Pride tauntings

How am I?

People ask, but I'm sure they don't really want to know.
They're just being polite and I put on a damn good show.

"Pretty good."
"I'm fine."
"Doing better."
Lies...

To put it simply: I have black mold (the deadly kind) growing inside my body. It's in my blood and thus everywhere. I'm starting to think there's more of It, now, than what's left of me. It causes my brain to swell causing blurred vision, headaches and fatigue. It causes my heart and kidneys to work extra hard and inefficiently resulting in toxins building up in my blood so I have to have my blood filtered often. It lowers my immune system making it difficult for my body to fight illness and leads to chronic respiratory, ear, vaginal yeast and skin infections. It causes my joints, bones and muscles to be stiff and achy which makes sitting, standing, lying down, walking, running and basically just being alive painful. It causes mucus and fungus to build up in my lungs making my breaths shallow and arduous. It makes my skin sensitive to touch, irritation, sun, wind, cold, heat and prone to bruising. Showers are difficult because if the water is too cold my muscles throb and my bones scream, but if it's too hot my skin prickles and peels. It's causing my acne to flair up. It's causing my hair to thin and fall out in handfuls. I have constant diarrhea and I throw up frequently (most often at about 2am). I have to take high doses of anti-fungals that leave me exhausted, disoriented and crazy. I'm basically living on raw vegetables, medications, vitamins and filtered water. I'm anemic. I have nosebleeds and rectal bleeding. I'm always starving and I've lost 25lbs, yet I'm flabby because I'm losing muscle tone. I'm tired all the time but I have difficulty sleeping or staying asleep. I'm constantly cold, yet sweaty. I get tired very easily and winded after walking short distances. I'm dead broke, having to work less hours than I'd like and had to accept a handout from my parents(an extremely difficult and humiliating thing for me). I cry at the drop of a hat and the hat drops often. I'm either short fused or too sick and tired to care about things that should bother me. I'm sick as hell, but I'll be fine.

Actually, I feel more alive than I ever have in my life.

"Thanks for asking."

You have such a good humor about all this...

"Look, in my life you either laugh or cry, there is nothing in between." Elizabeth Glaser

And so, I've been laughing...

I spent the first week or so after my sentencing(diagnosis) in complete shock and denial, and the next three weeks wavering between anger and feeling extremely sorry for myself. By the month mark, I thought I'd accepted things and was fine... You see up until very recently, my range of emotional vocabulary was thus: fine, not fine, and angry (I'm slowly learning to recognize and label other emotions I previously couldn't).

I've always been told/thought I had a pretty high threshold for pain, and physically I think I'm withstanding a lot right now, considering; but nothing prepared me for this overwhelming tidal wave of sadness that nearly drowned me yesterday. I knew at some point a not fine feeling would resurface, but I wasn't expecting the magnitude and sheer force I was blindsided with.

The thing is, in the past, I never managed my pain, I just disassociated myself from it. So while I may have experienced a lot of painful situations, physically, emotionally, spiritually, I never learned how to process and deal with any of that pain. I just sidestepped it.

I feel so raw and vulnerable, like an emo-chick entering menopause. A drink sounds like a really good idea right now. Two dozen donuts sound like an even better idea. Three boxes of It's-its sounds phenomenal! Something, anything, to get me away from this feeling, to get me away from me. But a drink isn't the solution. Stuffing my face full of donuts, or It's-its isn't the solution. Not feeling my emotions is not the solution. Learning to sit through and deal with pain in a healthy way is what I need to do. And I sure am doing a whole lot of sitting lately! (I sat for 3 hours and did a puzzle, start to finish, the other day. Holy cow.)



Someone recently told me that pain is beautiful... I told her she was full of shit. I do think pain is necessary for growth, though. This is a learning experience, right?

This illness is going to prove to be a good thing(it'd better!), in that it's stripping away all my defenses and pride and escape-routes.

Now, if I could just make it a day without bleeding from one of my orifices...