Groundhog Day

Don’t drive angry!  Don’t drive angry! 

What a great movie.  To honor this post, I have a song for you…

I have to tell you, it feels a bit like that for me.  I don’t know what anyone else is doing, but I have a set schedule.

Wake up in pain, Mel gets me up and dressed, my legs don’t work right, drool on my shirt, go down the elevator, get into my desk chair and start trying to work, incredibly inefficient and easily distracted, get bloated and nauseous at breakfast, catch some news, shift my head because neck ache, feel tired after lunch get distracted from work, pain meds start wearing off by four, Mel gives me dinner and meds at six, then transfer back to wheelchair, ask for suction, upstairs at seven-thirty, get Luke to sleep, bed and ten minutes of making Mel adjust me at eight forty-five, then ask Mel to roll me to get to sleep position around nine-thirty, wake up a bunch of times in pain and wake Mel up, and repeat!

Really the main problem is that it is the same pain and discomfort every time.  I know what is coming, pain-wise, at every step.  Some days are worse than others of my consciousness of the cycle, and those days are emotional.  Like transferring to the wheelchair at the end of the day, my thighs will be really stiff and painful.  There will be snot in my throat so when I stand up it is hard to breathe and I panic.  Or getting into bed, every hour I will wake up in pain because I can’t move around.  So I dread all the instances where I know what is coming.

I bring this up because my sisters were talking about it with me, and they were talking about a tracheostomy to help me keep going, but that would trap me even further, because I would need full-time care and a whole new set of groundhog day scenarios.  I told them my life is already that way, but dad doesn’t like that I think this way.

I’m not depressed, I just dread what is coming because I know what is going to happen.  It’s like the time loop in Dr. Strange.  I can’t win but I can lose over and over and over again.   (TT will understand that reference! )  And it runs into the how long question, and the dread of the garden of Gethsemane.  It is a meditation that is overlooked, how much more pain Jesus experienced knowing what was coming.

Let me reassure you that there is nothing wrong with Mel, she takes superb care of me.  This is stuff that is out of our control.  But I’m just being honest, and not trying to canonize myself!