As if I haven’t lived as my part-time cripple self for seven years, I seem to forget annually that October kicks my butt. I cruise through the summer doing relatively great, then September and then suddenly I’m spazzing, not walking and feeling as if I had a visit with Medusa and was stuck moving my stone self around in the world. I find myself scouring my brain for what I did to cause x, y, z to happen. Am I stressed out? Did I not go to sleep on time? Have I missed any medicine? Typically the answer is always no, it’s just October. “Remember this happens every year,” my boss and friend tells me as I’m about to tear my hair out with frustration and exhaustion.
This year I approached October like I was hiking the Appalachian trail. “Medicine, check. Plan to go to sleep at 8 every night, check. Zen vibes daily, check. No gluten, check. Night medicine doses, check. Headaches take medicine immediately, check.” Did I follow this exactly? Not really… I mean, I made friends with these night nurses who keep ungodly hours, but the rest of it I did just fine. AND, surprisingly, I made it through relatively unscathed. Sure, there were a boatload of headache/migrainey days, but I walked all but two days and overall, that my readers, is a Guiness World Book of Records, record. I marched out of that month thinking, “Hot damn! Maybe I’m getting this down! Maybe this no gluten is the trick!”
And then November hit.
November might just be the new October.
Now, for November’s credit, it’s not every year we go from 55 degrees to 77 in a week. What is my poor body supposed to do with that shift? Oh, I’ll tell you. It will explode into spazzing 2 nights, 2 days, shutdown walking for a little bit in the afternoon, because why? Oh, it just decides it’s tired I guess. Maybe throw in some Medusa visits… or my real favorite was the, “Hum, my legs are starting to hurt…” and then all joints, then hardly can walk, or hold myself up and who knew my head weighed in at 70 pounds? That was a fun afternoon at work that lasted about 2 hours. So yeah. Yeah for November.
On a plus note, my latest brilliant idea? Use my posture correction shoulder strap (that I was lured into purchasing thank you Facebook advertising) to loop around my wheelchair handles to keep my torso up when I’ve stared into Medusa’s snakes… I do recognize they make straps for this, but I don’t have one, so creativity is key. It is not a brilliant idea if you have to go to the bathroom quickly though because “un-posture-correcting” is not easy. Basically it’s like you have strapped yourself in and can’t reach the “release” strap. But you might get a good chuckle provided you don’t wet your pants in the process.