I didn’t write a wrap up last week, because I was down. I’m not great this week, but I’m not actively depressed anymore. It actually took me a while to realize I that I was–why do I keep staring off into space? Why does my face and body crumple the second I end a zoom call with a student? Why do I just want to sleep?
Luckily, my depression didn’t lie to me–it didn’t tell me that I didn’t deserve to be happy or that no one cared about me or that I would feel depressed forever.
Instead, it told me that my pain was going to keep getting worse.
And that’s probably true.
We’re dealing with a lot at my house. Anubis keeps getting blocked, even though we’re holding him down and cleaning his urethra, which is every bit as awful as it sounds. He’s been to the vet every week for the past month; Dante is literally there with him now as I type this.
Dante’s also had two flat tires in the past three weeks and will have oral surgery next week. And it’s heavy exam time for his Masters program.
I’m dealing with a couple of really difficult students, and that takes up more mental space than it should. My massage therapist is encouraging me to do a meditation throughout the day to clear the pressure of making all students happy all the time.
But what’s really causing problems right now is my physical health.
My TMJ dentist made me a night guard a couple of months ago. I had told him that I stopped wearing the one I got almost twenty years ago, because it made me grind more, and thus caused more pain. I told him my TMJ physical therapist a lower one would work better for me.
He told me he knew best and made a top one.
And I grind more.
And I wake up in pain more.
I met with him a couple of weeks ago, and we didn’t really talk about the guard because we had to go over the most intensive scans I’ve ever seen–down to the blood vessels. Apparently, not only do I have TMJ problems and arthritis and neck problems, which I knew already, but my airflow is constricted and my mouth didn’t form properly when I was a child and my tongue is in the wrong place. And apparently my tongue being in the wrong place maybe means I can’t breathe at night, and that would explain why I’m overweight and hypertensive (I would love to blame it completely on my tongue, and not on my stupid back making it hard to walk and my job being so sedentary and the food I cook being so good). And surely I’ve noticed these deformities, like how my upper lip is too thin, right?
I had not noticed that.
So he wants to cut my frenum and the tissue that connects my upper lip to my gums and put braces on me.
And I worked very hard not to cry, because having braces when I was a kid is when my daily headaches started, and moving my bones and teeth will hurt, and I have fibromyalgia, which means I will feel that hurt more than normal people, because my body is oversensitive and whiny.
And I think he said something about the braces closing the gap between my front teeth, but I don’t actually want that, because I’ve got this whole multiple-husbands, lusty wife of Bath thing going on.
And then, as I was working through this information and the depression that came with it, I started to bleed again, heavily.
Regular readers will remember that for several months last year, I had unexplained, constant heavy menstrual bleeding, which resulted in agonizing tests like a uterine scraping. We ended up fighting this by adding a second form of birth control–so now I’m on two different kinds, both of which are supposed to keep me from having periods all together.
It’s day 14 of this particular period, and it’s awful. I have some blood tests to do Wednesday.
I’ve been talking to some of my team members about what the TMJ doc wants to do, and their reaction reassures me that I’m not insane. They were all trained that lower night guards were best, and they have reservations about moving things in my skull around. My chiropractor stressed that this was a lot to add to all of the other body problems I’m working with right now and how if these procedures didn’t work–or made things worse–there would be no way to undo them.
I emailed the TMJ doc’s medical assistant a week ago with questions. If my tongue is in the wrong place, where is it supposed to be? Do I need a frenum cut to get it there? Can we try a lower guard? etc.
She hasn’t written back.
Today I head into Sacramento, to UCD’s genetics people, for a physical exam, to see if Ehlers-Danlos syndrome is likely.
I’m all cramped up because I walked for thirty whole minutes outside.
It’s just a lot.
And it’s been a lot for a long time, and usually I can handle that. And I don’t have unrealistic expectations. I’m a chronic pain patient. My goal is to manage, to keep going, not to erase what is unerasable.
But the dentist just threw me for a loop. I thought I knew what was wrong, and I did.
I just wasn’t prepared to learn my whole upper body was completely wrong and that it has been since the beginning of me.
And now I can’t stop thinking about my tongue.
