Sleepless in New Jersey

Sometimes I try to think back to when I realized I was beginning to have a problem. You know how at the end of a thriller movie they retrace how if you had paid better attention to all of the clues you would have known the whole time and you go, “OH!” So its nights like this one when my body aches, it’s swollen and the Charlie horses travel up and down my legs and into new places I never knew you could get Charlie horses, that I think back to how it all began.

Tonight as I was trying to lay in bed and my left arm kept going from numb to throbbing that I began to think back to how when I used to wake up numb on the left I blamed my husband. I thought that he was putting too much pressure on me, maybe cutting off the circulation. Then I began to think about stupid stuff like how I told the office manager how the sink wouldn’t turn off all the way, and he pointed out how it wasn’t pushed off enough. I wasn’t strong enough to turn the water off, but at the time I didn’t realize the clue.

How out of nowhere I began getting Charlie horses, and like any person with the internet I went on to find out that I wasn’t drinking enough water! So every time I would get an attack I would guzzle a glass of water and swear relief, until I would get into bed and they would begin forcing me in and out of bed. Again, another ignored clue. When I began to have twitching and tremors, or when I began to stutter because my mouth couldn’t keep up with my brain, I just blamed my nerves at a new job, I never thought I had a problem…another clue missed.

So tonight I listened. My left side is numb and yet throbbing, and my right side is aching and strained and here I am, complaining…or as I like to call it, “talking it out.” You know when you ask someone for help and as soon as you do, BAM, it comes to you. Tonight, or since its 1:00am, this morning now, it came to me. All of these little clues in the last year of the way I was feeling and the hints to my future are still happening. I’m scared, I’m tired, I’m frustrated, I’m dying for something with gluten or a piece of candy, but back to our topic, I am still in denial. I am in extreme denial about my limitations, because I don’t want people to think I’m lazy.

I care more about what other people think of me, than what I think of myself. I say I don’t care, but I do. I want everything to follow a schedule and be organized. I think there are a right and a wrong, and my life is ruled by trying to never make a mistake or let anyone down, but that only makes me make more mistakes and let more people down.  I don’t know what to do, but I do know I am trying the best way I know how. It might not be the way that my family wants me to handle it, or even the doctors, but every day I am proud of me for not saying, “I can’t,” but when I need help asking, “can you?” After all, asking for help is the first step in any recovery...the second step thats doing things you never thought you would to get the help you need.