Growing Pains and Zombification, Followed by Whining

Okay, so I disappeared for a few days again. There's a reason for it, and you can call it an excuse later if you want to. It feels like an excuse to me, although there isn't a lot I can do about it.

Anyone who's been reading my blog for a long time knows that I'm temporarily disabled. I can walk, but I'm not supposed to. I have hip tear injuries and misshapen hip joints. They came about as a result of improper training techniques in figure skating. I was competitive and in the sport rather seriously, so my training was pretty rigorous. I used to have to wear ten-pound weights on each ankle (yes, twenty pounds total), while I was skating, which included all forms of skating such as dancing, freestyle with the jumps and spins, and patch (what we called the figure-eight stuff). The weights put extreme strain on the joints. These days they tell people not to jog using wrist and ankle weights because of the pendulum effect. Our shoulders and hips are only meant to take the force of a swinging arm or leg, not any additional weight.

So, the long and short of it is, I deal with a lot of pain. Sometimes that pain gets the better of me and I have to take something for it. My doctor usually prescribes Percocet, but I'm in the middle of switching doctors and I don't want to be on heavy-duty narcotics anyway. The last thing I need is a pill habit on top of everything else I have to deal with. So, when it gets bad I take Tylenol Ones, which have codeine in them. I have a sensitivity to all narcotics, so I have to take Gravol (an anti-nauseant, in case you don't get them where you live) in order to keep myself from throwing up. Between the two drugs, I turn into a zombie. I can't hold a thought, I don't feel much of anything, I don't get any creative ideas, and my writing goes out the window apparently.

It took me several days longer than expected to make some changes to a piece I wrote last week for Feminspire, and I didn't get my weekly piece done until this morning, when I originally requested a Saturday morning deadline. I've done nothing business-wise all weekend, and a few days before that. Admittedly I was burning out, though, so between the pills and overdoing things, it's not such a stretch that I had to take a few days off. That kind of thing happens when you wake up, go straight to work, and then work right through until you fall asleep every day for weeks on end sometimes.

Now I have to get back in the habit of working again. It's that whole inertia thing - bodies at rest versus bodies in motion. Thankfully nothing has been sliding that couldn't slide. My editor wasn't going to go over my article until this morning anyway, as she's never done it on the weekend before, but I still feel like a jerk for not getting it done by the self-imposed deadline. I had one hell of a time coming up with a topic even, because I wasn't sure what everyone else on staff had written about, and I lost my own list of ideas when I had to reformat my laptop. I had an alternate list in BlackBerry, but it wasn't the pre-approved one I'd already sent to my editor when I signed on as a staff writer.

I swear this last week I might as well have been walking around moaning for brains, because the drugs always kick the crap out of me. When you face more pain than childbirth every day, though, there gets to be a point where it becomes ridiculous to take it anymore. I actually wasn't too bad when I woke up this morning, but after having to go out for a bit (which means walking around) the pain has come back. Now that I've managed to get the vital things done, I think I'm going to have to resort to pain relief again. I did manage to install my scanner software so that I can re-send my referral paperwork to my proposed new doctor's office. One small step for my life, one giant leap for the outdated scanner.

Aside from bitching and moaning, however, I don't have much to say today, and frankly no one really wants to hear that part of things anyway. I haven't done anything worth writing about lately, and have no poignant or inspiring or angry words to spew. So, now that I've got a few hours' work in, I'm going back to playing some games for a while once I've posted this. I only have one game (on my laptop at the moment) with currently-appropriate zombies in it, which is The Sims 2, which I might play later, but for now I'm going back to one of my favourite hidden-object/adventure series games. House of 1000 Doors just came out with their third one, which I've already played through, and I'm replaying the first two. I've also been playing some of the Dark Parables games again, because they came out with a fifth one, and I love FROGs (fragmented-object games).

So, now that I've put in about six hours' work, I'm taking a break. I'll get back to working tonight with some business stuff, as I have to get blogging functionality into the new websites. We're probably going to be featuring a column on TKP, but I'll fill y'all in on that when the time comes. I have to get it working first. I'm also going to do some blog posts on TKLP and WLS regarding grammar, formatting, etc. To be honest there are a million things I need to do, but I'm only one person. I'll get to it all...eventually...