Sometimes lupus gives you a bad day.
My bad day started sometime yesterday; I'm not sure when. My ears started to hurt, and my glands swelled up. I was trying to get some things done, but twenty minute tasks stretched into two hours or more. I functioned patiently for a long time, just rolling with my mistakes without tensing up and getting angry, plugging along, doing things slowly, stupidly, in the wrong order, but plugging along.
Until it got to be 11 p.m. At 11 p.m -- when I realized how late it was, and how little I had accomplished -- I fell apart.
Today should have been a good day. I had fun things to do, friends to be with.
But I felt awful. For one thing, I got hardly any sleep last night. I fell into bed, exhausted, at 12:09, because that's just how long it takes me to get ready for bed when I don't realize it's late until 11 p.m. I thought I would fall right to sleep, because of how tired I was, but I lay there struggling to turn my mind off until 1:44, at which point I got up to use the bathroom. I got up two more times to use the bathroom, finally fell asleep, woke up what seemed like 15 minutes later, and realized it was daylight. Sigh. Fatigue settled in like a sort of noxious pain. I felt awful. And when I feel awful, I am cross. Crabby. Miserable. I try to hold it in, but I feel it coming out. A word. A tone of voice. A snap. Then I feel ashamed and self-conscious and guilty.
It was a dark, rainy day. A Syracuse sort of day. We don't have that many days like this here in the midwest, but today our weather got me down, too. Also, I always seem to feel worse when there are storm clouds in the sky and specks of water or snow in the air.
I soldiered through a bunch of Christmas shopping. Drove home feeling the dreaded, "Ooooops. Pushed too long and hard." Tingling chills on my lower back suggest the onset of a low grade fever, never a good sign.
Shawn came home, and we ate (I'd already had to go ahead and eat some food before he got here, because of how weak I felt). Then I looked through the mail and opened a medical bill for approximately $675. And I wept. It was $1114 before insurance "adjusted" it. I should be thankful, right? But I wasn't thankful. I was distraught.
You know what I hate the most about lupus? I hate the bills. I'm always having to go to the doctor, and the doctor orders tests. The doctor tells me I have to see more doctors, and have more tests. Currently I am avoiding going to the urologist for a CT scan of my kidneys and a cystoscopy. I am supposed to have these done because my regular lupus blood tests have shown blood in my urine (microscopic, invisible amounts) for nearly a year now, and it isn't going away. Usually this doesn't bother me. Usually I don't have pain. I take cranberry tablets and drink a lot of fluids. I don't want to go to the doctor for this.
I do not want to go to these appointments and have these tests. There are only two possible outcomes from these tests, and neither is any good.
1. We could find that I have a serious problem that needs expensive treatment. Boooo.
2. We could take the time, undergo the unpleasant procedures, and pay the thousands of dollars they charge for doing the procedures, and then find out that everything is fine and we could have just as well saved the time, money and unpleasantness.
I am going to try to wrap about five gifts, and then I am going to try to go to bed early.
I will not try to figure out what to do with this bill until tomorrow.
