Actually, what Bob Dylan said via Rod Stewart. I’m more-tagging this so you can skip it if you don’t feel like reading me have a moment of clarity followed by a moment of sheer ugh.
“Tomorrow is a long time.” (Rod Stewart’s cover is a much better song overall. Sorry, Bob.)
It has been hitting me this week that I have to take this medicine forever. I’ve been so used to the doctors not knowing for sure what is wrong and changing things up every three months that I just plain ignored the fact that I’ve been on MTX for a year and it isn’t going away.
I have to take it because it is going to keep my hands from looking like this. I already have some visible damage to my left hand and wrist. Every time I am tempted to just scream and stop taking the shots I look at that picture.
But still.
This medicine makes me almost constantly nauseated. The associations with it are so bad that last night when I glimpsed a perfume bottle on my dresser I reflexively gagged. It took me a second to realise that the gagging was because the perfume looked exactly like the injectable version of my drug.
This medicine makes me sleep for about 36-48 hours. Even when I can’t sleep because something’s gone wrong I’m so fatigued that I can’t see straight and my brain operates at a base level. I lose any maturity adulthood has brought me.
Many other folks who take this take it over the weekend so they can function at their jobs during the week. I take it midweek so that I can have the weekend with my husband. I’m very fortunate to not have to go to a job right now. But I miss that too. I miss working. I miss spreadsheets and Quark documents and having to check my voicemail. But I know that I’m no longer able to do that type of job.
Compared to the other things that trouble people in this lifetime I’m well aware of how easy I have it. I have a good husband who loves me, a smart dog who understands English, a comfortable home, enough food to eat and the grace of I Am. I can read. I can write. I have clean water. I have air conditioning. I have the medicines available to me that will keep my hands from looking like this.
I still though, think about having to take those medicines forever and it makes me cry just a little bit. Tomorrow is a long time.
Just Another Pretty Farce 
OK, not to go all slavish devotion to His Bobness or anything, but you really have to thank Dylan directly on this one. Because that’s about the only line of the song he actually wrote himself. The rest is all from the 14th century or so.
Kat, my heart is constantly wrenched for you, for what you’re going through. But tomorrow is such a long time for not having the MTX and having your hands like that, too. My mother-in-law had hands like that, and feet, too, and she had once been a painter and professional dancer. So my heart is constantly gratified that you’ve got the damn stuff. (I know, I know, that’s easy for me to say.) Hang in there and maybe one day there will be a cure.
saying you miss Quark documents is a bold statement. That medicine must be a bear!