Susan McCorkindale

I like to read memoirs and on January 4, 2010 I checked out her book Confessions of a Counterfeit Farm Girl from my little local Fair Haven boro library. (I know because I just found the library slip as I was cleaning up the bookshelf.)

Try as I did, I had such a hard time adapting to suburban Jersey life and I was very attracted to Susan's story. She decides to leave her comfort zone of urban NJ and move with her husband and two sons to a cow farm in rural Virginia. McCorkindale was a self confessed total Jersey Girl, (woman) professional and Mom, who seemed the twin of every woman I ran into in my neighborhood, juggling careers and children and manicures and shoe shopping. (And I apologize for my judgementalness but when I arrived in suburbia my neighbors seemed too rich, too thin, too manicured, too self involved, and they drove their giant Escalades and Yukons and Hummers in such a distracted but defensive way it was if we really were at war in white America.) And I tried hard to get past my own shallowness at not being able to get past what I perceived as other's shallowness...)

So she was like me in reverse in a way. I am a country girl at heart and soul (well early on anyway, though I love NYC and my real home is the village of Bellingham) but I started life out on a little farm in VA and I go back to that land inside me every day.

Susan's life changes so dramatically when she and her husband decide to move with their two sons to a farm in rural VA and she tells her story with so much humor you can't help but love her.

So I utterly admired her honesty and her spunkiness and her willingness to be her unapologetic self but also try a life so outside her element, and she addresses that sort of culture shock I experienced moving between worlds that don't have many geographic miles between them but are as different as heads and tails.

I enjoyed her book so much that after I read it I found her blog online,
only to learn that after the book came out her husband got diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. And recall at that time I was very very ill myself with no one knowing what was wrong and I was partly reading just for escapism.

I think I cried for her and him and me when I read how ill he was. And I had to not stick with reading her blog. I was too entrenched in my own drama of pain and medicine and disease.

And I have had that strange phenomenon where I like something, and then it ends up connected to illness. For instance, two weeks ago I read Rhoda Janzen's Mennonite in a Little Black Dress and just loved it. Then looked the author up online only to find she has breast cancer and has been treated.

Well anyway, Susan McCorkindale has a new book coming out in August! 5oo Acres and Nowhere to Hide. I am excited. I watched a little three minute clip and then it happens, she tells how her husband got sick two years ago, and he died in April. I felt like crying for her and for him.

Rest In Peace Mister McCorkindale.

This is life, attached by the muscle to death.

I am still glad we have books.

I am going to write some.


PS. I did a terrible job with this post. Let's blame my head and crooked eyesight and fatigue of the mind and hands. But what I should really say is that actually Susan McCorkindale makes me brave. I admire her. The irony is that she makes me braver about farm life. Much of my life I had both mourned and celebrated the fact that I had escaped what I was sure was my destiny to be married to a farmer. That would have been a good fantasy but the reality seemed to me that he would have been alcoholic and I would have been miserable. Lets say I saw this a few times. So I was glad to escape and find a world in which women's and children's rights were at least acknowledged. When I was a child in VA it was still legal to beat your wife provided the stick was not too large. Animals, women, and children were abused.
So I have a fear of farms. Because they happen in the countryside, where there is isolation.
But now my mate and I both face the possibility that we could give in to a dream and have some land around us as we move to Texas where land and life are cheaper. The feral cats here who have adopted us seem to be saying, Dont move to the suburbs. Take us with you and we will be your farm cats. That is their gift to us. To help us, force us, brave our dreams.

Do you have dreams you need to brave?

(photo, my first trip to Chocolate Bayou, Alvin Texas, April 2011)

Cloud Brain

I continue to wonder about environmental factors.

I have cyclical migraines wherever I go but there is this strange prickling in my head that is daily and I think only began late last summer.
It is is deep inside, so not the skin or bones, but between the bones and brain, like I grow cactus inside my head. Is this nerves? Is this? What, what is this?

I had been back in NJ only a single night when I felt the strange cloud shape settle into the right side of my head again.

It is like there is something here we breathe in. Like a strange gas, or a bloom of algae, something in the air.

My mate gets too many headaches also. He decribes a similar cloud in his head.

In the first years of it I asked all the docs what could it be? Said we had tested for radon and we had carbon monoxide detectors. I wonder about molds or radioactive countertops or that death spice smell that wafted through sometimes. In the heat of summer the house has strange ghost smells.

But no one knew what it could be, what in an environment could cause my health problems. And I have found nothing.

But two weeks ago I came back from the west and sat in the humid dark on the front step and felt the strange fog curl up like a cat in the right side of my head.

Could it be something in the ground? The air? Something that blooms in the pond?
My mate says he has seen on maps that there are undeground rivers beneath us, naturally, as the pond drains by and we are on a peninsular between two rivers.

Or is there some undiscovered gas, radon like, that no one knows and no one has named.

There does just seem to be something in the air.

It could explain why our neighbors are so very very strange, so aloof, so very Distant.

Everyone has The Vapours.

Last Dose of Zmax tonight

I loved this drug.

Took it for six days and it's supposed to still work for ten.

But I don't want to go off of it.

I have slept 6-7 hours a night.
And when I woke up this morning the glands in my neck had reduced a great deal.

I do have a return of that right sided pressure in the rear of my skull, like something is unfurling and kicking out inside of there, but still, I can see! I can think! I can imagine! I can do!

I love being able to see out of my eyes!

So we shall see what happens next.


7-20-11

temporal arteritis, cranial arteritis, Vasculitis

Something else that can cause optic neuritis.

Isn't vasculitis what I have wondered about for years?

Amazingly, steriods help treat Optic neuritis.

Oh this post. It is just so like my past three years. Constantly searching, constantly scanning, hoping, becoming a quick expert on weird things. Reading about conditions like lymphocytic choriomeningitis (a rodent born infectious virus, recall I spent years cleaning out the Virginia house and attics. Mouse life everywhere.)

Will there ever be more answers?

I am even willing to give up all answers if there can just be a cure.

Now that the Amerge knocked the migraine down to a three or four day incident, I can so much more clearly see that then what I am left with is this other condition which seems more like a meningitis or encephalitis or something.

optic neuritis

For the past week, i think thanks to Amerge and then ZMax, I have been able to see out of both eyes. This is an incredible experience. For years I have not been able to see very well, the right eye is often crushed and foggy. And my depth perception is all wacko and I just plain can't see well. I have been going around in a dreadful and pressured haze.

To be able to see for the past few days is just a miracle.

What are the things that cause such severe optic neuritis? It looks again like it is MS, lupus, and Lyme Disease that are possible causes.

I recall I began losing vision in that right eye about five years ago, before the head pains began. I went to the eye doctor and he could not find a problem though he said he could not determine how hard my brain was having to work to compensate for a tired eye.

All I know is that I can see this week and I am very very happy about it.



7-19-11

Holy Trinity

I am feeling pretty damn good.

Not that my head pain is all resolved, not that sometimes my muscles don't burn with a strange fire, but I am upright and forward motion, at a time of month when I am sometimes headed to hospital or suicide.

So something about this combo of Antibiotic plus Amerge plus Ibuprofen has done some magic. Day 4 of the antibiotics.

So I still have crackling in the head on all sides and a weird deep pain like in the marrow of my skull bones, but I sleep 7 hours and I wake and I wait for the sledgehammer and the death rattle, and instead its just like, Oh, hmm, I have a really bad headache. Is that all? And i wait. And that is All!

And I get up and do my day.

Today I posted flyers around town to try to find Miss Beezle a home.

7-19-11

Thank you Dr. Ponti, Porphyria and Hormone Results

It was as I expected, they too were under the voodoo curse that seems to surround me.

I am not saying it is useful or sane to believe that one is cursed, but when the sorts of things that happen to me happen for years on end, the mind can make no more sense of it.

So both Chris and dr. Ponti told me they tried to call me mid June and could not get through to me, that my phone would not take their messages and I did not answer.

The porphyria test results don't show porphyria.

The hormone panel shows high progesterone. Dr. Ponti says come in for one more hormone blood draw and then she is sending me to the endocrinologist.

7-19-2011

PFO

Do I have a hole in my heart?

Would this explain why my lips are so often blue?
and my feet?

Wow! Wow! Wow! UW Headache Clinic, PFO

Just as I was feeling the East Coast doctors had all given up on me, (I was actually on the other line with sweet cheerful Chris at Dr. Ponti's inquiring about my porphyria test results)my cell phone rang and there was a 206 Seattle number calling so I grabbed it and it was Alisa at the UW Headache Clinic in Seattle and she spoke to me in this beautiful fluent medical language that honestly sounded like singing. Like song.

Now by now it must be obvious that I will take hope wherever I can get it.

But please take me seriously when I say My God, This was so Wonderful. I got off the phone jumping for joy and feeling like I had won an award!

Her first question was why hadn't I been diagnosed with migraine with aura? And I said, I have no idea because I have been having aura since 2008 and it can be so severe and yet when I look at the codes all of the doctors are using it is always headache and migraine, not migraine with aura etc.

And she said yes, I can't figure it out because when I read your charts I see speech impediments and visual distortions and those are aura.

And she let me speak and explain my difficulties and to say that it has been a very hard time since 2007/2008. How the migraines were three days at a time in 2007 and then 2008 became monstrous. They stretched out until there were no spaces in between them.

She asked me if i knew about....and she said this beautiful long sound, and i said no though then when she began to explain I did know what she was talking about but I just let her explain because her description was beautiful about the heart and the brain and fetal development and the lungs and the purification of the blood and so forth...

PFO. Patent Foramen Ovale. Yes I had heard about it and a couple of years ago, Spring 2009 when my heart turned into a washing machine I wondered about it as I did research into what could be making my chest gurgle and slosh and vibrate out of rhythm and try to break loose from its moorings in my chest. But then an echocardiogram, a 24 hour holter monitor, and an ultrasound of my heart showed nothing.

But now I learn that for this test for PFO they would have to inject saline into my veins, which I had not have done of course.

So, she says that in half of patients with migraine with aura they have PFO.

But she says no one does the surgery as treatment for migraine.
And it is only for research that you can have it done and only after you have tried three prophylactics and failed.

And I explained that while Topomax had been recommended for me before, starting 2009, I had not used it as I was too sick with other health complaints and tests and trying to get other pains under control to work on that.

She asked if I was using the hydrocodone and I said No, I had started Amerge and that was helping and that beyond that I just had so many different types of weird head pain and something changed radically and for the worse in September 2010.

She heard me. She talked about tests they can do. She said they would see me. The front desk would call me.

And I feel like Wow. Thank you. Thank you.

And that I have, since Nov 2008, felt that there was a major circulatory aspect to the illness.
And now I am thinking maybe the antibiotic is helping me this week because it cleans the blood a bit?

I have no idea. I just know that this past week I have felt better, between the Amerge, the antibiotic, and the ibuprofen.

The future is looking brighter, in a nice non glaring, pleasantly shady way.

Science, Science, I love Science.

Crackly Head, Feral Kittens

7-17-11

Day 3 on the antibiotics

No adverse reactions

The first day it seemed hugely helpful, pressure reduced in head, crackling settled down. Day 2 seemed good too. But by this, the third night, the overall crackly head feeling was back (though not very bad) and there is slight build up of pressure in that back right side, and I laughed once tonight and the nerves in the right side of my head just screamed.

What to do? Continue to grit teeth and bare it.

Am up late listening to the bullfrogs.
And trying to figure out how to find a home for Miss Beezle, the feral kitten born last Fall, who survived 5 days 40 feet up a tree, and then the blizzards of winter on her own, was impregnated by Goodness this Spring, gave birth a few days ago in the neighbor's yard, and since then has been at our back door nonstop screaming for food and attention. She is just a kitten herself.

Hope

Hope.

I would never give up hope. Would you?


7-16-11




(photo Semiahmoo Spit, Blaine WA)

Myalgia

7-15-11

Severe, whole body pain, started about an hour after I took the Z Max.

But I can't blame the pill. I have off and on severe all over body pain, dating back years.

This time it has come on like a serious flu.
Even my skin hurts.

It hurts to sit down.
To stand.

Legs, arms, back, butt, neck.

Strangely after I iced head today then neck hurt worse.

I also remember this hot and pained feeling when I went on the steroids.

And it is not just the muscles, the bones hurt too. And inside the bones.

I just hope I can feel better tomorrow.

Please.

Noises, pain, pressure in Left side of head and why I am angry

Well I am angry because I am in so much pain. And no doctor has diagnosed me.

So is it some strange raging infection? It has spread. It is now in the left side of my head also.

And it moves, and when it moves I feel like throwing up. And it feels like pressure, and also fizzing. It is a little crackly, and prickly.

There is some war going on in there.

Some serious dis-ease.

Bacteria? Fungus? Virus? Parasite?

Whatever it is it also has all the glands in my left side neck swollen up, and it wants to pinch down my nerves, make me twitch in left side of face. What is this thing?

7-15-11

The Mysterious Case of Dr. Raab

She vanished on me. No response to the faxed letter Dr. Ponti sent her on June 7th.

No response to my mailed in letter of June 16th asking what do we do next, what imaging can be done for right side head, explaining I was in severe pain with cycling neurological deficits, could she please follow up on the porphyria tests, Help!

Silence.

Until July 8th when I received a strange disconnected voicemail from her. Just saying call her or come in to see her if she can ever be of any help in the future.

As if the present does not exist?

It was the oddest thing.

I like her.
Why the total disconnect? What have I done? What could I do to make myself a better, more attractive patient so these doctors care? I pay my bills. I show up. I try their treatments. I come back.

Is Everyone Else also under The Voodoo Curse, ordered Not To Help Me?

Still No Porphyria Test Results 10 plus weeks and counting

Was it just a scam? This genetic testing ruse?

I am emailing Mt. Sinai Genetic Testing Labs again today, as I do once a month.

Since results were supposed to take 2-4 weeks.

And we are at 11 weeks.

I think I have lost confidence in the lab. And their results.


Update. The woman at the lab emailed right back and said she thought the results were faxed to my doctors several weeks ago.

What is this?! Doctors? Hello?

Ice Woman

I return to ice. It is as if my head has suffered some insane sports injury.
Today the ice helps again. And a few sips of coffee.

I have found an ice pack that conforms better to my skull than the one I was using yesterday. This makes a big difference, the level of contact.

Meanwhile, I have almost entirely given up chewing ice, as it seems like there is no good padding in my head and bones rub bones when I chew hard things.

Ice, in the right places.
Very Nice.

Pill Friend

7-15-11

Bad bad bad bad bad head pain. Right Sided. Left sided too.

So what do I do? What do I take?

I can't get through this alone.

What pill friend will I take today?

Can anyone help me?

I decide to take a fioricet.
It gives me an hour of feeling better. Thank you pill friend for that hour.

Azithromycin

7-14-11

I want to start it but i am so chicken.

7-15-11

hot flashes in my muscles

severe pressure and pain in LEFT side of head, moving around,
just like the right side was all Fall, Winter, and Spring

it is like head has a severe fever, hot to the touch, burning, feverish, but the thermometer shows nothing

twitching right arm

madness, and anger. What is this?

9:45 pm I start the ZMax. It hopefully will be helpful and if nothing else, perhaps informative.

Right Sided Head Pain Roars/Gelato Spoons of Codeine Syrup

7-14-11

So what is this? The "migraine" is gone but I have that severe right sided head pain. Pressure, like my head and teeth will blow out. What is this and how do I treat it? It seems impervious to everything. Last night I tried ibuprofen and today aspirin. Ice packs and hot packs make no difference. It is like the most awful tooth ache one could imagine. It is like I have a broken bone in my head.

Also, my glands in my left side of my neck are totally swollen again. They were huge for three weeks and then better for a week but now back to hugely swollen. Last night I felt like I might have a sinus infection. Maybe tomorrow I will start the antibiotics that Dr. Hopper prescribed.

There were moments today where I was in so much pain on R side head, plus dizzy, queasy, weak, frustrated, almost low blood sugary feeling.

Finally I begin taking tiny gelato spoon doses of codeine syrup. But it doesn't really do anything.

Second Dose of Amerge

7-12-11

I take the pill. It helps me. Maybe I can resume my life.
Thank you Dr. Taylor.

This is the reminder, the validation, that whatever is wrong with me stumps each doctor, but that each time I do continue and find someone new, they have a new idea.

7-13-11

I pledge to listen to myself better.

The Amerge is helping! I slept last night! Hooray for naratriptan!

Pregnant with Death

It is like I want to walk something out.

Like i am in labor.

like i am pregnant with death.

12:33 7-11-11 Wow.

An hour and fifteen minutes after the Amerge and it is helping. I want to cry with relief. I can lightly smile again.

1:30 effects seems to have plateau-ed
i tried to eat chicken soup but i am too ill

i am so nauseaus nauseus,
i am even nauseaus in my arms

i am in such a living hell.
the world's worst experiment. yes, i know there are others worse off then me, but still, this is pretty bad.

back to my dark room.

4:45 whew! Better.
couldnt eat my soup, had to go back to bed, but i slept! for an hour! then watched tv in the dark. got up and showered. and i feel better. i move slowly. but i am up!

I am going to make a Tres Leches cake for my mate's belated birthday. He is 54 now.

Moon shaped pill

7-11-11

As soon as I am not so violently ill I am trying the Amerge.

11:15, trying half of a moon shaped pill

take it with some yogurt and a prayer

i kiss the box it came in

and go back to bed with goldfish crackers and a heating pad

what makes me call this a migraine? it is not just the head pain, i have that so much, it is the nausea, the extreme light sensitivity, put me in a dark room, don't move too much. No one talk to me.

11:30 I am now getting nauseaus from having taken the pill. But I take this as a good sign. Strangely, when the triptans seem to work best there is nauseau first.
It is a weird trade-off.

What also makes it a migraine, by my definition, is the way my brain goes nuts through the episodes. While drinking an icy coke i think how good a very hot tea would be and while applying the hot pack i think i need an ice pack not instead but also, as if i have two heads, and two minds who can perceive opposites simultaneously

meanwhile the smell of my own blood makes me nauseaus

i have blocked out all the windows upstairs, pulled shades and blinds, and curtains

for over a month i have been showering in a dark bathroom

it hurts when i cough or sneeze

but hey it is now 11:45 and i think the new pill is helping! I can see out of my left eye!

Wildfire in the head

They cannot stop it.

I need firemen, not doctors.

After all these months it has now spread left.

A dagger in my left eye. Stiff neck. Crushing head pain.

Agony. Agony. Agony.

Trying to get my queasiness down so I can try Amerge.

I feel like I need a shot, an injection.

Scarlet ghosts fall from between my legs.

The light screams.

Amerge Day

Monday 7-11-11

10 am
The Head Pain is so Severe I want to cry, or die. Why will no one help me? Period started yesterday, and so today=AGONY. Left side of head had me up a lot of the night. Ice pack. Now it is all left side agony. I want to try my new drug Amerge/naratriptain but I am so queasy. I just want to sleep. So, the icepack. The coke with ice. The pain is off the charts cruel.

Crushing. Crushing.

basilar artery migraines

i learn about these by reading on the internet, web md and mayo clinic etc, they sound very much like my weirdest scariest migraines and maybe if a doctor had ever said they thought that was what my freak awful blacking out stroke episodes were, i might feel better thinking oh at least it has a name


what am i doing with my life? sitting here with an ice pack on my head researching head pain and considering what medication to take
what are you doing with your life?

school supplies

a lovely homecoming to NJ late Friday night

though i have a strange night/another sleep like seizure and walking into hall in dark, runnng away, dizzy, hot


Saturday brunch of fresh sweet corn crepes at the In Between'

a lovely day and an evening walk beneath the moon at the ocean with orange chocolate icecream cones

on the drive home a silver fox raced across in front of us

sunday morning=today. period starts, a bearable day with just ibuprofen but then at night i go to bed, (even drugging self with a little benadryl so i will sleep)

i wake up within two hours, very sweaty, with head pain

the head pain is all left sided

last month the pain moved left, after being in right since the Fall, and what does that mean? why has it migrated all to the left side?
is it contagious? migratory? spreading?
it is bacteria? fungus? parasite?

it is pinched nerves?

is the right side just too burned out to feel much right now?

well i have still had right sided pain and crackling but this left sided thing is the thud heavy painful migraine thing

so it is 3:40 am and i am up icing the left side of my head

this post is called school supplies because i want my life back
and at Target all the school supplies have come in, and I get so excited, like Fall is another Spring, and someday I will be well enough to teach and learn, to be teacher and student

7-10-11

the blood draw that wasn't

7-6-11

I tried. I slept. I ate. I drank. I meditated. I went there.
I told myself a story of how I wanted the results and this was the way to get them, for someone to extract my blood and read it like a story.

And then the very nice phlebotomist said she hoped I had a big vein and she showed me an entire sheet of labels of all the tests that needed to be run and I asked her to count how many vials that was and when she got to 11 oe 13 and they were not little lavender tops but like large tubes, I simply shook my head. No way.

This has been a year of dreadful blood draws.
I am exhausted, anemic, bruised, and traumatized.

Back to the drawing board. I will have to ask Dr. Taylor to prioritize them and break them down into 2 or 3 lab visits.

I know most of them are either for lupus or the entire stroke panel portion of the lab requisition. She did say if they came back positive she would be sending me on to the rheumatologist.

I need a vacation though. Since I was 14 they have been looking for a diagnosis. 27 years of tests. I really can't do anymore. If I ever even get a diagnosis I think at this date I would hardly be able to stand a treatment if it involved a needle, pill, or loud machine.

the MRI

Was so very happy to have made it through another head/neck MRI today because as I told the tech, "I am so claustrophobic now I got claustrophobic in a movie theater this week." She said someone came in and told her he was so claustrophobic he couldn't put on a band-aid.

I hear you!

And I am so grateful to Bree and Michelle and the front desk woman who helped me through it. Also all my friends and family and doctors and nurses and spirit helpers. I think even of my cats and dog and trees and music.

And then I also visit outer space and far galaxies.
And also the aboriginal people in the dream time.

They were painting my body with speckles.
Then the rains came.

We danced and leapt like frogs.

Then someone was saying sunshine sunshine sunshine sunshine over and over.

I stayed as very still as I could. They said they got good images.
I am relieved. Grateful. Whew.

And I think I could in the future help others with their phobias, as I have so been there.

Later in the day I ran into Lake Whatcom with my little friend June. What a joy!

MRI

Tomorrow is MRI day. I am so terrified.

Have I told you how severe my claustrophobia is?

But I really want the information.
So I tell myself I am going on a special journey. This is the only way I can get these photographs taken.

When I had the last one in December it too was terrifying but I was somewhat in a better place then and had not gone through the last six months of terror and pain.

And I got in that MRI back east a couple of months ago and had to get right back out.
Thankfully my vertigo is not too bad right now.

In December I told myself it was my lion. The Masai have their lion. I have my MRI. I made it through. The girls were so kind.

I really hope I can make it through tomorrow for this cervical spine imaging.
I need the information.

I will rally all the powers I have and try to make it through.
If only they didnt have to strap you in, and put the cage over your face.
But I will breathe, breathe, breathe. And tell myself stories.
It is like getting in a space ship.

gall bladder tests

What other tests are there? I guess it is true that I had them all=ultrasound, nuclear hidascan, endoscopy, mri. I recall when I asked Dr. Hopper about the other gall bladder tests he said they are so invasive they cause problems themselves. Injections of dye into ducts, etc.

But I wonder, can it be a gall bladder problem even though nothing has ever shown up on the gall bladder tests? Should I be re tested at some point?

actually 700 bucks on meds

actually, it was only a grand total of 634.94
and i have good insurance! but they dont want me to try other migraine medications, while i am desperate to delve into the far reaches of the medication ocean, desperate. I dont like medication! But it has been saving my life.

Djuna Harper

I am blessed.

I have known her a long time. She knows me well though she has not seen me in years.
But she was a helpmate in my life about a decade ago.

Today she came in and saw me on her day off.

She can handle alot.

Djuna is tall and elegant and strong and graceful. This is her body and this is her soul.

She doesn't miss a detail or a beat.

She heard it all. We covered miles and miles in a short time. A great distance in a short time.

She thinks that what happened to me in 2007 sounds like classic gall bladder, and so do I.

I still do. And I have wondered what/how to do anything about it. And it flares up and down.

She had many ideas. She is glad I am doing what I am doing. She also has other migraine experts I can see if I need more help. She also wants me to ask the doctors about Depakote, but especially maybe Lamictal. She thinks that might help me a lot.

She also thinks that it does sound like trigeminal neuralgia on top of it all and says anything I can do to calm down cranial nerves is good. Including avoiding hats and sunglases and anything that irritates. She also sincerely thinks I should get medical marijuana and I think that is a great idea, and it is legal and available in WA. This is a much more humane place. I love it here.

She also thinks it is time to leave NJ, though I had hardly mentioned our culture challenges there. She thinks we might like Texas.

She wants me to try different over the counter anti viral sinus washes to keep my head healthy and to ward off any more viruses.

I left her office feeling substantial. Realigned. She says, "I am here for you" and I feel that she is.

I had a very nice day after my session, which is saying a lot. It had been a hard morning. Nightmares of zombies all night, awakened early feeling terribly wrong, decided to drug self with codeine cough syrup to get through it, and I did and then went back to sleep. Mate and I had been fighting for days. I swear it was like the virus trying to break us up.

But then the drugged sleep, the fresh start, a little coffee, blue skies, a nice chat with mate, a session with Djuna, and a walk in Fair Haven with a good friend.
Tonight I babysat the beloved niece and nephew. Sang them songs and told them stories and tucked them into bed. And here I am.

Thank you Djuna for your help in restoring me.