Quilt Update, Other Stuff

My quilt is proceeding well.  I’m now quilting the water in semi-circles below the land, and when that’s done I’ll do a bit of sky – haven’t decided how exactly that’s going to look yet.  You can see a bit of the water in the picture below, and you can see the leaf stitch work I’ve been doing over the past few weeks.  Remember back whenever, when I said that the stitching I was planning would take just a week? I am completely full of nonsense about that.  Totally. I get maybe 2 hours a night at most to work on this, so getting things done fast is really unlikely.  I never estimate time correctly!

Stitching and a bit of cooking have been my salvation lately. This quilt is a sea of calm, a reminder of a place I once was that was beautiful and soothing, which I’ve needed.  So this “thing” – I’m normally pretty stoic and uncommunicative about things like “this,” but it’s not a state secret, and it’s affected my life quite a bit, like blogging less, and making my dream of backpacking pretty hard, and using so much sick time I can hardly take a vacation, that sort of thing. For the last several months I’ve been dealing with a medical issue that I flippantly refer to as “irritating” but when I’m feeling less flippant I refer to it as painful, scary, and gets in the way of life a whole heck of a lot. For months, since last summer, I was getting only small pieces of what was going on, and the problem continued while I saw doctors, and had uncomfortable and anxiety-provoking tests for things like seizure and stroke and blood pressure.

So I worry, but what can I do?  Well, I have finally gotten a clue – narrowed down the doctors to a headache neurologist, who  thinks basilar migraine is the culprit, a less common type with a peculiar, worrisome aura, one that that results from problems with reduced blood flow to the brain stem. It’s not fun. It lasts too long a lot of the time, and it has scared me half to death sometimes. I get dizzy and faint, my eyesight goes funny, I can’t speak well and get confused, and I get clumsy. And indeed, if untreated or treated wrong, those stroke-like symptoms can become stroke. Plus, it can’t use many of the typical treatments. And so there I was today, listening to this, and then getting an injection in my head, and I’m thinking, what in the world is going on with me?

This is treatable, it is. It’s not quick, but it’s possible. I’m feeling scared right now, as I start treatment that’s more specifically directed toward this, and I’m tired because naturally there will be more tests involving needles and claustrophobia.  Ironically, this is when I need my sewing needle and crochet hook and my cooking spoons more than usual, at least these are things I can create and have some control over, soothing things I can do when I need to think, or when I just want to watch TV and zone out, or just something else to concentrate on when my head doesn’t feel like it’s on straight.  Everyone has their own things that they do; this is mine. This is what I do when it feels bad, or I just need to unwind.

Thanks for bearing with me. It’s not my usual thing to share, but if I can’t talk about it here, where can I talk about it? I hope in the next few months I can find some peace from getting 2 or 3 or 4 headaches a week, some more permanent resolution, some sort of break from feeling like this, and get back to feeling more like typical energetic and overly creative self. It’s taken a fair piece of that away since last July.

I hope all of you in blog land have places to share what you’re going through. I’ve found a good bit of comfort in reading others’ struggles – not that they’re struggling, I wish they weren’t, but that I’m not the only one who goes through things that disrupt their life like this even though they have to keep getting up and doing what they do every day. I feel weird, having problems that don’t go away; most days it’s fine, but some days like today, it’s just a little harder to wrap myself around.

Ta for now, M