Rude much?

There's something inherently very, very wrong with this situation. I actually had a number of days after the last set of ER visits where my pain was actually pretty darn manageable by the meds on hand. Coincidentally, most of those days occurred while I was down at the parents, trying to give Eden little time to herself to where she didn't have to spent the bulk of her effort either taking care of me or avoiding aggravating my pain with excessive light or noise. Unfortunately, things started peaking again during the ride back up to Portland, and seem to have come to a head again as of last night.

Oddly enough, during the day time yesterday, things were pretty good - I actually did perhaps 70% of the driving on the way to and from Newport (darn near unheard of, and we had a blast at the Aquarium, thanks to a Groupon we'd purchased months ago that was about to expire), and was in very good spirits the whole way; I could feel the edges of discomfort, but it was largely masked by my meds. Then as the cars started flipping on their lights at dusk, things rapidly degraded, to the point where Eden actually had to ask me to pull over and change drivers, since I had steadily been putting more and more of my brainpower on "pushing" against the pain half-consciously, and was essentially driving on full auto-pilot. I spent the bulk of last night getting up every few hours to treat the pain to get to the point where I could at least stand to lie there in the dark listening to podcasts. Of course now I'm back in the garage, hiding from the light, which is a bit annoying, as I had hoped to spend a good portion of the day utilizing the processing power of my desktop to actually catch up a bit on photos for once.

I guess that's really the theme here, for me. As painful as this all is, mentally it's more annoying than anything, for a number of reasons. I think the most prominent bit is that it completely messes with my self-identity. For the longest time I've kind of defined myself as "Smart, but not wise...", and have been able to hold a bit of pride in that definition. By this I mean that I'm clever, quick, and a good problem solver, but with my memory issues, etc, I just don't have a whole lot of past experience to draw on. Tests and such have always been easy, and people are generally impressed with me, once they have a few hours of exposure. For all of that, I have the common sense of a rock, and I've learned to deal with that, and try to react with a healthy sense of humor when it's pointed out (or I manage to point it out myself through accident or action).

That intelligence is largely gone during these attacks, or at least is effectively masked - either the pain, pressure, and dizziness occupy so much of my attention that I'm just too bloody slow to keep up, or the meds that somewhat block those symptoms make it a monumental effort to think at all, or some combination of the two, all the time. I spend a horrible amount of effort just trying to hold together to do the simplest things, and of course my time in school is hampered to say the least. It's a major portion of the reason that I'm taking this next semester off from school to hopefully get a better grip on controlling these issues, as well as the thought that the funds for that semester would be largely wasted with the amount of attention I'm currently able to bring to bear.

On the plus side, I'm down to roughly 24.5 hours until I see the Neurologist for the first time, so my spirits aren't quite as low as they might otherwise be; in point of fact, I'm really quite excited about where that might lead. For the moment, however, I'm just vexed that my time for useful and intelligent discourse with my wife, and for possibly getting out to see friends for a while, has been curtailed again. Ah well, I guess we'll see what the morrow has to bring.

- J