Bright Spots and Rough Patches

A bright spot in my woeful and worrisome days. The anthology I'm featured in is out and I received my contributors copy a few days ago. It's being sold at our local Borders and when my mother mentioned to a bookseller that I was one of the contributors, they snapped my picture for the bulletin board. I was pretty pleased with that. Seeing my name in print makes me want to continue to see it in print, so I assembled a modest (very modest) sheaf of poems to submit to a small handful (3) of literary magazines. With teaching work on the far horizon, writing and submitting poems (and essays and articles) is the only way that I can feel useful.

I also did an interview on "good patient syndrome" that is, the idea that patients will act against their own best interests in order not to be branded a bad patient. A quote will be in an upcoming issue of Pain Pathways magazine.

I struggled with the decision to fire my rheumatologist; she had experience in treating EDS. But I got tired of trying to pull her ostrich head out of the sand. As I complained of almost weekly escalations in pain she decided that the best course of action would be to get me an emergency appointment...with a pain psychologist. When she told me I was letting the pain control me, I decided it was time to dip. It was clear she wasn't taking me seriously. Now I need to find someone in the area who will. And I need to do it soon.

It's infuriating, because it's standing in the way of my ambition...to teach. Yesterday I spent mostly in bed, only getting up to hobble painfully to the bathroom with the aid of my cane. The cause of this setback? A one hour stroll through the mall with my mother. That was all it took to floor me with pain for the next two days.

The left hip is still not quite right despite being pampered these past couple of days, so tomorrow I'll probably have to walk with my cane most of the day. I'm just guessing. I don't even know if there's something wrong with it (tendonitis?) Ostensibly, this is where a doctor would step in. But I don't have a doctor. I have an ostrich with an MD.

I'm hoping that if I keep writing I will accidentally write something uplifting. Better luck tomorrow. Good night.