore. I want to be able to go on with my life. I want to learn to play the saxophone. I want to go kickboxing. I want to ski. I want to learn how to Waltz. I want to sit without crying. I want this crap to be over.

I am so goddamn tired of it.

Previously?

My house is a total mess.

Over a month ago, my computer had a virus which caused me to reinstall the registries on my machine. Thanks to an illness that renders sitting a very painful activity for me, I haven’t used my desktop since that night. I do know however that the soundcard is still not working and I have absolutely no idea how to fix it. I can only imagine the more subtle errors that are still sitting on my machine, which I won’t be able to catch until my discs stop digging into my back.

My clothes are all over the living room couch and the chair in my bedroom. Until we packed for Christmas, our luggage sat on the floor, unpacked since Thanksgiving. This morning, Jake kindly unpacked our bags from our shortened vacation so now my clothes decorate the chair, the treadmill and the bed.

I am supposed to put pillows under my knees when I lie on my back and under my tummy when I lie on my stomach and somewhere under my legs when I lie on my side. On my bed, we currently have six pillows, just in case I am in a certain position and a pillow is not at hand. These pillows start in their correct location (under my knees, for example) but end up on the floor after several hours of battle during the night. A few hours later, they’ll end up back in bed, possibly even under my head this time. The dust in my house and I have become close friends.

Jake has been doing all the house errands, cooking me three meals a day and doing anything in his power to make me put as little effort on my body as possible. He’s kind, loving and generous.

I love him.

I don’t know what I would do without him.

Previously?

I’m a list maker.

I believe there are two kinds of people in the world: ones who make lists and ones who don’t. While the makers can’t understand how the others can keep track of things, the non-makers don’t believe in keeping track. Anyhow, since I’m a list maker, my friend Mike’s idea sounds just like my kinda project.

He said that he had this friend who made a list of 100 things she wants to do before she dies. The list contains anything from ‘having a baby’ to ‘being on TV’. He talked about how his friend tries to do one thing in the list each year. After our conversation I started thinking about wishes that would make it to my list.

So I sat down and made one. Believe it or not, it was hard to think of 100 things, I could only come up with 50. I figured I’d start on the 50 while I thought of others to add. I’ll type up the entire thing in a few days but in the meantime, here are some sneak previews off my list.

– fly a plane
– go to Antarctica
– read a book in French
– get drunk
– own a Dalmatian

The items can be anything, the only criteria is that you want to do it. Some items can be things that you know you will do someday like getting married while others can be things that will really take an effort to accomplish, like climbing the Everest. The only caution I want to mention is to make sure the list item is something you can measure. If you put an item like ‘be happy’ on the list it’s really hard to figure out if that item is ever officially off your list.

Anyhow, it’s your list so you can put anything you want on it.

What items would make your list?

Previously?

Goody Links
Ever wondered the history of chewing gum or potato chips? Here’s a great site for the history of just about everything. [ via MetaFilter ]

In case you were convinced that Bush won, over a month later you still can’t be sure. I wonder how many people’s careers are gonna be over before we get a new president?

Thoughts
from calm to psychotic in under 60
This morning I woke up much better than yesterday. My back was still aching but I’d actually managed to sleep most of the night so I figured that had to be a good sign. On the way to work, flurries of snowflakes were falling and I smiled. I love snow, especially when it’s sweet and non-intrusive like it was.

Until 3:45, I was having an okay day. Small frustrations of getting my schedule together were annoying but not enough to throw me off. My sign language class is offered on Tuesdays now so I was actually happy. And then….and then my so-called doctor’s office called.

I went to this doctor for the first time on Monday morning. I specifically asked how long the appointment takes cause I had a 10am class and they told me it would be no problem. No problem my ass. I got out of there at 10:25 and then I still had to call back to schedule a follow-up appointment. When I got out of my class, on the way to another, I called the office and had to call three times just to be able to get an appointment. That morning when I was seeing the doctor, I told him I really didn’t favor taking pills and he said that while he agreed with me, he still wanted to put me on steroids cause he said it would heal my disc problems immediately. So I said fine and started taking all three medications he prescribed.

Yesterday, after having spent a painful and sleepless night, I called the doctor’s office at 9am and asked them to find out why I was still in enough pain not to be able to sleep. The fucking office calls me back a day and a half later, and the stupid-ass secretary says she’s gonna put me on another medication and that the doctor wants me to schedule an MRI. To say the least, I freaked. I asked the chick whether I was supposed to take this new medicine in addition to what I already was taking and she said yes. I asked her why I needed an MRI and she goes, “Look I have no idea, I’m telling you what the doctor told me. He looked at your chart and told me to do this.” So I tell her about how totally unresponsive this doctor’s been to me and how I will have to change doctors and she goes “Well, I thought I was being real nice to you.” I must tell you that at this point, she probably could not have said anything without me blowing up.

So I hung up and called Jake who told me to call my regular doctor (who is wonderful and amazing) and ask for another doctor. I call the woman’s office and she’s gone for the day. Her very patient and kind nurse listens to me as I cry and babble over the phone about how I wanna know why I need to take even more medication and how I’m still in pain after these steroids and how this doctor won’t tell me what’s going on. I just went berserk. I’m at work and I’m weeping. I call my poor mother all the way in Turkey at 11:30pm, still blabbering.

In the meantime, I call NYU to schedule this MRI and the woman tells me I need a permission number to be able to schedule an MRI and since this is a regular procedure, the doctor’s office should have already given me one and the hospital can’t schedule an MRI without it. So I call the office back and the woman’s totally clueless and she says she’ll need a few days to get me this number. Let alone the fact that the earliest MRI appointment I can get at this moment is already 10 days away.

As I get off the phone, I realize my regular doctor did call me back and is now leaving to go home. I struggle to call her back but her office is closed so I get her paged. The paging service is a total bitch and hangs up on me as soon as she has my number. This amazing doctor calls me back from God knows where and she calms me down. She tells me that I’m probably having an emotional reaction due to one of the medications I’m taking. She tells me that she wants me to change doctors and says that I totally should feel comfortable with my doctor and gives me another name to call at 9am on Monday morning. I ask her if I’m supposed to take this additional anti-inflammatory medication the other doctor gave me and she goes “But you’re already taking an anti-inflammatory” and she says that one should never take two anti-inflammatory medications at the same time. So she tells me to go home and lie down and ignore the other medication. She’s kind, she’s wonderful, and she’s amazing.

I go to the pharmacy where the asshole doctor called for my prescription and the pharmacist says that with the current medication I’m taking he would recommend highly against my taking this additional medication. I tell him my general doctor agreed and that I refuse to take this new prescription and come home to lie down.

All of this in about 40 minutes. I am now dying with pain and that doctor is extremely lucky he’s nowhere near my vicinity.

Why do doctors in this country suck so hard? What happened to personal care and attention?

Previously?

I know I haven’t had many excerpts lately but I promise they will come back as soon as I am sane and in one piece.

When I mentioned that my back was broken yesterday, I meant it. Last night, I lay in bed almost crying from the pain. There was absolutely no possible position in which I could curl up and not hurt myself. I tried lying on my back, my stomach, my side, half leg off the bed, both legs under my stomach. None of it worked. Nothing. Nada!

So this morning after a few hours of walking around hunched and changing positions in my chair every few seconds, I started worrying that something might have gone seriously wrong. I have a family full of people with slipped disks, so I had reason to worry. My wonderful doctor was kind enough to give me an appointment pretty much right away and she told me, thankfully, that I hadn’t injured anything permanently but that I wasn’t in real good shape. She gave me some strong drugs (weee!) to take the pain away and told me that she wants me to do physical therapy. Ugh!

My experiences with physical therapy are horrendous at best. I had years of it back at home. It was okay while the guy was doing it but minutes after he’d leave the pain would start shooting up and down my spine and I’d end up, curled up on the floor, weeping. You must understand that after such magnificent memories, I am really not looking forward to these sessions. It might even be better to keep walking around hunched up.

Thanks to Heather, I had my first laugh today. Thanks for making my day, I really needed it, especially today.

I came home, all bummed out, really feeling quite miserable. About forty minutes later, I called my friend John who lives in Japan and we talked for quite a while and I am so glad we did. From December of last year to this past May, I was living in Tokyo, for work and I had no friends whatsoever. John, and his now girlfriend Liz, were two of my closest friends. John actually ate lunch with my almost every single day of those six months. We even sat at the restaurant, him reading his book and me reading mine. He listened to me whine about my job and played the typing arcade game with me until the wee hours of the morning. Liz took me to my first and second hairdresser trips. Since she knows how to speak Japanese, she talked to the funnily dressed woman who was about to change the length and color of my hair. If it weren’t for her, I would have never had the opportunity to experience the hair washing machines that wash your hair on their own. Just like sticking your head in a toilet bowl. By the time I got off the phone, I missed Japan and felt thankful for my friends, no matter how much or little I get to speak to them. Thank you John and Liz for being the best! Since they are both taking the same Japanese exam as I am on Sunday (well Liz is taking the expert level but it’s on the same day) I also wanted to wish them both tons of luck!

May you always be surrounded with friends (and no backache).

Before?

Thoughts
Starting at age 11, I wrote in my diary every single day. So much so that my friends would make fun of me. To top it off, I was a very private person and shared my feelings with no one, which made these diaries even more precious. My friends would tease about having read them and I’d fly off the handle, as they wanted me to.

The greatest thing about having written years of diaries is that I can now go back and read them all. Amidst the childish blabber, I find some gems.

During the last years of high school and in the beginning of college, I used to ask people to write me letters. Handwritten ones. As much as they whined about it, I have all these amazing letters now. Trust me when I say that they are much more precious than email. I had this theory (which I still believe in) that people feel more comfortable writing things down as opposed to vocalizing them. Somehow when we write them down, things become easier to say. We can talk about our feelings and our disappointments, etc.

When you write things down, you don’t have to worry about the opposite party’s reaction. You don’t have to worry about their disappointment, lack of excitement, disapproval, anger, bewilderment or anything else. You just pour things out, writing to a faceless entity. I’ve found that this process makes people more honest, more open and more at ease. Don’t believe me? Give it a try!

Before?