Started last night.
Ug, my internet is so screwed this evening. I kept trying off and on for an hour to get an easy download and kept timing out so badly that I couldn't even pull 3 minutes of video. I tried to get on server and it was so difficult just completing login that once it took nearly 5 minutes just for chat to show up. I've got a live draft coming up in a few days, will I be able to even attend? I might wind up having to just auto draft this year. Our broadband host is offering discounts, so it's not my laptop, it's not our setup or router, it's everyone on this service. We're basically hostage since no one else offers service to my house.
We got a ton of stuff accomplished around the house today, though. Major space reallocation around the kitchen, buncha stuff moved upstairs, one major appliance sold and another installed, closets and drawers and cabinets organized.
It's difficult to tell where I am with therapy progress on the atlas/axis cervicocranial thing. The nerves around my face that went numb in 2004 and then redeveloped all new maddening itching and tingling and numbness for years afterward seem to be waking up. All that is lately replaced with extremely tender sensitive areas that seem to feel normal otherwise, but I can only guess since I haven't felt what normal is since I was 19. It's coming across as kinda painful (think scalp sensitivity where it hurts just touching your skin, but all over my face too, almost like I'm bruised or something), but it's also actually kinda feeling like the nerves are able to feel more correctly for the first time in years. A lot of the painful ear stabbing sensations have nearly stopped. The tinnitus is unreal and my sense of smell is going in and out like it can't decide. I had lost quite a lot of my sense of smell and taste years ago, and it's interesting when I suddenly notice something smells really good or I'm hearing something I hadn't noticed before. My hearing used to be super awesome, like 110% on hearing tests, and then I went through the nerve fail and could barely follow tv because I was like so consonant-dyslexic with my real time hearing processing, and now I'm keeping up way better again without having to pause every other sentence making sure I heard it right. The first season of Continuum five years ago was so difficult to audio process that I was pausing after nearly every sentence. @bonenado got a lot of gold stars that year for being so patient with that. (The broohaha years ago over an interview transcription I did- no one had a clue how labor intensive that was for me, and how many total hours that took.)
The hope is that this will also positively affect all my nervous system going on down, like arms and legs. Still difficult to tell, but there is enough relief overall, however vague, to keep a thumbs up on it. The hardest part is the local area itself. When I whiplashed just beneath my skull (usually how people wind up paralyzed or killed), I damaged so much soft tissue that it got really swollen in there and laid down enough scar tissue to prevent my C1/skull area to sit together properly, and I have lived with that horrible nerve pressure for decades. If you need any kind of context, this is a good site to check out.
C1 and C2 Vertebrae: The Basics Behind the Worst Spinal Cord Injuries
I never talked about this for years and it took awhile for me to start getting really honest on Spaz and Pinky blogs about it after I committed to physical therapy a few years ago, and even then no one knew quite what the real truth was when I first brought it up. Between a chiropractor (started 2007) and a physical therapy team on hospital campus, it has taken ten years now to reach this point, where we are able to successfully work on this area directly, and it is still very slow work. Before I started this, I reached a point of needing help with everything, including self care, and had plunged into such long illness and terrible depression that I didn't believe I would live much longer. The pain itself was rough enough, but piled on top of it were complications galore, which I've been untangling on my blogs. It's rough and parts of it suck because I'm really feeling that nerve reverb as the pressure is slowly being trained back off and the nerve tissues continue to heal, BUT I'm so busy now keeping up with everything going on in my house, how can that not be a miracle? It's still so very hard, though, and at what seems like a dead run.
And now it's today.
Pain can be a wonderful teacher, a powerful motivator, and even a good friend. Pain has been part of who I am since I can remember. I've chosen pain over relief based on cost/benefits so many times, and I'm proof that really deep hard unremitting pain can be survived. If there is one thing I absolutely know, it is pain. I can see it in others, I can read it in animals, I can feel it when I'm near it. I will have a few things to say about pain and the cruelty some use to inflict it as a learning/teaching tool, as an entertaining toy, as a regenerating profit cycle, and as one of the despairing anguished who cried in the night not knowing if my existence was heard.
In the meantime, I'm quietly growing my wealth on the game server and even more quietly building beautiful things while I very, very quietly keep molding the real build I sculpt out of words.
Oh, yeah. Sploit and Batman are still on high ground with #Harvey. I can't begin to describe how stressed out I was going into this weekend. I'm finally starting to relax a little.
I am loving this vid. I can't believe how buried on youtube it is and how few views it's gotten, because it's very cute and really quite good.
