So very many things have gotten in the way of me writing more regular posts it’s hard to decide where to start with listing them, but the change that seems to be the most obvious even to a dumb smart person like me is that I started back to work on January 4 and my dudes, if I may call you my dudes, holy shit. How did I forget what it’s like to work a 50+ hour a week corporate job in such a short time? It was only a little less than a year of medical leave! It might as well have been a thousand years.

Advertising! Advertising in a post-Covid world (who am I kidding? There ain’t no “post” to Covid)! Advertising when you work for a giant holding company agency! Advertising when your new job is running new business so people can make MORE advertising!

Advertising!

Ok. I just remembered to slap myself upside the head with the reality that the truth of the matter is I work in ADVERTISING, people, not brain surgery or teaching children or nursing or as a clerk in a grocery store or on the floor at some Amazon distribution center or in any one of a million other truly necessary professions where people do actual important things. I work in advertising!

But man. Do we take ourselves seriously.

Maybe it’s because of how much money our clients spend with us. Maybe it’s because our ability to get new clients directly affects the jobs of a lot of other people who also work in advertising along side of us. Maybe it’s because our jobs in advertising fund our freakishly expensive disabled lives. Oh wait. That’s just why advertising is so important to me, personally. Hell. Maybe because it’s some kind of other chronic sickness (not the one I have that affects my central nervous system) where you’ve spent so much time doing something crazy for a living that you can’t really imagine not doing it anymore. Maybe you have to admit you kind of love it and, man, it’s nice to have something to think about that isn’t your fucked up spinal cord.

It’s probably a little bit of all of that but we’re going to laugh a little at ourselves in this post. And share some news. Nothing earth shattering. Just what’s been going on around here since we’ve chatted last.

First, some good news.

The changes I made to my physical therapy schedule have made a huge difference in my performance.

I am finally getting stronger again. I am back to being able to walk my oh-so-impressive 40 foot stretches (stop it, you know that’s really far and so much further than I ever really want to walk in the first place anyway). I can stand up without holding on for as long as it takes to pull up my damn pants. Well. Most of the time anyway. My pain levels have decreased notably and my drug levels haven’t increased so that’s a good thing I suppose.

I decided I hate the stupid expensive bed with the adjustable base. It’s too high off of the ground and the constant adjusting is just dumb. I’m getting a regular old bed with a low profile box spring…boom. Problem solved.

I was able to take my first shower without the shower wheelchair this past Wednesday. I walked into the shower with my rollator. Used the teak benches I had built into my bathroom. And had the best shower I’ve had in as long as I can remember. I mean, don’t get too excited. I’m still not ready to shower alone (words I never thought would exit my mouth). But it’s such a huge step forward I can’t help but celebrate it.

That’s what’s really funny about my life. While I’m on video call after video call trying to solve the problems of the advertising world from the most comfortable chair in the house (my wheelchair), I’m doing really crazy handi-girl things.

For example, I need to make sure I’m standing to bear weight on my legs to help keep my legs somewhat operational. But I’m scheduled from hour to hour in meeting after meeting that I have to do while sitting down because people need to see my face in every meeting – so I’ve taken to standing up in my bathroom when I’m in there to pee.

Wait. I don’t mean I’m peeing standing up. That would be weird. But I do stand before I pee and count to one hundred. I stand after I pee and sing a little song while I weight shift. The sit-to-stand is another fun activity I can do in the guest bathroom because of the handy placement of grab bars. I try to do at least ten. Occasionally, if I have time, I’ll do a set of push ups against one of those many grab bars in my guest bathroom because hell! Why not? Muscle atrophy is a thing and I don’t want any parts of it, so bathroom exercising it shall be!

Some of my “meetings” in a day are my physical therapy. Or my occupational therapist coming over to help me learn the “intermediate activities of daily living.” It makes me giggle to wonder if my colleagues would be amused to know that I started my day by taking a shower with an audience. Or how proud I am of my ability to sit on a bench in the shower and not in a wheelchair.

In addition to figuring out how to produce PowerPoint slides at the speed of light from what seems like thousands of different templates and formats, each morning my day starts with the extreme effort required to don my compression toe socks.

You see, if I don’t put on compression socks first thing in the morning, my ankles and feet will be the size of soccer balls before noon. If any wheelchair user out there can tell me another way to avoid lower extremity swelling from sitting all day I’ll pay big bucks for that information because compression socks are no joke. Add toes to the compression socks and it gets exponentially more difficult to get them on every morning. The toe socks are critical to keep my spastic toes on my right foot from curling into little toe claws. But I have to put on yet another pair of toe socks on top of the compression toe socks because those don’t have grippers on the bottoms and the other ones do. Those grippers keep me from landing on my ass when I walk my 40 occasional feet. This absurdity is my life.

All of this has to happen before my first morning meeting but nobody on my video calls can see me taking deep cleansing breaths between tugs on my sock while trying to ignore the burning in my neck that results from this degree of daily morning exertion. They have no idea. They just see my smiling face on the next Teams call and nobody is the wiser.

I’m still sleeping in the sleep recliner because of how much I hate the previously mentioned adjustable bed. I also sleep in the recliner because it’s just so much easier to deal with after the long day of work and bathroom exercising is finally over.

The wonderful sleep recliner has a heater in it so my aching back muscles are soothed without the need of clumsy heating pads. It makes it super easy to elevate my only softball-sized swollen feet and ankles (compression socks can only do so much). Until I procure my new plain old bed, I’m sticking with the chair because it makes my life easier after a long day of doing weird shit at weird times. And pondering the new realities of your life like how odd it is that resting your feet on the foot plates of your wheelchair all day makes your feet hurt on the bottoms. I guess it’s kind of like how your feet might hurt from standing all day? I’m not sure why this discovery surprised me but it did.

I’m having fun by playing with makeup on “important” call days and seeing if I can get my hair to be so high that it doesn’t fit in the video call frame (spoiler alert…I always can and I usually do). I find myself laughing more these days even if it’s myself that I’m laughing at.

Work might be just how you make your living. How you fund the things you love or need in life. But it also provides a much needed distraction. One I’d oddly been missing while checking myself in and out of the hospital every few months in 2020.

Yes. My work life combined with my bizarre MS life is often the stuff of absurd comedy sketches brought to life but when it’s not making me cry it’s making me laugh or even just making me smile at seeing some colleague on my computer screen who I’ve missed seeing over the last year or so.

No, my house isn’t all perfectly set up for me yet. There are still boxes to unpack and important items missing – like my giant box of prescription eyeglasses (at least 15 pair…I have a bit of an obsession with wacky frames and losing them is making me exceedingly sad) and an entire bag of expensive sheets and at least 6 cashmere scarves. The decor is in need of some big time help and for the most part I need to get someone to help me rearrange the entire kitchen so I’ll be able to manage on my own once my roommate moves out in mid-March (a whole ten days earlier than I expected but who’s counting?).

So I guess that’s the bad news. I’ll be forced to figure out how to live alone again a bit sooner than I expected.

I know I’ll figure out how to feed myself and feed my cat and do the laundry and get myself dressed for work each morning (at least from the waist up) but I can’t lie and say I’m looking forward to figuring all of that out just yet. I know I will because I have to. That reality kind of makes things simpler. The lack of choice of it all. I have to keep reminding myself that I’m in such a better situation now. This house. This job. Even that wheelchair! They all make life feel more…well. More like life and that actually feels good. I’m sure I’ll get back to loving my solitude again. Even if it means a lot more take out in my future.

There is calm in the chaos even when I have trouble seeing it – even if it requires a klonipin to make the calm reveal itself at the end of my 10th video call of the day. I will happily use all of the tools in my handi-girl toolbox. There’s no shame in this wheelie girl’s game.

A girls gotta do what a girls gotta do. Even if it’s bathroom push-ups.