Wednesday, February 25, 2004
Of dreams and guts and itches....
Went to the gastroenterologist yesterday. She agreed that I'd had a neurological reaction to the gastroparesis medication and that from this point on, it would be best to just control my symptoms with diet. I'm going to stay gluten-free since it is helping so much, but I'll have to be more cautious than before with what I do eat as far as digestibility goes. I guess I'd better get serious about learning to make my own soup and stuff like that. She did give me a prescription for an anti-nausea medication to take only when needed. I'm nauseous when I wake up for the day more often than not.
Have had some amazing dreams lately since I've only gotten one night of deep sleep in the past week and a half. Some of the better ones didn't stick with me...bummer. One was too fascinating to forget, though...I dreamed about my own possible future. In it, I was living in an old Victorian mansion with hardwood floors and tapestries and walls of antique books floor to ceiling. The rooms each had their own unique character, with all those little cubbyholes and unexpected surprises you find in old houses. From the window, I had a view of the historic district of a town about 85 miles from here. Dan was long gone (I think I had outlived him), and I was in a wheelchair. How I got onto the second floor of this house, I don't know. The mansion held a lot of secrets, like how I already knew everything about the town before I ever saw it as a child. I was renting out part of the house to some younger people, who had also learned to co-exist with the ghosts there.
Nearly missed my aquacise class today....I got almost no sleep last night again. It seems the area around my right heel where I've got the bandage over the ever-so-slowly-healing incision has a rash or infection or something. At any rate, it iches horribly! I've broken the skin with all my scratching. I've put hydrocortisone cream on it, but it hasn't helped at all. It was this maddening itch that woke me up, along with one of my fevers. I struggled mightily to relax and not scratch and wait out the night sweats. The chills started about a half hour after that, so when I did finally drift off, I dreamed I was in a freezing cold waiting room in the ER for a staph infection on my heel. I'd been there for hours because I was not a priority case. At one point, two people burst through the door arguing furiously. It seemed as though violence would break out any minute. There was a young girl about three years old in the waiting room by herself looking scared about all the shouting. For once I put aside my usual aversion to kids and hugged her and told her it would be all right. Shortly afterward, the girl's mom came back into the waiting area still changing from her hospital gown into her street clothes. She leaned against a tv tray as she dressed despite my warnings that it was unstable. The tray collapsed and so did she, and she had to be taken back into the patient area, meaning my wait to see a doctor would be even longer. The alarm woke me up after that....
The twitches and tremors are getting closer to the level they were at before I took the gastroparesis medication, but I still got a toe-to-knee cramp in the right leg when I got up today, and I'm still having trouble having my body coordinate with my brain. I tried to toss a water frisbee in aquacise today with my left hand and almost couldn't figure out how. It's like the left side of my body doesn't completely understand what I want it to do. I'm hoping this is just a temporary problem.
Have had some amazing dreams lately since I've only gotten one night of deep sleep in the past week and a half. Some of the better ones didn't stick with me...bummer. One was too fascinating to forget, though...I dreamed about my own possible future. In it, I was living in an old Victorian mansion with hardwood floors and tapestries and walls of antique books floor to ceiling. The rooms each had their own unique character, with all those little cubbyholes and unexpected surprises you find in old houses. From the window, I had a view of the historic district of a town about 85 miles from here. Dan was long gone (I think I had outlived him), and I was in a wheelchair. How I got onto the second floor of this house, I don't know. The mansion held a lot of secrets, like how I already knew everything about the town before I ever saw it as a child. I was renting out part of the house to some younger people, who had also learned to co-exist with the ghosts there.
Nearly missed my aquacise class today....I got almost no sleep last night again. It seems the area around my right heel where I've got the bandage over the ever-so-slowly-healing incision has a rash or infection or something. At any rate, it iches horribly! I've broken the skin with all my scratching. I've put hydrocortisone cream on it, but it hasn't helped at all. It was this maddening itch that woke me up, along with one of my fevers. I struggled mightily to relax and not scratch and wait out the night sweats. The chills started about a half hour after that, so when I did finally drift off, I dreamed I was in a freezing cold waiting room in the ER for a staph infection on my heel. I'd been there for hours because I was not a priority case. At one point, two people burst through the door arguing furiously. It seemed as though violence would break out any minute. There was a young girl about three years old in the waiting room by herself looking scared about all the shouting. For once I put aside my usual aversion to kids and hugged her and told her it would be all right. Shortly afterward, the girl's mom came back into the waiting area still changing from her hospital gown into her street clothes. She leaned against a tv tray as she dressed despite my warnings that it was unstable. The tray collapsed and so did she, and she had to be taken back into the patient area, meaning my wait to see a doctor would be even longer. The alarm woke me up after that....
The twitches and tremors are getting closer to the level they were at before I took the gastroparesis medication, but I still got a toe-to-knee cramp in the right leg when I got up today, and I'm still having trouble having my body coordinate with my brain. I tried to toss a water frisbee in aquacise today with my left hand and almost couldn't figure out how. It's like the left side of my body doesn't completely understand what I want it to do. I'm hoping this is just a temporary problem.
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