Nah. That’s probably somewhat of an overstatement but it keeps occurring to me, in the last week or so, as I wait and rest and do everything I am told I should be doing to help myself get back to non-nauseous living that the spaces in between are the things we never talk about. I’ve avoided writing this post all weekend because I don’t find it very interesting reading, let alone writing.

When you have a flare or are in the thick of a relapse there’s something inherently interesting about that, even if you’re the patient. There are problems to solve. A thing that must be dealt with. Procedures to consider. Drugs to take. Hospitals to escape from. Information to share. All very interesting things to write about should you happen to be a blogger who writes about your life with multiple sclerosis. But once all of that excitement is over, there’s the rest.

The in between stuff is what really sucks because it’s really a whole lot of minutes that turn into hours that turn into weeks and then suddenly it’s been a month since the whole drama started that are full of a whole lot of nothing at all. All of the rest.

You fill the moments with email and conference calls and Law & Order reruns running in the background and talking to friends and being occasionally visited by co-workers, friends and family. You walk around your house seeing corners and details you never knew were there. But you don’t walk too much because you have to conserve your energy for exciting things like cat feeding and litter scooping before your energy runs out. You can’t quit doing those things because you are already so very weak! You need your “exercise” even if it’s just a few flights of steps in a day. You can’t give up your special work outs!

The days look alike because you’re wearing the same clothes (sometimes clean versions, sometimes not because laundry is suddenly like an Olympic sport) and you’re looking at the same face without makeup and without clean hair. The days go by and the nights get longer because even doing the very small things you are able to do leaves you physically exhausted and likely to be happily in bed before the sun goes down.

You read to keep yourself from thinking. So, you read a lot. You read so much you’re on book number 23 of 2017 and there’s no end in sight. You might break your personal annual book record. When you get tired of reading, you write. You write to help get bad thoughts out of your head and into the journal where they can fester without directly threatening your sanity. You journal about the things you could never write about on your blog. People would worry. You can’t have people worrying.

You are always waiting. The days and nights are chock full ‘o waiting.

You go to bed each night wishing and asking the universe to make tomorrow the day when you finally wake up feeling normal again. You get pissed off after you take a short trip outside and realize that the very most minimum of moving about in the outside world leaves you dizzy and eventually heaving into a portable puke bag that you stole from the hospital (I’m very slick like that). Every morning offers new hope of possible normalcy that is usually dashed by around 3PM when you frantically rinse out the stolen puke bag because you never really believed you would need so many of those damn things so you only stole a few.

Other moments are full of experimenting with medicines because in all of your alone time you’ve convinced yourself that you can manage this entire stupid situation if only you could figure out the right cocktail and timing for said cocktail. The drugs that help with the dizziness don’t help enough to make up for the horrible tiredness that they cause. The nausea drug added to that makes for an instant torpor that makes leaving the house out of the question. You aren’t sick when you take the drugs, but you are also pretty much a zombie and you need to function well enough to have all of those conference calls.

You begin to feel like a prisoner in your home. You convince yourself that mind over matter works with brain diseases and then you find out violently that you are terribly wrong. When you move around too much, you get nauseous. When you get nauseous you get sick. Repeat.

Yesterday I drove. My brother was my co-pilot for safety’s sake. I did OK. I walked around quite a bit. I didn’t feel dizzy. It was my experiment to see how I might get through a day should I decide to finally give in and make it into my office this week. I was initially jubilant because I felt like it was a good experiment. I got a little bit hopeful that I had finally come to be outside world friendly! I might be able to leave the house. In clothing that isn’t clothing I could and do sleep in.

Then around 4PM the dizzies hit. I was feeling very worn out. Food wasn’t even an option because my stomach was roiling. I desperately stumbled around the house looking for the clean, recently rinsed out puke bag and gagged into it for what felt like the millionth time in the last three weeks. Or has it been four weeks already? I think it’s been four weeks.

Going to my office involves a few really minor actions. Minor if you are a normal. I have to get dressed. I have to pack up my bag and get my computer in my backpack and get from my house to the car, from my car to my office and back again at the end of the day.

The thing is, before any of that happens I will have done two set of stairs down and two sets of stairs back up to my dressing room after doing my cat chores. So I’m already going to be worn out. Crazy, right? But even knowing that, I’m almost sure I could make it to my car once dressed without using one of my special portable puke bags.

But what happens once I get there? I’d have to walk from my car and into the office which involves actually going outside, carrying that backpack that holds my computer and my giant bottle of water, and probably using Stan, my new cane, to help make sure I actually make it from the parking garage to the building just across the street.

I’m not sure how long it would be that I was actually IN the office before I’d be desperately heaving into a portable bag but this time in public with people all around me. I mean, randomly pulling out a bright green plastic bag and hurling your guts into it at random intervals is often considered anti-social behavior in polite company.  Many of my closest work colleagues are traveling next week (to meetings I should be traveling to along with them but of course that’s impossible because I can barely drive or walk let alone fly) so I’d be forced to impose myself on people who maybe don’t know me as well or who I might not feel as comfortable with asking to hold my puke bag for me, ya know?

It’s also still hot here in Pittsburgh. Above 80 degrees hot and that, on top of all of the little things that are involved with getting me from point A to point B is the perfect combination of factors to ensure that this imagined scenario will play out exactly as I’ve described here. I know the weather for the next week promises some relief from the heat and humidity so maybe I could plan my week around that to give myself more of a chance of success. I am an obsessive user of any and all weather apps that help me plan out days when I am less likely to feel like shit on a shingle. This is also completely normal to me. This obsessive weather watching.

Guess what? All of this thinking and planning and strategizing has me exhausted again. It’s only 4:20PM and way too early for getting back into the bed that I just dragged myself out of at 12:30PM.

There will be more waiting. More days of wearing lounge wear and sporting bed head as I take conference calls and respond to email. More days of being annoyed by my cats who I really love a lot but whom I’m not accustomed to spending quite this much time among. They are needy little jerks. Sometimes I forget I love them. Then I remember and I feel guilty.

This is all to say that when you have so much time to just wait and think and do nothing much at all you get a little overwhelmed with the idea of making your life even a little bit more complicated by trying to accomplish any of it in the outside world.

My new plan is to wait until Wednesday to head to the office. It’s cleaning lady day. I need to vacate the premises. It’s supposed to be cooler and not as humid by Wednesday. Another good sign. Maybe a few more days of resting and sleeping and waiting and nothingness will leave me feeling almost human by Wednesday! I can hope. I never stop hoping.

The image above is a self portrait I did probably ten years ago before all of this insanity started. I used to paint with oils. I used to love painting but I can’t really do that anymore because I don’t have a studio in the house where I can shut out the kitties from chemicals that could harm them. I used to paint on my front porch which involved carrying my easel, my canvas and my paints outside and then back in again once I was done for the day. I keep my painting supplies in the basement out of kitty reach. More steps. I haven’t painted anything in a really long time probably all because of those steps and that carrying and my literal lack of energy for anything other than trying to live the most basic kind of life.

The moments in between are when you start resenting the hell out of things like that. That’s why you don’t like writing about them. The moments in between are the things you would really like to forget but you cannot because there are so damn many of them!

I’m told it won’t always be like this. I believe that, I really do. But it doesn’t make you any less pissed off in those many moments in between. You’re only human and so am I.