Squeeze

Squeeze, a photo by jujuridl on Flickr.

Sorry, it’s been awhile. I’ve been drawing. But I’ve also experienced a system crash. I’m on a new machine, new apps, and new software for my hateful scanner. You get the idea. Learning curves with several blind traps.

Anyway, I’ve scanned something. And if my faltering brain can remember what I’ve learned, then I’ll be able to scan again without weeks of relearning. Fingers crossed. Creek don’t rise.

Docs are moving me from a focus on Babesia treatment to a focus on Bartonella. Headaches have reduced to just the symptoms shown here. During the cycle when I would normally have a blowout headache, I now just have a sensation of being squeezed from the neck and jaws. This accompanied by a weird tympannic sensation in my ears and soft pulsing of light behind my eyes, of course in time with my heart beats. The stuff that used to come before a headache.

But then, instead of revving up into a splitting headache, it just stops.

The image is what I hope would happen. That the squeezing sensation would just squeeze those spirokitties right out of my head.

I’m working with a fabulous physical therapist now, and working at patience as I recover from all that time in bed. Bed time is bad time. Takes a person down fast. Makes coming back up again real, real slow.

Props to my docs who have gotten me out of bed. I know I have a long way to go, but it’s got to go faster on my feet. Speaking of feet…. OW.

Still Life with Big Food

Still Life with Big Food, a photo by jujuridl on Flickr.

Working on watercolors. Thought I had an original thought here, but then a pal showed me Tom Wesselman’s work from the 1960s. Oh well. I had fun painting it, and learned some stuff, and see where I need to work more or harder or something. I might do a series of these to keep the effort going, because I like the problems these forms present.

What this has to do with Lyme? Well, lymies can’t eat this stuff. Really, anyone who wants optimal health should avoid anything that comes in bright packages. And highly processed wheat and sugar. It’s hard to give it up, but we do get better faster when we do.

That is all.

Within the Moment…

My husband, the poet Jack Ridl, who suffers from my Lyme and Babesia, and whatever else, wrote this for all of us tick-borne disease folk:

Within the Moment of Indefinite Suffering

All it takes is a tick. You can be walking
your dog. Your dog can be stopping to
sniff a patch of jewel weed or pausing
to pee on a post surrounded by poison ivy.

You could be watching a swallowtail slowly
lifting and settling its wings while resting on
a swatch of crown vetch. The sun could be
lost behind clouds, clustered in a cumulous

mound of white or sinister gray, the moon
could be full, waning, new, the stars moving
across their scrim of deep space, everything
still benign in its revolving threat. You

could be sweeping the walk, passing under
the pergola draped in wisteria, wedding veil,
honeysuckle, or merely sitting on the bench
beside the brook out back. Or taking a path

through the park, joggers steady-stepping, or
walking along the well-worn trail to the pond
at the edge of town where you could be sitting
under the willow, its branches hanging their braids

over your wait for the sunfish to surface. It could all be
beautiful: the day, the light, the breeze bending the tall grass.

Stuck

Stuck, a photo by jujuridl on Flickr.

If you’ve got Lyme on the brain, neuroborreliosis, you know the symptoms. Foggy head, language processing problems, brain SPECT scans that look like Lupus or Encephelitis, and mean, basically, that your brain skips like a scratched up LP.

Practically it means that while reading, you can get stuck repeating a short phrase over and over and over and over and over and…. until something knocks your needle out of the groove and you can press on. I’m never sure, because there is no way to set the timer when it starts, but I suspect I have lost as many as 10 minutes in a loop. Who knows? Sometimes I can keep moving while it happens… While it happens, it happens, it happens, it happens, it happens….

Dem Bones

pink bones, a photo by jujuridl on Flickr.

So the assignment was to paint the old skeleton that lives in a closet in the Art Department. I studied it from all angles, thought about it, and noted that the pelvis was wired together rather inelegantly. The way my pelvis feels most days.

These days the worst of my pain is in my hips and the iliac crests and S.I. joints and thigh bones, the knees, ankles and feet. It’s a kind of neural pain that hits full speed around 5p.m. and is really very distracting by bedtime. I’m experimenting with higher and higher doses of gabapentin to try to get it under control enough to sleep without being a disconnected, staring blob when I wake up.

So I focused on the part of the bones that hurt, thinking I could work some voodoo cure by virtue of sheer focus…

Okay, that didn’t work. But I did think of a reason for the fractured pelvis. That nasty pea. That’s the culprit. Not unlike a practically invisible pathogen — hard to imagine something so small could destroy my beautiful wickedness.

Daddy always said I was a princess.

You *look* great

You look great, a photo by jujuridl on Flickr.

The tick bites and leaves its bacteriae and pathogens behind, and those frack with your immune system, and your brain and heart and joints, maybe a kidney… But except for palsy or a rash, no one sees them at work.

You still look like a normal person. The lesions and clots are under your skin. And except for the hallucinations and the staring fits, usually no one but the people who know you very well have any idea how Not You you really are.

You see your friends when you are well enough to be seen, but not when you are in bed, blindfolded, on anti-nausea drugs and enough painkillers to stop a horse.

So, you know, you look good. And if Fernando was right, that’s what really matters.

Red Squid

Squid 07-10-11, a photo by jujuridl on Flickr.

Watercolor class. The entire month of July. This weekend’s homework: Paint what you like. I like the natural history drawings/paintings in Seba’s spectacular collection. This from the  book Cabinet of Natural Curiosities. Also I have psychic history with squid that dates back to early childhood that leaves me sort of fascinated and scared of them. And they are delicious.