Slip and fog

Yesterday I read a great blog entry by Robin McKinley – In which the ME gets in the way of progress, in which she spoke of “slipping and fogging” through activities when her ME was bad.

It was timely, because I’d been having a bad day myself – with more fog than anything else.  Now, I don’t suffer from ME – I have an autoimmune condition that has been through several diagnoses – undifferentiated connective tissue disease. lupus and most recently, seronegative rheumatoid arthritis (not that the diagnosis makes much of a difference, because my symptoms and treatment are the same regardless).  This winter has been hard on me – my pain levels have been high (though thankfully, my arthritis is kept to a tolerable level mostly by steroid tapers) and of late, my fatigue has been horrible.  I’ve been sleeping for ten hours at night, and still needing to nap most days.

Yesterday was one of those days.  I’d had a good night’s sleep, but ended up crashing out on the couch while the kidlet slept in the afternoon.  Feeling horribly lazy the whole time, despite the fact that my body was screaming for rest.  Today doesn’t feel much better so far, since my body is dealing some extra inflammation today (which I won’t go into details of) and is struggling.

I wish I could just load up on caffeine and soldier on through all the work I want to do.  But that way leads to an even bigger crash (and is possibly what led to this whole foggy state of being in the first place – hi, caffeine-fuelled PhD, which is gathering dust) in the future.

It’s a horrible balancing act.  And I am ever grateful to people like Robin McKinley who speak openly about their health struggles (and for the friends I have who have their own health issues, and the internet, which allows us to chat when we’re both crashing and helps us to feel less alone).

Time to try to slip and fog through another day.

Mirrored from Stephanie Gunn.