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Edited on Fri Apr-25-08 11:45 PM by WilliamPitt
Greetings.
Usually when I post down here...oh Hell, pretty much every time I throw some feeble thread against the Lounge walls...it will dependably involve some/most/all/more of the following: lots of swearing, lots of toilet humor riddled with swearing, more swearing, three or four type-written attempts to be as funny as my cat says I am, no seriously he says so...
...shit...I said the loud part quiet and the quiet part loud...let's move on...
But anyway, this post is going to be a little sideways, slightly different, because today was a good day, so what I'm going to try to do is tell the story of my good day while incorporating into this post as much of my usual idiotic asshattery as possible, just to keep things as close to the normal, safely stupid and generally vapid tenor that pretty much keeps me from thinking about stuff like my talking cat who thinks I'm funny.
Fuck. Ass.
OK. Good start.
So my last birthday was early November, and it was also a good day, until roundabout sunset.
Wait. Little background info required.
My girlfriend (together now for 18 months) were a year into the relationship, she was working retail and going to school for her Marketing/Management degree...but back somewhere in the previous May, her right arm started to go numb. Then tingly. Then weak. Then shaky. And since she's a righty and a student who needed to take notes and type out papers, this phenomenon became more and more distressing and disruptive.
We went from thinking it was carpal tunnel (tried a wrist brace, didn't help) to thinking it was a pinched nerve (tried massage therapy, equally fruitless) to wondering what the fucking fuckety fuck is going on here, and meanwhile it was getting worse. She couldn't tie her shoes, button her coat, lift a glass to her lips, or do anything at all with that right arm. It was fucked, and the doctors had no answers, and she was scared and pissed and frustrated and thwarted.
Try to go through a day with your good arm tied behind you. After 25 minutes, you'll want to stab a puppy or club baby seals with dead spotted owls, you'll want to do something horrendous simply out of sheer fury, abject terror, and helpless despair.
Maybe that's just me. Anyway...shut up cat. Shit. Balls.
Back to my birthday, which found us in the emergency room at Brigham & Women's hospital because my girlfriend had gotten an MRI the day before, and her doctor had the results, and her doctor told us to run-not-walk to the emergency room so we could meet with the on-call neurologist in the main hallway and one curtain away from a guy who'd been shot three times and was screaming his last breaths at the ceiling tiles, we met the neurologist who told my girlfriend she had Multiple Sclerosis.
That was almost six months ago. Since then, there have been a few changes around here. She had to withdraw from school, not because she couldn't hack it (she had been adjusting to scholarship with a fucked-up arm quite well, and the diagnosis didn't change that), but because that first post-diagnosis month was all about doctors and clinics and appointments and PT, so she couldn't be missing neurologist phone-calls because she was in class...and yes, she fully intends to go back at some point.
She had been living a few miles away, but she moved in with me a few days after The Most Fucked Up Birthday In History, because fuck leaving her alone in the middle of this terrorpalooza. It has worked out magnificently. I give her a shot of MS medicine every day, we're eating (mostly) healthy foods, drinking smoothies like they're made of Humboldt Kind, and she got promoted to manager of her store last month, which came with (get this) an $11,000 pay bump.
She's. My. Fucking. Hero.
So. Last Monday. Marathon Day in Boston + Sox game at noon + Bruins playoff game that night + Celtics playoff game also that night. I'm out early to enjoy the day with some old friends, she's at work...and my phone rings. She feels symptoms. THOSE symptoms. The same shit she felt when her right arm went to the zoo (tightness that comes and goes, like rubber bands cinced around her arm).
HER LEFT ARM.
She's terrified. I'm terrified. Are the MS lesions blowing up in her brain again? Is she going to lose both arms now? Worse? Paralyzed? One leg, no arms, God damn fuck ass shit piss fucking fuck this fucking shit, let her be OK.
That kind of talk was all and only in my head. I stayed cool, steady, shitting my soul out my ass from fear but the poker face stayed put. She, by the way, was a friggin' oak tree filled with steel and iron and granite and whatever else is hard and steady and prepared to hear what needed to be heard.
We handled it, stayed cool, stayed together, did what we had to do, got her to her MS doctor (who I suspect actually might be God), where she got a prescription for low doses of this anti-seizure medication to bat down the rubber-band shit...and scheduled an MRI exam to see if the MS was blooming in her cerebellum again.
The MRI was yesterday. An hour in the tube. She told me afterwards that she now knows what it is to be a suppository...and, for the record, being a suppository sucks ass, according to her (sorry, had to do it).
The call came a couple of hours ago. The doc. The MRI results. The word. The future. The news.
All quiet on the western front.
No new lesions, no new problems, the sensations she felt Monday were made by some lightning bolts that didn't get the November memo, and were still trying to fly down the axons that got savaged during her last MS attack, and that's apparently very normal, it's gonna happen, so keep an eye on it, but don't be afraid anymore, because the big be-like-a-suppository tube took a zillion pictures, and all of them came back HEALTHY and NORMAL and FINE AS FUCKING PAINT.
Fuck you, MS. The left arm stays. Along with the rest of her, and damn you to Hell anyway.
She's zonked out on the couch in the other room, the TV is still on, and the cat is curled up in a ball next to her. I'm in here. Breathing. Just fucking breathing.
Today was a good day.
Fuck.
Ass.
Someone shut this goddam cat up, please.
:woohoo::woohoo::woohoo::woohoo::woohoo::woohoo::woohoo::woohoo::woohoo::woohoo::woohoo::woohoo::woohoo::woohoo::woohoo::woohoo::woohoo::woohoo::woohoo::woohoo::woohoo::woohoo::woohoo::woohoo::woohoo::woohoo::woohoo::woohoo::woohoo::woohoo::woohoo::woohoo::woohoo::woohoo::woohoo::woohoo::woohoo::woohoo::woohoo::woohoo::woohoo::woohoo::woohoo::woohoo::woohoo::woohoo::woohoo::woohoo::woohoo::woohoo::woohoo::woohoo::woohoo::woohoo::woohoo::woohoo::woohoo::woohoo::woohoo::woohoo::woohoo::woohoo::woohoo::woohoo::woohoo::woohoo:
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