Articles from May 2019

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This is me at the moment. This has been me for the past three months. I’m on uneven ground and I’m fighting back at all the attacking things coming up the hill at me. It’s frustrating and wearing me out. Plus there’s all that vertigo at the top of the hill! I’ve had small victories along the way. I replaced my useless doctor with one who is incredible. She has understood that I have a variety of different issues that conflict and agitate one another. So she’s aggressively taken each one on. This led to good and bad things. My wounded leg is blood clot free – which is awesome. One of them was in a seriously bad place. I saw a blood doctor who put me on iron infusions. Exhaustion has gone away. It helps I was taken off my blood thinner – no more alarming bruising. I see physical therapy these days for three different issues and they are mostly improving. I have torn ligaments in my knee though, which if the therapy doesn’t give me better results may lead to knee reconstruction. I’m not pumped about that. But hey, still got that semi charmed kind of life (without all the drug use found in that song, hahah.)

What keeps storming up the hill even as I fight it back is the trauma sustained to my head. There is physical trauma and ptsd to be sifted through. I didn’t get any help for it right after falling. I kind of rippled in the breeze as I tried to find a local doctor. Found one and he never listened to me or laughed off my concerns. So instead of starting the healing process right then, I was delayed more than a year and that allowed for things to get worse. The vertigo has become life disrupting. The memory loss and problems with short term memory loss has just gotten worse. I have fallen several times as a result of the dizziness. I’ve forgotten that I packaged something up but haven’t shipped it out. I’ve forgotten if I’ve asked Maggie to help me with something. It’s obnoxious. I have no confidence in my walking because my knee is unstable.

I have a very intense moment with the vertigo, which has caused it to swan dive into very bad places since. My brother and his new wife paid us a visit. We all stayed at a hotel Over the Rhine (spot across the river in Kentucky) so we didn’t have to travel back and forth during the long weekend. I love my knew sister. I can’t put in-law on it because she treats me like a sister. And the weekend started out wonderfully. We had so much fun. At one point we went to the Cincinnati museum and were having a great time and decided to go see an Omnimax movie. In hindsight the what the hell was I thinking?! idea did pop up. Have you been to one of these theaters? The average healthy person can go in there and get a little woozy over the tight and narrow seating. I never gave it a thought because I have gone there all the time throughout my life.

My husband and family went in to get good seats for us. I slowly hobbled behind. I got up the steps fine, turned to walk to my seat and was overcome with vertigo. Overcome is not a strong enough word. Completely blindsided by fear and panic. I was stranded in the middle where I couldn’t go forward, couldn’t go back. My husband came and got me and helped me to my seat. Then I could barely sit because it involved me leaning over as I sat down. Finally I’m parked in my seat and trying to control my breathing. As I finally get my shit mostly together the movie starts: An hour over flying over active volcanoes and dramatically dipping down into them. Then I had to get back out. It was awful.

So we got out of there and cooled down. I didn’t want to take the shuttle back to our hotel. I wanted to walk and get some fresh air. Again, no one is thinking and we go out to the path that connects Newport to our area. We take the option of no stairs. This leads to me walking over a bridge you can see the street below, to a very narrow sidewalk path that is elevated a story over the street below. What had I done to be here? I couldn’t breath. It was embarrassing and I hated how it upset my brother and sister because they worried they’d been thoughtless to my needs. They weren’t.

Since then it takes very little to trigger the vertigo. I’m always afraid I’m going to fall over. I can’t remember the last 15 minutes of every night before I fall asleep. I keep notes to remind myself in the morning of what I did. I keep a memory board to try and keep all my things needing doing in sight. Therapy is helping, but its still difficult. Especially when I’m keeping up with a boom in my business.

This card represents fighting through to success and needing to continue to fight to maintain it. I have come a long way and aside from these trials I am a very good position. I’ve fought a long battle to find my successes in life and these details strive to pull me back down. My worst enemy has always been procrastination. It’s what caused my business to struggle in the beginning. I knew what I wanted and needed to do, but I figured I would do it tomorrow. These issues see me waking up to a day that I just want to turn off and ignore for another day. When I do this or place my responsibilities on someone else things stop working smoothly. People outside my little world are affected by it. So I struggle through it. I try to stand firm on my uneven ground and maintain my place I worked very hard to get to. That said, if you’re written me and not heard back yet I might have forgotten it without meaning to. Poke me again.

A side note about this card’s artwork. I used the work of female artist Artemisia Gentileschi for this card because she had courage, she won her battles, but she always had to be on guard to maintain her place in the world.