A Brief Briefing

Well, I had my second acupuncture appointment at the beginning of the week. It was dreadful and they crammed needles in my ears and in between my toes and other awful things. It hurt and I bled and I was terribly happy to go home afterward. My knees hurt like the end times for the rest of the day and I spent most of the afternoon lying on the couch watching anime and feeling sorry for myself. The next day, though, class was not nearly as painful as I had feared. Perhaps it just takes a while to have a positive effect? Or is it just that I felt so dreadful the day before that a change back to the status quo seemed like a blessing? I suppose we shall see in time.
In more interesting news I recently downloaded a copy of the original story the Nutcracker was based on, and so far it is a total hallucinatory crazy-fest. I will report back after I've polished it off.

Anyway, in case I don't hit the blog again until next week:

ONE HUNDRED POSTS, BITCHES!

100th post! Woooooo!
Not a lot to say, though, I'm afraid.
The last week or so has been really difficult. My cat was diagnosed with a chronic illness. My husband started a new job while also suffering from an endless migraine. My rheumatism flared up so bad I just wanted to sleep through it but couldn't lay down for very long. I was PMSing, which makes it even better. I got a zillion custom orders all at once (which is nice, don't get me wrong. Those vet bills ain't payin' themselves) so I am working and sewing and attempting to communicate with people all over the country while keeping them all separate (my brain is not an organized place).
My hips are going out. They have been for a while, but I have been trying so hard to ignore it. This weekend was the first time they had been so bad that they were my main focus, though.
So, basically, everything is super crappy all around.
But I am going to class in spite of everything. Next week I am going to take an extra class. The harder one. I am a little nervous about it! My other option is to take the class immediately afterward, which is basically pre-beginning. I suppose it couldn't do me any harm to take it. Or maybe I could just do barre of the harder class? Does it really matter? This Monday we were doing those ridiculously hard chaînés turns again. Even when I try to spot I just get dizzy and need a sit-down. I will get them eventually but until then I look super dorky out there.
Sigh. Chaînés turns. You are not my BFF.

Guess How Many Pills I Take Everyday. It is 7.

So. The next chapter in the saga of chemical substances that are being pumped in to my body.

I was feeling like the nortriptyline (a tricyclic used for treating chronic pain for those of you playing at home) was making me feel crazy and distressed. It has a suicidal ideation warning on the bottle, but the way I was feeling wasn't exactly depression. One of the symptoms of rheumatic conditions is depression, and it runs rampant through my family. Me and clinical depression are not what I would call old friends, but we are certainly old acquaintances. It was more like the sort of manic emotional state that you (okay, I) experience right before a period starts. You know, fine for a while and then tetchy and angry, and then despairing and fatalistic. Unable to concentrate on large quantities of anything. Extremely tired and unable to cope with people or things. Looking at the dishes like a mountain too high to climb. If you had never experienced clinical depression you might think that was what was going on.

Anyhow, so I emailed my doctor and said "get me off this crap, and make it snappy" and he emailed me back saying "no, we will just put you on another thing on top of it and that will solve the problem". I was FURIOUS. I actually spent a week or so sitting on it because I couldn't quite figure out what to say that didn't use curse words and would fit in the 1000 character limit that Kaiser imposes on it's emails. I also couldn't do research, because I would type something in to google and then look at the 11,735 related hits... and my mind would just shut right down and I would need to go take a nap and a shot. In the end I had to have my (poor sweet wonderful) husband research it for me and then cut and paste relevant bits of information, with highlighted sections so I would know what I needed to look at first, and send it to me as an email.
 Then I took about five hours trying to whittle down an email to a few talking points. And then I had my husband look it over to make sure it was intelligible. And finally, at 1am one morning, I hit send and off it went.
The bad news is I am now on ANOTHER !@#$ing drug on top of my original drugs. The good news is that I have been taking it for three days and feel a lot better (mentally, anyway) already. Cons: couldn't sleep last night which wasn't awesome. Supposed to make me gain even more weight. Can't wait to see how wide my ass can actually get before I snap in half. Pros: this is supposed to help with the pain as well as with the crazy. It's basically low-dose zoloft which is a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor and interacts with the tricylic (theoretically) to decrease pain and smack down some of the side effects.
We shall see.

SMACK!

My husband and I have been watching a show on Netflix, and whenever a particular character whom he hates says anything the hubby says "SMACK!"
You know, because she's so stupid you want to smack her? Hey, at least he's not all hot for every pretty girl on TV, am I right?
Anyway, so a couple of weeks back I was in such terrible pain and was so stiff in the knees that I could hardly walk. I frantically e-mailed my doctor and begged for help. Anything. A different pain killer or anti-inflammatory. A referral back to a rheumatologist or physical therapist. ANYTHING. He responded by sending me in for x-rays and said vaguely that maybe he'd think about steroid injections if he saw whatever the hell he was looking for on the x-rays. Okay. Fine. I was pretty sure that the x-rays would show NOTHING, because I have had every part of my body x-rayed already. So it was just a day that I had to spend in a silly hospital gown standing next to a pole with the words 'left" and "right" written on it in lead, and feeling self conscious about the holes in my socks while getting bombarded with radiation for no reason. But that isn't what annoyed me.
I heard nothing from my doctor for two weeks, and then last week I received a letter in the mail. It said "x-rays unremarkable. No damage or  defects found". Signed sealed delivered. Not a word on what that means to him, or why he made me take the stupid x-rays in the first place when all evidence points to a problem that is not related to my bones in any way. I should write back to him, but I am too livid to even deal with the man right now. I don't even care what the condition is anymore! I just want a treatment for the symptoms! But every time I say a thing to a doctor within this shitty HMO all I get is "we don't know what's wrong with you".
SMACK!

You Are Not So Bad Off

brazilian ballet school teaching the blind 

Very cool little video.

I was just thinking about how I hurt right now to the point that I want to call it stupid. Like... I stupid hurt right now. Like it's an emphasizing word*. But now that I've watched that I think I will just pretend I am not as shallow and self centered as I actually am and just say that we finally did more turning pas de bourrée and it was much less awful this time. We also did more of the crazy waltzing and hey, at least it almost made sense. Just almost, though.



*I know it has a name but I asked my husband (who has an English degree) and he was like "I dunno, yo" and if he doesn't know then what hope do I have (I have a stinkin' fashion degree)?

Goals With a Capital G.

My ankles are not allowed to go. Because, you see, I have got goals. No, make that Goals. Ya can't dance without ankles. They've been a little testy lately. Mostly I think that is because I am using them more and in new and different ways. So my tendons go a little twangy or something. That is what I am betting on. Hoping for. I lay awake some nights, and though I am a staunch atheist I sort of pray to the universe in general "not my ankles, not my ankles, not my ankles, not my ankles......"

Tin Foil Ballerinas

 Did anyone else make tin foil ballerinas for the Christmas tree when they were kids? They are super cheap and easy and you can make them in any size. Big honkin' ones for little hands and teeny tiny ones for grown up hands. I have been making them to decorate the ugly faux ficus tree in my apartment building's communal foyer for the last few years. Since I can't go to class tonight (hurt too much) I am releasing my frustration by distraction, and making this year's crop a bit early.

You just take a square of aluminum foil and cut or tear it along the lines here ---------->
and then squish the foil up until it is roughly human shaped. Then you can pose them. I suppose they could be imps or fairies, but ours were always ballerinas. Arms in high fifth are perfect for hanging them on the tree. When I was little I always posed them as if they were doing pirouettes with their arms in fifth. Because that was what Ballerinas Looked Like, thank you very much! I also made little tutus for them with fabric or scraps of paper cut in to a circle with a hole in the middle to fit around their waist.

Stupid Pain. Nobody Likes you.

I know, I know. Posty McPostalot. But I'm suffering from an excess of things to talk about. I wrote this whole post here and then realized that it was just me complaining. BUT. I think that part of the reason this blog exists is so that I can complain. I can complain about pain and I can elate about ballet. Or complain about ballet. That will happen too, sometimes. Anyway, the next two paragraphs are the uncut and pure pity party post (P!P!P!) that I started out with. The stuff at the end is BALLET TALKIN' MMKAY.

*******
Today my world is mostly frustratingly painful. I would like a medication that works for more than two days straight. I would also like some sort of treatment plan that would actually allow me to *do* things, rather than just lay perfectly still all day for fear of aggravating some part of my body. Sometimes it is hard not to feel like something is purposefully making life miserable for me in the most evil and spiteful way. This whole rheumatism thing only really got a sort-of diagnoses when it manifested itself in my hands and wrists. And of course I work with my hands, so it was like taking away a big important part of my self worth. Years in to this and nothing has ever helped my hands much, treatment-wise. I can certainly do things that make it worse, but I can't do anything to make it better.

It's funny, though, because my hands have been so bad for so long that unless it flares up especially badly (like it did this past summer when I was working 11 hour days in the costume shop at a local theater) I hardly even think about it that much any more. It's just a pain that I have learned to internalize and live on top of, rather than under. But the F*CKING KNEES! It's a new pain, relatively. And maybe it's the newness that makes it so much harder to take right now. And the fact that all I want to do right now is dance, and this is Not Helping That. Once in a while every joint in my body will flare up really badly and I will be on my ass for weeks, but eventually it starts to fade enough that I can start doing things again. But this, this is constant. It's like the thing that is going on in my hands, only it's in another part of my body. Always. Always. It's a little maddening. When I think of how long it took me to learn to sit on the pain in my hands (years. YEARS) it frightens the hell out of me.
*******

SO ANYWAY. I went to my first real live Ballet I class yesterday! It is technically a Ballet I/II class, but at least half of us were recent graduates from the pre-ballet class, so sorry other 4.5 people, you are stuck doing class with the slow kids for a while. I could do the stuff, mostly (my chassés and glissades are a suck-fest but that is not new information) but I get SO confused and lose my place when we are doing combinations. It's ridiculous. It's like some amusing poster you would expect to see in the kids section of the library. Where a whole class of little ballerinas is standing with their right arm in fifth and then the one little ballerina with the messy hair in the third row has her left arm in fifth. I am the tousled ballerina.

Also, someone has got to show me how to make accent gras (and the other one, the one I forget how to spell because French class was 13 years ago. Accent ay goo?) when I am typing, because cutting and pasting from wikipedia is NO GOOD. (Later... So it's spelled "egu" which is how I thought it was spelled, but it looked too stupid to be right.)