#we will now be chucking thinkythoughts like baby birds out of nest enjoy

[hag-o-hags]

last weekend I went way too hard, and by Sunday night I was running on completely empty. not even partying hard, just. Ikea and redecorating and blah blah blah blah blah, in our mid-30s we ball.

all this week I've been OUT, batteries dead, zero energy, can't brain for shit, plus Mon/Tues/Wed I have a sore throat, so I'm hitting it with alka-seltzer the first couple days, till it starts to feel better and I'm just drinking SO much tea.

Wednesday the Dizzy starts. By Thursday, I can't sit up without everything spinning, and through Sunday, I have to be flat on my back. Getting up to feed the creachurs is exhausting, disorienting, and generally miserable, let alone feeding myself. Dramamine does nothing. Also, super bonus, my body fucking hurts because I can't move!

Surprise, this is exactly what getting over La Rona felt like, except I don't have La Rona.

Since November I've been sort of operating on yes, this is still LongTallShortFatCovid in the absence of enough data to officially diagnose it, so let's just behave like it's ME/CFS and see what happens. So, supine on the sofa on Sunday, I'm trying to figure out if Gentle Stretches™ are a good or bad idea with post-exertional malaise (the hallmark ME/CFS symptom that I am pretending I know I have for reasons of science). Because, again, I am stiff and sore and I fucking ache.

I know that unfortunately there's a LOT of anecdata and not much hard review around symptom relief, but I also know there's quite a lot of people trying to figure out what works. One person's dribbly candles and magic circles and stuffed crocodile hanging from the ceiling and 13 other chronically ill people chanting the universe's esoteric and black history leads to another person's 4 cc of mouse blood and three small sticks.

I found a blog with a good enough balance of science vs multiple personal experiences that it felt worth digging into -- also Gentle Stretches™ probably not gonna make PEM worse, thank god, sitting yoga ahoy. Some people found NSAIDs or steroids helped them to recover, but the really interesting one to me was a couple very very very small studies about Dextromethorphan Hbr, an OTC cough suppressant.

That tinged a tiny little ding in my foggy jelly brain, and I rooted around like a drunk opossum until I found the alka-seltzer box in the recycling. (Coulda looked this up online. But again, jelly brain.) The cough suppressant is DXM Hbr. And it's got aspirin. I'd been taking a little ibuprofen all week because Ache, so it wasn't necessarily the NSAID. But when I phased out the cough suppressant, that's when the dizzy started.

It's just a correlation, I've got n=1 here. I know that. But I took a standard dose of OTC cough syrup (DXM Hbr and guaifenesin -- no NSAIDs), and in a couple hours I could get up, and walk around the yard and water the plants, despite being kinda dizzy. I started some laundry. I kept taking it just according to the directions yesterday, and today, for the first time in an ENTIRE WEEK, I can think enough to write, I can go upstairs without needing to sit after, and I'm a little lightheaded but I'm not stumbling.

Placebo is a thing of course, but also, Dramamine couldn't touch this, even though it helped last time. Day by day it was getting worse, not better, and I was laying on the couch because I'd finally managed to finish a shower but I couldn't be upright any more afterward.

(All shower euphoria is erased when I gotta sit flopped on the ground towing the faucet hose around my head and trying not to blast my eyeballs out.)

I have an appointment with my doctor on Wednesday. I'm really lucky -- she's been great thus far, and takes me seriously when I say wacky things like I HAVE AN HYPOTHESIS REGARDING THESE SYMPTOMS, CAN WE LOOK INTO THEM. ("Yes and also would you like a referral to get spayed").

That being said, Saturday morning, I cried and cried, feeling like I had to hold onto the sofa to not fall off, because I'm scared and frustrated and angry and grieving. Grief is probably the worst because right now I don't know what I've lost. If I've lost anything. If this is real, if it's going to pass, if I'm panicking ... or if this is my life. Other disabilities have taken things from me -- doors that get closed and then bricked over. This feels like I could get shut in one room forever, like. Yes you, the Stress Powered Engine, who lives for pushing eustress as close to distress as you possibly can for fun and profit! Doing that will now hit you like a semi at highways speeds!

Or, I could recover. I don't have the data to know.