I finally started pelvic floor therapy last Thursday. I was told by the therapist who did my intake that most pelvic floor patients only come once a week, but I’m a special case because of course I am. I mean, why wouldn’t an obscure yet common condition impact me for multiple reasons instead of just one?
She confirmed I do have vaginismus, which was kind of obvious given that twelve years ago I had to be given general anesthesia for a pelvic exam and hysteroscopy. But it was still nice to officially have someone who knows how “my down there” works confirm it. (“My down there” was something that slipped out once in a conversation with Chris so now it’s something we joke about.) Anyway, she found out about my history of trauma, which she said is definitely a factor. Then she found out about my history of hip problems and attempted & successful orthopedic surgeries on it. And she found out about my hypermobility and how my joints can be “really flexible” but my muscles lack flexibility and can be extremely stiff.
It’s going to be hard for me to do some of the therapies required because relaxing muscles is extremely difficult for me. Like my brain will send the message for them to relax and my body will send one back asking WTAF it’s talking about. Physical therapists have literally had to slap and jerk my legs (not in a painful way) to make the muscles ease up before. And one of my new therapists, because I can’t just have one, will be doing dry needling for part of mine.
She decided on that path because checking my body for orthopedic clues about “my down there” (cute right?) always seemed to lead me to feel tensing & spasming in my vagina. She discovered my piriformis muscle, which has been a dick to me for years, was extremely stiff and just pressing once almost automatically caused a spasm for me. She said normally she could work it out with her hands, but she thought that could set me back weeks. So she is going to do dry needling instead.
If it works, it works.
And she will be focusing on my external therapy. The other therapist, who I haven’t met yet, will be working on my internal therapy. Not internal as in psychotherapy but internal as in INTERNAL. So that’ll be different, right? Because I need external pelvic floor/orthopedic physical therapy in addition to the internal pelvic floor therapy, I get to see them twice a week.
Oh, and to get any of this done, I had to ask my rheumatologist for a referral/order for it & set the appointment up myself because it was taking my family doctor too damn long to do a second one. I’m also still a bit annoyed at her office staff for trying to send me to a clinic that doesn’t take my insurance. (What is even up with that?)
So yeah. Now I get to go to pelvic floor therapy in the morning twice a week because that’s when the internal therapist works at this clinic. The morning part is what I dread the most.
So I will probably regret writing this later, but I’m on Flexeril so I’ll worry about that then.
As you may or may not know, for years, I didn’t have the best experiences in life when it comes to sex positivity, sex education, and sexual experiences. That I was sexually abused as a child, raped as an adult, part of a very conservative religion for most of my life, and forced to grow up in the “sex-is-bad-bigotry-is-good” state of Alabama probably all have contributed to my vaginismus. If you don’t know what that is, it basically means that my vagina closed up shop without letting me know and refuses to reopen for no goddamn reason. It can be painful, but it’s mostly embarrassing as fuck and emotionally devastating.
I can be super turned on, but if my vagina wants, it will close up like it’s Spirit Halloween on November 3rd. It practically disappears from the face of the earth. And by face of the earth, I mean my “down there” region. It’s so exhausting and it’s painful, and sometimes I feel like I’m failing at being a girlfriend and a human being.
There are treatments for it, including dilators and physical therapy. The problem is that dilators can take hours, which is kinda shitty when you really want to have sex right this minute. And the problem with physical therapy is that pelvic floor physical therapy can’t be done by just anyone and the people who do it won’t fucking schedule my appointment. My family doctor sent the first referral the week before Valentine’s Day. They sent another almost two weeks ago. Still nothing.
What does a girl have to do to have a functional vagina so she can have a lot of sex with the love of her life? Also, so I can stop having the vagina spasms that hurt like a motherfucker. Mainly the sex though because priorities.
This past week has been a struggle. No, really it has. There have been several times where I wanted to scream into a pillow or start crying and never stop. It’s been bad enough that I can’t even remember all of the badness.
The worst of it started on Monday morning. (Prior to this, the freezer we keep my ice packs in died.) Mom had a steroid injection in her neck. She’d thought it was funny when they scheduled it that they could either do it on Valentine’s Day or on my birthday (Thursday); and she didn’t understand the concept of: I have plans those days that don’t involve hours of waiting in a car for a shot that never actually gives any lasting relief. But I agreed to Valentine’s Day because I knew it’d be easier that day than on my birthday.
So because of their newest Covid protocols, I sat in the car for three hours. When you have a notoriously bad hip, sitting in the car can be beyond painful. I was stiff and in a lot of pain during my date with Chris, but the date was nice, cute, and fun. We watched YouTube videos afterwards.
An hour before my dad had to leave for an appointment on Tuesday morning, mom fell. I checked on her and asked if I needed to take him. She said she was okay, and she took him to his appointment. When they got back, she was talking about how the next afternoon he needed to go to the pharmacy to get his pneumonia vaccine. I told her that wasn’t possible since I had to work Wednesday. She then said she’d do it on Thursday afternoon. When I reminded her I had plans on Thursday, she told me other people in the house have plans too and she didn’t understand why I had to do whatever it was on Thursday. I told her she could take him early on Thursday, but I wasn’t going to give up that afternoon. She never seemed to recognize why I was so adamant about Thursday.
I had to take her to a lab appointment that afternoon and I had to sit in the car in the parking lot for another hour, which inflamed my hip even more. When we got home, I went to grab my bag and I saw that a painting of mine had been cut in two places. I assumed it was damaged by my dad because he does that with my stuff quite a bit. I showed my mom and she didn’t seem to understand why I would be so upset.
Normally, Tuesday is Writers’ Club night. So I would usually be staying at Chris’s overnight after we all went home. But Tuesday it was canceled. I texted to make sure I could still stay over, since I know sometimes he might not feel like it, and he said of course I could. So I went over and started napping on the bed with him at around 5 pm.
At 5:59, we both woke up to a special ringtone I have set for mom. She might need to go to the ER. Her throat hurt, she couldn’t swallow, her back hurt, she couldn’t move, and she couldn’t see her doctor the next day because he wasn’t going to be in. I drove home and picked her up; I waited while she got ready. Then I drove her to the ER and, at about 7 pm, let her out before I went to park the car in the parking deck. That’s when it happened, and, by it, I mean I wrecked my car.
I hit a concrete pillar/support/column as I was entering the parking space. A doctor witnessed it and tried to prevent my oncoming panic attack. This led to an asthma attack and texts to Ashley, Chris, mom, my aunt, Laura, and Kitty. They helped calm me down.
While in the ER’s visitor waiting area out in the parking deck, there was a guy who was reciting rap lyrics, yelling obscenities & slurs, and said “I’m going to fucking kill you” as a state trooper headed into the ER. The cop grabbed his vest and turned really quickly. I was sure something bad was about to go down. It didn’t. Security moved the guy a few times. Eventually Chris suggested I go wait in my car, so I did.
At about 1:45, mom texted me that she got a room in the ER. This meant I could go wait with her in the hospital, which I did. We were told that the doctor would be in soon. Soon ended up being 5:30. He said she pulled a muscle and just had a sore throat; her throat had already started feeling better by now. He said we’d get discharged soon. Soon ended up being 7 am.
Around 24 hours after I first woke up.
I went home to take a nap before my HAL shift, and got about 4.5 hours sleep in. Luckily, things were fairly dead on Wednesday, so I just sat and watched my friend Sara get married via livestream. Oh, and I answered a new text from mom about how I needed to change my birthday plans. (Not because she was in pain.)
She told me that there would be storms the next day and there was a risk they’d been strong. I had been monitoring the system for days. She wanted us to cancel our plans to go to The Cheesecake Factory. I told her that I would just make sure we got there and back to Chris’s house before the storms arrived. So even though I suck at time management, I worked out a timeline for the next day so that we could do what we’d planned on doing for months. (Mom had been told a while before that this was our plan.)
Because of the importance of the timeline, I was the one who took dad to get his vaccine, not her. And I was able to get to Chris’s house well before I needed to to make sure we could go to The Cheesecake Factory.
Our date was actually one of the best birthdays ever, and not just because I was finally able to try Chicken Parmesan Pizza Style, which I loved. No, it was one of the best because I was with Chris.
He’s so pretty.
At 4:54, mom texted to check if we’d gotten back. We had been back since shortly before 3:30, which was when I had told Chris we needed to be back. She asked if I was staying overnight and I told her I was. She said that was fine.
Two hours later, she let me know that dad was upset by his new glucose monitor. She was describing him as losing control, snapping, and yelling, which he does these things as part of his dementia and his bipolar disorder and his sparkling personality. He can be violent and it’s important to keep him as calm as possible to prevent that violence. His violence is something that mom knows scares the shit out of me because I’m usually the person he targets. So bringing it up was a good way to make me come home. But I sensed that he wasn’t really in that mind frame, so I tried giving ideas to soothe him. She told me nothing could soothe him but she’d leave him alone. Chris asked if she realized how her texts sound. I told him that she says she doesn’t, but that I’ve told her in the past and she claims that isn’t her intention.
I don’t think anything major happened on Friday, but on Saturday night while I was sleeping my Facebook got hacked. I was able to convince Facebook to let me change the password, but my account is currently disabled, pending a review.
From what I’ve gathered, the hackers posted an ad for some kind of good or service that violates Facebook’s Terms of Service. The community standards link leads to this page. If they compared the ads to any other post I’ve made since 2007, they’d notice that none of those goods/services line up with my values.
So, in 28 days, I may officially have a permanently disabled Facebook profile for things I didn’t even do. Fun. Things will get better soon. They have to.
O’s birthday was a couple of weeks ago, Chris’s birthday was Monday, my birthday is in just over two weeks, and mom’s is five days after that. This time of year is always pretty hectic for me in terms of birthdays & other family things.
We used to also have the days and weeks Nana would mourn the losses on the anniversaries of deaths, including Granddaddy’s, which happened 26 years ago this past Monday. I sometimes wonder how she would react to knowing Chris’s birthday was Granddaddy’s death day.
This last weekend was also Chris’s weekend with O. I drove him to pick up O on Friday and I drove them to drop O off on Sunday. It was the first time I was in the vicinity of O’s mom, a woman I have felt intimidated by for a while. But now I don’t, which I’m counting as an achievement.
After dropping O off, we went on a quest to find dinner for his family. We were going to go to Popeyes but there were technical issues and a lack of sides that prevented that, so instead we got food at KFC. Then we watched Charlotte Dobre and Evan & Katelyn videos on YouTube. Eventually mom texted to passive aggressively remind me to come home because she wouldn’t get to see me for the next two nights so she needed to spend time with me.
I spent Monday with Chris. He had to get his hair cut and his beard trimmed. I have previously attempted to trim his mustache before and accidentally gave him half of a Hitler-stache, so I defer to professionals on that. We then hung out at his house for a while until his mom was ready for dinner, which we ate at his favorite Japanese restaurant. We ate, and I tried sushi for the second time and found out I do like it. I also found out that my first sushi was probably bad, as in rotten or on its way to being rotten; this rice was vinegary and the fish was super fishy to the point that I barely finished a couple of rolls. Chris told me that it’s probably a good thing I didn’t finish the sushi that time because it was bad. The food Monday night was good; so good that I overate & ended up vomiting part of it when we got back to his house.
Then we watched The Legend of Vox Machina before going back to YouTube videos while we regretted our life choices. (Mostly, the overeating, but also any movement we made after overeating.) Mom texted at around ten, which caused the night to come to an abrupt end.
Chris was still feeling bad after the food choices today, so, to give him a chance to recover, we didn’t get to go to Writers’ Club together tonight. I’ll admit I cried a bit when I found that out because I’m on my period and I do that a lot on my period, as I mentioned a few posts ago. Apparently it had to do with the extra progesterone that gets released around the time of your period causing borderline personality disorder to go into overdrive.
I found out about the change of plans prior to getting my labs done for my primary care doctor. And I’m sure my lipids and sugar levels will be great after the mukbang that was this weekend.
The first Tiktok I got to post about my labs this morning. The first I started recording this morning about my labs.
Oh, and I found out before the labs that Adore Me decided to claim I sent back another empty box with their Elite subscription, so I was fucking pissed about that. Later in the day, they’d claim they actually received it, but everything was unsanitary so they had to give me an almost $200 penalty for items they actually received. I’ve contacted the BBB and plan to make YouTube & TikTok videos about their scamming tendencies. (Last month, they claimed I sent back an empty box because they say they never received anything from me. The month before, they claimed I sent something back dirty. I’m not sure how I could dirty up something I never touched.)
Oh, and I started figuring out how extensive my disordered eating really is. I’ve been exhibiting signs not just of binge eating disorder but also bulimia, and that’s freaked me out a little. But otherwise things in my life are awesome.
Basically, I had a lot going on and didn’t really have a lot of time for drama llamas on social media, so when I got home and found out a person I considered a friend blocked me on Twitter, I was about ready to laugh. No really. Apparently I may have been blocked for failing to block another friend of mine sometime over the weekend because some of their friends got into it with some of hers.
I don’t know all of what happened nor do I care to, especially since the blocker is being hypocritical as fuck over all of it. A few months ago another person said that if you didn’t like two people they both happen to like, then you are a bad/questionable person. I made a TikTok about how this kind of behavior hurt my feelings. The blocker sent me half a dozen comments invalidating my feelings & gaslighting the fuck out of me. Then she deleted them so as to not look bad. We never spoke of it again, but she’s seemed sus to me since then.
It used to make me uncomfortable how close she was with people who had been even more hurtful toward me. There was one in particular who compared a breakdown in borderline personality disorder to being a little depressed or anxious. That person claimed I was ableist because I disagreed with them and had pointed out that they had excused their friend’s ableist rhetoric. They claimed I hated autistic people and some other bullshit. I have a lot of mutuals with this person, but most don’t make me uncomfortable. The blocker did.
Today I realized her block didn’t matter all that much to me. I had an amazing weekend. I’m hormonal and cry over anything, but being dumped by a person I used to think of as a friend didn’t matter to me. There are other people who I know it would hurt coming from, but not her.
And I know this coming weekend will be amazing too, and I know that not being able to share it with this person doesn’t bother me at all. So I guess I should thank her for the learning experience?
The weekends this year are starting to remind me of the winter of 1996. We’ve had two winter storms so far and we’re only fifteen days in. In 1996, we seemed to have a winter storm every single week in January and a couple into February.
Of course memories of that year are pretty vivid since it was also the winter when so many relatives died and the year when both of my grandfathers died. It’s also the year when my OCD got kicked into high gear. Basically, it wasn’t the best of times for me & my family.
I love snow, except for how it seems to isolate me from my friends and, now, Chris. It gives me no way to get out and deal with my anxiety, which isn’t great. At least when we were on lockdown, I could be in my car and drive around a little. Or I could go up to Lowe Mill and work a little, but I can’t do that even on the clearest day since that studio is no longer being rented by HAL. (I need a safe place to do art.)
I hope the snow won’t keep us stuck inside for long.
I spent Saturday afternoon through Sunday afternoon with Chris at his house. We spent most of the time asleep. When I would wake up, sometimes I would play Pokémon Go or I would read things on Twitter.
Other times I would turn over and act like Edward Cullen. No, I’m not saying I wanted to eat him because he smells so awesome. (Generally speaking I always want to do other things because he smells so awesome.) I would just look at him and think how pretty he is, which I ended up telling him when he woke up while I was less inhibited due to my nighttime medication. (That may also be part of why I’m okay writing this.)
But he is so pretty.
And if you’re thinking that’s emasculating, fuck you. Pretty isn’t feminine or masculine. It’s just pretty. That’s what it is, and that’s what he is.
He is also handsome and sexy and gorgeous and adorable and I just want to look at him forever. And watch him change clothes. And smell his pillow when he’s in the bathroom. And listen to him say just about anything ever.
He’s pretty and perfect and his eyes are magical and I love him so much. This weekend was far from the first time I’ve thought these things. Another time was when we were on the flight to California and he was holding my hand across the aisle because I am fucking terrified of flying and I knew that I was safe because I was with him. I knew that I never wanted to not hold his hand because I am home when I hold it. I know that I am touching my other half. (Not in a The Divinyls or Britney sort of way.)
And, on the way back, when he was helping me not die from exposure to peanuts—thanks, Spirit—I felt secure. Also, I liked having a chance to rest my head on his shoulder for four hours. Just being able to touch some part of him—I know some of y’all went to Perv City on that—anchors me. Though my “love language” for expressing love may be gifts, I think receiving involves physical touch. Or it is with him, since my haphephobia is still there with most people.
I miss him right now, but I know I’ll see him again in a day and a half, and I’ll be there overnight. So I guess I just get to dream and daydream about his prettiness until then.
I have to get back into the hang of blogging and I know eventually I will. I know I used to disappear for days and weeks and months on end, but I don’t want to be like that anymore. I want to be more reliable.
Christmas was pretty good, though it was a bit scary at one point when we found out that Chris’s son had COVID-19. He was in California at the time, so we were helpless and heartbroken. I may have also been extra bitchy towards people during that time because I was upset. O is fine now, which ended up being the only thing I really wanted this Christmas. (Though if you want to get something for my birthday, I wouldn’t be opposed to that.)
Our dessert table on Christmas
I spent Christmas Day with my mom’s side of the family, and Chris spent it with his mom’s side. We waited until the day before New Years Eve to wrap presents for O, which were unwrapped within an hour of O getting to Chris’s house on New Years Eve. He seemed to enjoy his presents, which I’m so glad. You watch enough Charlotte Dobre videos and you start to worry about how kids will react to presents; though I never really have to worry about with O because he’s a good kid.
Chris and I went to a “party” before Christmas at our friend Elenya’s house. (It’s also Colin’s house, but he wasn’t there that night.) It was really just a Writers’ Club meeting with Christmas themed prompts (by Rhiana) and desserts & hot chocolate. I wrote this, which is only available on my Patreon.
So that’s what happened over my holiday break. And now I’m sitting in my living room listening to rain and sleet as part of the winter storm that’s going on right now. Fun times.
My T. Swift shirt on New Years Eve. Please ignore the toilet in the background.
On the way to celebrate Thanksgiving at my aunt’s house on Thursday, my mom told me that she and my dad had had a conversation recently about me. She told me that she told him that I would be happier and easier to get along with if I was on mood stabilizers. I was horrified.
My first response was, “what?” That was followed by my pointing out that I had tried every mood stabilizer and that I had adverse reactions to a large chunk of them (lithium, antipsychotics, and several anticonvulsants) and a zombie on most of them. My mom told me that I hadn’t. (I have taken all but two FDA-approved and off-label mood stabilizers.)
I’m actually much happier and feel relatively stable off of them. Being happier is why I’m not at home as much. In fact, the goal of my mental health care over the last decade or so has been to increase my ability to leave the house with the hope that one day I could actually live separately from my parents. And my treatment plans have had to accommodate my inability to use mood stabilizers.
When I told him what she’d said, Chris said it sounded like she wanted me to be compliant and stay home all the time. Unfortunately that was what I thought too. I haven’t told him all of the times she has said she wants to be my representative payee or have me placed in a program through Social Security that would eliminate my access to a bank account & remove my ability to run my shop. It would keep me without true resources.
It makes all of her talk through the years about my lack of control & my inability to live without continued assistance of my parents seem all the more sinister. Not to mention how it colors my view on her wanting access to my accident settlement (she wants it in her bank account) and how she wants to raid my cash box for the festivals I’ve sold art & jewelry at. I’m fairly certain she’s been repaid most of the change she thinks I owe her on that. Then again, this is a woman who has threatened to sell or throw out my belongings before, so who knows what she thinks about that money?
It makes me want to make sure I definitely get a studio out of this house so that I can definitely gain independence. It also makes me want to stay out of my house all the time. I don’t feel like she views me as a person.
Some of the gifts for O arrived today, which has me kind of worried because I don’t remember how to properly wrap presents. Also, I have no wrapping paper, bows, tape, or tags for O’s gifts.
I bought special paper for Chris’s presents that I could use on O’s, but I don’t know if I should. I may just get O his own paper too. I know blue is his favorite color, so I may run with that.
Or I could do gift bags.
Again.
I don’t get why wrapping gifts has to be so difficult for me, besides my clumsiness amplifying my issues with cutting and folding in straight lines. Also, tape hates me. Oh, wait. I’m starting to figure out why it’s difficult.
So it’s been a while since I’ve blogged. I haven’t added my old posts back yet, but I do plan to do that. I guess I should mention what’s been going on in my life.
I am an exhibiting artist at Huntsville Art League, and have been since last year. For a while I was the Education VP there, but now I’m the President. I was also teaching there and at Michael’s, but then a little thing called COVID interrupted that.
I have published two books of poetry—The Dark Lady and Ambition. I have sold precisely two copies of those books, which was honestly more than I expected to sell. Publishing them also led to my creation of my Goodreads Author page.
I finally had to get another iron infusion last week. My hematologist had told me last year that this would definitely be the year for it, and he was right. My ferritin had been steadily dropping since 2013—when I had my last infusion. This year it actually slowed down on that descent and only got to 21, but my iron saturation went from 35% to 16.7% and my platelets had already started going up. With my risk of clots, that last part was a bit more concerning. So I got an INFeD infusion to help get that under control.
Oh, and I have the most amazing boyfriend ever. His name is Chris. He’s my age and has a 13-year-old son. Chris is funny, sweet, smart, and I am so in love with him. We have been together since May 17, 2020. We didn’t meet in person until September 2020 though because of COVID. I met his son in May 2021.
Chris and I took this selfie when we got our third COVID shot last month.
He and I are actually going on our first trip together this weekend. We’ll be going to California for his best friend’s wedding. I haven’t been on a plane since 1999 and I’m a tad nervous, but I’m sure he’ll find a way to calm me or get my mind off of the anxiety.
