Reality is a Slippery Thing

I've been here 2 1/2 weeks, one more to go.   So, how am I doing?  I could bore you with details, but the upshot is,   I don't really know. In some ways I'm worse than I was in Nov.  in others....?   Reality has so much to do with context and editing and perspective; it's hard to pin down.

Ok   so I will bore you with details.
I've had increasing migrating joint pain and thigh muscle weakness since early Summer.  Around the beginning of Nov. my joint pain started to fade but I continued with  muscle pain especially thigh muscle weakness which made me increasingly unable to lift my feet and walk.   By the end of Nov. when I came out here, I couldn't walk without the walker.  That weakness was a little worse by the end of the first week here.   In the last few days,  I think, maybe, perhaps,       
I might be getting slightly stronger. 

This is where the slightly surreal perspective of this post emerges.     Pain and even disability are so "now"  so hard to put on that darn 10 pt scale the docs are always asking for.   Mine has also been challenging to document because it goes up and down over a 1-2 week cycle as well as targeting different pain spots.  I've been keeping a regular record  but it's hard to really compare the sensations of even a few days before.   I noted back in Nov. when I no longer was able to lift my foot over a curb without something to pull myself up with.  I noticed a couple of weeks ago that I felt dangerous trying to shuffle the 30' to the front door of the clinic.  I've been using the walker 100% since then. But today I tried walking some 40+  feet and it was a stronger, safer shuffle.  I was able to pull myself up stairs foot over foot not the one step at a time that's been my last few weeks.

In the past, the shifts have been subtle; often they've been part of a cycle which continues a downward trend.  The pains change characteristics and loci.  I've felt lost in a jungle of sensation where perspective is both elusive and illusory.  But my perspective or self talk about this morass is a powerful variable that I think it's time  to use. 

I'm going to try to harness the placebo effect, or denial,    or hope or whatever psychological trick it may be to pull myself arm over arm out of this hole I'm in.   Lord only knows I've thrown every intervention but the kitchen sink at it in these last weeks including sessions in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber, laser light treatment of my blood, very detailed food sensitivity testing  and other IV antimicrobial  and immune stimulating drugs.       So now is the time to add my psychological magic sauce,  find the strand of reality that reinforces the perception that I am getting stronger, and hold on to it with all my might.       And it may, indeed, in time, prove  Real.