DISH

I’ve been dreading the night – its coming and getting myself through it – for months. The past few weeks have been worse, have gotten progressively worse. I’m barely, if at all, sleeping, catching myself up throughout the day on rest I’ve missed, effectively cancelling out the day itself. To a point, I’d gotten used to it, making due with four or five hours of at least “okay” sleep. However, I’ve found myself dipping into the three-hour level. Or less. On nights like this one. This past one, now, as dawn approaches. My thought process is feeling it – really feeling it. Nausea’s followed. My dreams are more and more bizarre. I’ve begun to wonder if I’d not be better-off dead. I feel dead now. So tired. Physically weak, physically and emotionally pained. I’m gobbling over-the-counter pain pills like mints.

I’ve been diagnosed with Diffuse Idiopathic Skeletal Hyperostosis, or “DISH”. It’s turning my body’s tendons and ligaments to bone, starting itself along my spine. Calcifying my joints. I worry I’ll soon be crippled.

I can’t get comfortable well-enough when lying down to rest easy. The doc ordered a spinal MRI a few days ago, but lying on the table in the machine was itself too painful for me to continue with the scan, so I got the fuck outta there and, upon leaving the imaging clinic, I had a tonic-clonic seizure. “Let’s try a CT scan,” my doc suggested and she ordered one; I go in at the end of this week. On its heels will come a visit to the spine center at St. Luke’s in Meridian to suss out where I go from that point with this shit. Thus far, its caused bone spurs in a foot as well as taking out its Achilles’ tendon. My legs are hurting, becoming stiff. I’ve also begun physical therapy. That and over-the-counter painkillers are about all one can do about DISH… There are surgical treatments available, but they’re not effective permanently. You can slow it down but it’s not stoppable. Which makes me wonder if I’ll ever sleep well again. My torso’s been tricky since my thymoma excision in 2012, during which they had to bust into my ribcage to cut that bastard out. After, achieving a comfortable sleeping position was tough and that rib pain, it doesn’t go away. DISH has turbocharged my body pain during sleep, taking it from a noticeable pinch that only woke me up at several points throughout a night to a constant scream of agony that’s worse around my right hip and through that side’s kidney area. Finding that “sweet spot” in which I’m at peace, physically, has become my “holy grail”.

At this time of morning, I’m up. Getting the self-grinding coffee maker ready for its first brew of the day. I don’t mind an early rise. Thing is, I’ve been going since between 1:00 a.m. and two and my brain’s been in business for itself beginning around then; I’m just along for the ride. It’s taken me to some pretty dark places. It toys with giving up. But that’s not me. Not now. It doesn’t seem like so long ago that I was actively trying to off myself on the regular. It took a few inpatient stays and a lot of therapy to get me to realize that it’s not that I wanted to die but rather that I’d forgotten how to live, and anyway, I’d proven myself not very good at killing myself as they always seemed to drag me back easily-enough. So, I slapped my earbuds in and put on some tunes and tried to take myself to a place that was a little brighter.

I told my therapist during last week’s session that all this is putting the zap on me. I was quick to add that I think I have it handled, though, as I often fear I’m this close to her escorting me back to the mental hospital. Which is a Band-Aid rather than a solution for me. Sure, they’d keep me safe and looked-after over the course of my stay, but the stay’s about learning the tools for self-care and assisted care through therapy and I’ve got those tools – I don’t need the shit rehashed. I only need for the pain to go away or to achieve some level of content with it, that it can be handled, that I can handle it. Meanwhile, my head’s taking me all over hell with all this in its sleep-deprived state and- Fuck. All I want is to sleep.