How to make “Heaven in a Bowl”:

* 2 small scoops ice cream (vanilla bean works well)
* 2 small spoonfuls of Cool Whip from the freezer
* crumbled up cookie or cookie crumbs
* handful of marshmallows
* chocolate Sundae topping

I enjoyed a big bowl of this today (see pic!) as a reward for getting some really unpleasant and avoided tasks completed…

Can’t wait to brag about this to my psychologist who has been helping me with this fear. See, I’ve had a major mail-phobia for 6 months!

“How can one be terrified of opening the mail?”, you might ask, but it’s actually pretty reasonable to expect in my case. Feelings of dread about bills and paperwork were already settling in earlier. Then when I had my most recent collision at the end of September, I just couldn’t keep up with anything at all for the first little while especially. Everything fell behind, especially the mail and bills. The mail turned from something fairly unpleasant (mostly bills with most of the extra stuff being extra junk or else part of the endless paper nightmare related to car accidents, loss of financial security, application for benefits – and the ensuing rejection letters, etc.).

My hubby had helped me try to keep up, especially in October and November when the “overdue bill” notices started to show up (I’m afraid to check our credit rating). He prepared all these folders for me and would check the mail for me, putting the right papers in their places (”bills”, “receipts to submit to insurance”, “magazines” “flyers”, etc.). But unless it was urgent, it sat there… some of it until today. Let’s just say I saw a whole ton of advertisements today that made me feel like we were still gearing up for the Christmas holidays!! It was very confusing…

I’m glad it’s done. I don’t want to fall that behind again, but I can totally understand how I got that way (and how anyone in my position now and any time could). If you’ve gone through something as life-altering as a collision, having already made huge adjustments due to chronic pain, sometimes crawling through the day (and still trying to be a Mom and a spouse and all that!) is all you can do.

There are some new rules at pharmacies (at least here in Ontario) that are specifically related to controlled narcotics. Yes, these can be the drugs that *some* people can become addicted to. But they are also the medications that many pain patients rely on to keep living their days with some attempt at quality of life that approaches what they were used to before! I know for me my pain meds don’t do all that much for the pain, but over the past few years I’ve found a combination that has brought me some relief and better sleep.

If you aren’t affected or aware of the new rules, here’s what some of them include. This is what I have noticed at Pharmacies ONLY (the Clinic ones are even more legnthy and complicated, perhaps I can list them another day):

* Showing Photo I.D. when picking up prescriptions for yourself.
* Your spouse or family member or friend showing Photo I.D. when picking up Rx.
* Even in the same chain of pharmacy, if they don’t have the medication you need when you need it, they can’t transfer it to another pharmacy. Instead, you need to go to your doctor or clinic (for some people this means going back to a walk-in!) to get a new Rx to bring to a new building.
* For ALL medications, if you are on insurance, they will not pay for a renewal unless you are within 1 week of being “due”.
* For Controlled medications (e.g. narcotics), you can’t fill a ’script unless it is the exact DAY your meds are due.

It is this last one that I have the biggest problem with…

Last month when we relaized my medications were to run out on January 1st 2012 (i.e. New Year’s Day), we had to go head-to-head with the pharmacies to have this problem corrected. Even though THEY were the ones who had decided to close their store on that day, didn’t matter, they felt we should still follow this rule. At first, they tried to say things like “Well we close at Midnight so maybe if you came in, we could release the medication at 11:59pm”. Eventually they consented to release the meds earlier in the day (hopefully they realized how ridiculous this was for a few small bottles of pills for 1 person who had been a customer there for years!).

The next month, I had a similar problem. I had asked the clinic receptionist for a follow-up appointment with my doctor in “60 days”. I was very specific that this was the time, not just 2 months. But no, they gave me an appointment 2 months down the road. Since January and December were both 31 days long, this appointment left me without medication for several days. I changed the appointment but the best I was able to get by the time I realized the problem (I can personally attest to the fact that Fibro Fog is a very real and daily thing!) was a couple days earlier… which still left me without one of my nighttime meds for 2 nights. Those were very tough nights with not as much sleep!

This month I would have a similar problem if I had taken replacement pills for the pills I lost when I recently threw up a stomach-full of EVERYTHING (nausea is an everyday thing for me, luckily the vommitting happens rarely, but still does happen!). It’s either go without the meds for the part of the day (or half-day) after throwing up or be a couple pills short before the Pharmacy’s sanctioned pick-up day! Either way, I end up suffering.

The main argument for me is that the reasons don’t match up with what is actually happening. The safeguards are supposed to be in place to prevent addiction, to prevent the sale of narcotics, etc. But they are they even the most effective (or cost-effective, or common sense) way to do this?! Are they even accomplishing what they set out to accomplish? The research I’ve seen out there (that shows addiction rates are NOT improving over the recent past, but getting worse!) seems to answer a resounding NO!

So why are we putting pain patients through increased pain when these additional restrainsts aren’t influencing the actual target audience of who they were designed to affect?!?

Like much of the set-up in this system we have to navigate, it doesn’t make a lick of sense! >:(

Vent over…

In December, I tried my best to give my kids a “normal” Christmas, but of course, I overdid it. Even though I kept cutting back my ToDo list, I couldn’t keep up. Of all my ambitions, many weren’t realized. For instance, I had planned to put an adorable hand-knit hat (or scarf) on the head (or neck) of many many a close friend’s young child! But I only ended up finishing 1 scarf in time to give for the actual day.

I did most of my shopping early, I did a lot of it online. I started wrapping early. I set lower standards for myself (like “only” making 12 handmade cards). I tried to “pace” myself as much as I could (I still have not learned if that’s an official thing you can learn and apply to pain in a unique way, but I just spread things out in a common sense way!). But still, I totally crashed…

Week before Christmas, I was in bed to pull myself back from the edge of total breakdown. I camped out there for a few days, starting with the Sunday after our annual open house, which was so wonderfully busy and FULL (of caring and dear friends, of busy children, of sweet babies, of adorable toddlers), it made me feel real happiness, which cut sharply and bravely through the pain and exhaustion. I hung onto those feelings, even the next day when I barely left my bed or my room.

Christmas Day, my son woke insanely early and was in and out of our room. We got up with him and went downstairs at a more reasonable hour and I put on my usual happy face for the kiddos. I’m so very very good at that now. Not first thing in the mornings, usually (my DS has literally screamed at what he calls my “scary morning eyes” – bleary, dark, can-hardly-open-them tired eyes), but as I get going, I can look almost normal. I dressed all up for the traditional brunch with the family. It was nice except that I missed handing out half my cards when I went to lie down in my parents’ spare room bed.

A few days after Christmas, I found myself having severe chest pains. They lasted hours and hours, even when I took myself right to bed at 2 o’clock in the afternoon. It was hard to tell if I had any other new symptoms – after all, I frequently experienced headaches, was sometimes short of breath or dizzy, was always having aches and pains, was exhausted round-the-clock and had been regularly suffering from increased nausea for weeks due to medication changes anyways! Still, when my DH looked up the chest pains, we became worried my heart was involved and most of the information out there will tell you: DON’T take the risk, get to a hospital right away!

My heart passed all the tests there, which was a relief but also meant I would get bumped down the priority queue and would wait for many hours to find out what was actually wrong with me. I finally got an answer at around 10:30pm (still having these severe extra pains this whole time!). The doctor was very informative – she gave a Dx of Costocondritis, which is apparently very common for women who have Fibromyalgia, especially women who have larger breasts (and my DDs hadn’t exactly been well-contained in my bras with all the fighting against gaining extra weight as of late!). She advised me it would take a few days for that particular episode to calm down and prescribed heat and ibuprophen (while dropping my regular anti-inflammatory medication to not destroy my stomach too much).

I did get that episode cleared up, but it has been back very regularly since over the past 4 weeks. Lovely! Isn’t another side effect of everything I have going on *just* what I needed? An online friend in a Chronic Pain group used a term that I am totally adopting now because it is just the perfect word to describe everything that has happened to me the past few years: collateral damage. This domino effect of all these events and circumstances that have followed the collisions… like those cars didn’t just hit me: they bumped into my LIFE and started knocking over everything, piece by piece, area by area. Health, fiances, parenting, marriage, volunteering, hobbies, social life… and now nothing remains untouched.

Anyways, I hadn’t intended to vent about how miserable I am (I’ll save that for my therapy sessions, which I’m finally finally doing at long last – carving out time for myself to heal a little!). Point being: I went through this and it sucked, and I wish I’d know about it before. Obviously I’m not a doctor so even if you are someone suffering from Fibro, if you think you have something going on that could possibly involve your heart, you need to get checked out! But now you can have this to hold onto like “maybe it’s just this…” so you’re not, say, worried the whole time that you might die and leave your husband and children behind to look after themselves without you. And that maybe they might not do that very well because even though you *think* you only take up space on the couch knitting all the time and not cooking anymore, you actually do a lot for the family with planning and organizing and what not. Just for example, if you were someone like that.

Next point is that I can barely crawl to my home office to update my blog. Or post pics of my knitted works. Or pics of cards (not that I have created all that many new ones lately anyways). I have been considering closing or changing it again, just as I have been considering closing or changing my small business, KStar Design. I’m so behind on life things and health things and real things that I don’t know why I would want to keep trying to keep up online as well. I officially stepped down from my Young Mommies Boards recently and it felt so sad but it was also very necessary.

More on all this later (hopefully?), but change is in the air…

ETA: the original version of this entry was glitchy, only the re-posted version (Jan 31st) is the full copy