…has sucked. But things are getting better.

I have felt messed up all day. Tired and stressed out and anxious. For a while it felt like I couldn’t do anything without this omnipresent anxiey making me want ot jump out of my skin and back in again.

At the same time, I felt this energy drain. Not, thank goodness, the really bad kind that makes me feel like there’s a gravity well trying to suck me down to the floor by making every cell in my body heavier, but still somewhat unpleasant.

Worst of all was the deep hard ache in my lungs. That’s what clued me in to the fact that the problem was oxygen and that I needed to do my breathing exercises pronto.

I have three such exercises :

1. Forcibly emptying absolutely all the air from my lungs. That means taking a deep breath, then exhaling continuously until there is absolutely nothing left in my lungs. This works by getting rid of the excess CO2 that accumulates in my lungs as I sleep because the sleep apnea causes incomplete exhalation. This technique is highly effective but also somewhat strenuous and uncomfortable. So I am somewhat more likely to use…
2. Holding my breath. I am not sure why this works, exactly. But it does. I take a deep breath and hold it for as long as I can, and while I am doing so, I can feel the CO2 in the bottom of my lungs being sucked upwards, and then it gets pushes out when I finally exhale. This technique also works as a test of how bad my situation is, because (and this is a little spooky), the worse my imbalance is, the longer it takes before holding my breath has the usual effect of making me want to exhale. I figure this is because when I am holding my breath, my lungs are using up the oxygen mixed in with the CO2 and I don’t feel oxygen starved until that is all used up. I have gone thirty seconds without feeling the effect before. Wild. I always have this odd technique….
3. Breathing in an out rapidly. As in, panting like a dog. Seems to pull the CO2 up and then push it out. I don’t use this one so much, but it’d good to have when the other two techniques either don’t seem to be working, or when in my O2-deprived state they both seem too onerous or complicated.

So I was able to get myself somewhat back on track via my own efforts, which is always good, Anything where I can help myself out of a bad situation or even just make my life a little better via my own effort is a good thing because it works against my usual feeling of utter helplessness and despair.

I need all the reminders I can get that I am not, in fact, powerless to change my situation and that I am not utterly incompetent and that the fact that sometimes it’s really hard for me to do simple things is no reflection on my character or capacities.

It just means I’m sick. And if I hang in there, the fog will lift, and I will be able to get shit done at last.

More on this later.

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I should really stop saying that, I rarely if ever resume the previous topic because by the time I get back to the computer, my mind is a million miles away from where it was when I started this dang thing.

What can I say, the waters of my mind run swift and deep.

I just had a very modern “senior moment” : I managed to completely forget why I opened a browser tab in the moments in between opening it and switching to it.

The waters of my mind run so swift and deep that whatever is on my mind can get swept out to see at breathtaking speed.

My mental beach has one heck of a riptide.

I feel better now, thank goodness. Just like yesterday. And that has me thinking.

If the deal was, ‘you will feel absolutely horrible for six hours a day but the rest of the time you will feel reasonably okay”, I think I would make that deal.

From what I understand about people who are super grumpy in the morning and hate “morning people”, that’s life for a lot of people period.

Especially before that “first cup of coffee”, or so I am led to believe.

Myself, I have never been like that. But then again, I have never had anything forcing me to be more awake and alert than I wanted to be.

Even when I was a kid going to school, I always got up way before I needed to leave because it takes me a long time to wake up.

And even the walk to school and the morning classes did not require me to wake all the way up. So it could be 11 am before I was truly awake.

The few times in my life when something has been forcing me to be way more awake than I would naturally be, I was hella grumpy.

Oh damn…. it just occurred to me that the worst case scenario is if I had to deal with something totally unexpected while not fully awake.

I don’t handle the unexpected well when I am fully compos mentis. If I was already sleepy and cranky when the unwanted surprise came, there would be no hope in hell of keeping the angry sarcastic bear that lives inside me in his cage.

I remember that before tour buses were banned from going through Bevery Hills, there would be these news stories about some poor celeb in their slippers and bathrobe getting into a screaming argument with some fucking halfwit who just trampled their begonias or whatever.

I could totally see that happening to me. Not only can I get cranky when my sleep is disturbed, I also have very strict sense of propriety and privacy and can get quite bent out of shape when I feel someone has vastly exceeded their perogatives.

So yeah. I can imagine getting into a screaming argument with some idiot who woke me up by trodding through my flower bed.

I picture me screaming, ‘YOU ASSHOLES DON’T OWN ME!’.

And THAT would be the video that would go viral.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.