It’s Me Or The Grass

I am awake.

This is a problem.

I am awake at 11:00am on a Wednesday.

This almost never happens, because I take my shot on Tuesday night, which means I sleep from 2 hours after I get the shot until Wednesday night at 5 when I try (and sometimes fail) to wake up for a couple hours to be polite to my husband before I sleep again until about 2:00 Thursday afternoon.

I am awake because the pain woke me up. If the pain is worse than the medication, it’s a bad pain. And I’m in this bad pain because of the rain. And I’m glad for the sake of all my trees and grasses and flowers and vines that we’ve at last got good drinks for them.

But seriously…my whole body feels like a throbbing bruise joined together by rusted nails. My long bones ache into the marrow. I hurt so badly that my pillow was soaked with tears when I woke up and there are half-moon cuts in the meat of my hands where the nails dug in during my unconscious hours.

This, my friends, is arthritis.

When I was a kid I’d see arthritis commercials and they’d be some old guy wincing while he held his hand and then taking Bayer and smiling while he threw a football to his tow-headed grandchild. I got from those commercials that arthritis was a minor nuisance, like hair that had grown a little too long in the back.

When the doctors told me I had arthritis I was annoyed because I didn’t think they diagnosed me right. Arthritis is a minor nuisance and this–this hurting too bad to wear clothes, literally–was not minor.

Then I read about it and found out that yes, indeed, this is a type of arthritis and it does behave this way and it is in many ways worse than cancer.

And today I can’t even sleep through it like usual.

Damn.