I’m about two and a half months into my physical therapy and sleep recovery efforts now. As I’m writing this (a while ago, actually, but I’ve done a more thorough editing pass to get it up-to-date), I’ve finally hit a point where I was able to sleep for seven consecutive hours. Which isn’t as much as I’d like, of course, but it’s nearly double what I was getting back in September and early October, when things were at their worst. Also, while I’m still waking up due to pain and soreness, I can now go do a few stretches and then go back to sleep for another two or three hours. Or least I could back when I was getting a maximum of six hours of sleep at a stretch. I’ll have spent the last few weekends trying (with mixed results) to get as much sleep as possible since the week before US Thanksgiving (the second-to-last week of November) was physically draining in a way I haven’t experienced in years, as was the week after US Thanksgiving, but that was very clearly due to work stress in a way that the aforementioned week wasn’t. I managed to get several nights of quality sleep while I was away from work, but I’ve still been dozing off at my desk every single day so it clearly wasn’t enough (or wasn’t of sufficient quality) to make me actually feel rested. As it turns out, since there is an unfortunate intermingling of issues I’m dealing with, I’ve hit the upper-limit on how much sleep I can get and the worsening of those intermingling issues has actually started to cut down on how much sleep I can get, thanks to the once-again-worsening back, shoulder, and now general joint pain I’ve got going on.

As it turns out, it is difficult to fix your messed up muscles and back when you’re not sleeping enough to feel physically rested, much less keep your body in functioning condition (did you know that your nerves get super sensitive after prolonged periods of sleep deprivation?); you’re on a pair of medications that both make your muscles and joints stiff, sore, and pained; one of the aforementioned medications makes it difficult to exercise because of the much-extended recovery period that you now require; and your job requires bursts of physical activity that are incredibly stressful on specific parts of your body that just so happen to either overlap with or attach to all the parts of your body that you need to improve in order to sleep better. Truly, the last four months of my life have been an interconnected nightmare of unexpected consequences. Who knew that wanting to deal with a skin condition that has been a problem for my entire life in a way that has made it difficult to feel confident about myself and has distanced me from my body in ways I don’t care to mention on the internet would cause me to have one of the most stressful, painful, and physically disastrous years of my life, complete with the worst feelings of bodily alienation I’ve ever experienced? I sure didn’t, back when I started all this, and nothing my doctor said prepared me for the fallout of what seemed like an easy decision. By the time I realized the true extent of this bullshit, it was August and I was on the cusp of being done with the medication (a cusp I’ve been on for four months now because that’s just the way it goes sometimes), so it made more sense to carry on than to stop and have to resume again at a later date.

Which is still the territory I’m in, as my hopes of wrapping things up in November are dashed and even my hopes of being finished sometime in December are starting to look far-fetched at best. The problem is that I’m not sure if I’m committed the sunk cost fallacy or thinking about stopping one step short of the finish line because I will unfortunately only know I’ve crossed it when it’s at least a couple weeks in the rearview mirror. Truly, this is an unpleasant place to be and it is making the physical demands I’m trying to place on my body, for work and recovery/rebuilding my muscles to help fix my back, almost impossible to maintain. I’m not even trying to push myself by my old standards. I’m barely doing anything by those standards and still my body is unable to keep up with what I’m asking of it. I did some vacuuming the other day and sure, I was sore already, but just the constant effort of vacuuming my whole apartment had me out of breath and tired. Which, I feel I should say in my own defense, isn’t as unlikely as you might think given the sort of furious vacuuming I do and how I have to navigate a few carpet-chunk rugs that all require different levels of effort due to their wildly different depths. And, you know, the whole moving furniture out of the way thing. So it’s an out-of-breath I earned honestly, but from an activity that, a year ago, would have seen me only mildly sweating. Which is another thing those medications have changed… My sweat is less salty and I sweat much more profusely than I did before it. I’m really not sure why, but apparently it’s a likely-enough outcome that my doctor has discussed prescribing me a medication to make me sweat less. I dunno that it’s worth it, though. Sweating cools me down and I’m already way too warm at work most days, now that the heat is back on, so it’s difficult to say whether or not it would actually be beneficial to sweat less…

I’m just ready to go back to the way I used to feel. To not be constantly aching in every joint, to be able to move around without needing a minute of movement to be able to walk at a normal gait and pace. To be able to stand up and sit down easily again… I feel like my body is failing me in ways it never should, if I take care of it the way I have been for the last almost four years and, I’m not going to lie, that’s a really horrible feeling. I’m beginning to wonder if the benefits of my medications, which only could last me my entire life if I push through to the end, however long that takes, are worth feeling more and more disconnected from my body than I’ve ever been before. I mean, what am I supposed to do about the fact that even being at rest is uncomfortable now? What is there to do when I can never really rest and can only trade different kinds of stress around as the total amount slowly increases until it eventually crushes me? I know I need to talk to my doctor about all this and that maybe the sign that I’m fretting about it this deeply is telling me to knock it off for now. I’m just not sure what that would look like and if taking time off to recover and feel less discombobulated would actually help or just draw out the process since the medication takes time to disappear and start its work. Hell, if I intend to go back, I might even need to keep taking the other of the paired medications just to keep the side-effects of the first one at bay if they don’t go away immediately… I really wish I knew how much longer this was going to take. I’m so tired and I’m so ready to get some sleep again when these medications stop messing with the muscles in my shoulders and back. I’m ready to feel alright again, or just like my body isn’t failing me. Beyond ready, even. This is constantly eating away at me to the degree that I’m not sure how much of me there will be left if I don’t do something about it. At least my next appointment is only two days after this post goes up, so I don’t need to wait much longer…