And Then There Were Nine

I don’t post all the time Facebook, but this was my Facebook status this morning:

A woman brings her paperwork for the first time she’s seeing a podiatrist in her Cincinnati Reds tote. After meeting the podiatrist, Dr. Cardinal, she leaves his office with one less big toenail. Coincidence or conspiracy?

This really happened! The front of my feet hang over the footplate on my wheelchair and last week I hit the refrigerator with my right foot, my big toe taking the brunt of the collision. This is not new; I hit the fridge and counter bottoms often. Only this time the pain was especially nasty in the area of the toenail, which already hurt. It didn’t just go away, ike it usually does when I hit my toes. In fact the pain was there all day and when David took my shoes off that night, it was evident that there had been some bleeding.

The toe was actually okay, but a little sore the next day. It hurt like crazy in the nail area when I bumped it, but it was a brief pain and not incredibly unlike my toes often hurt, especially the big ones, around the nails when I bump them. The day after that was a different story!

The next morning David was helping me with my shoes and he slipped the canvas loafer over the tip of my foot and I started screaming to just take it off. The pain when the shoe hit the big toenail was excruciating. He got one of my too-big slippers on the foot and I was on the phone, first to the insurance company to see if a podiatrist was covered, then to a podiatrist. Good old insurance; I have the wrong disease to have a podiatrist cut my toenails, therefore knowing if thee is anything threatening my feet, but if I’m in pain, it’s absolutely okay to see a foot doctor.

So yesterday was my first-ever appointment with a podiatrist. There are several doctors at the foot and ankle clinic and they got me an opening with Dr. Cardinal. Hehe…You know my baseball brain; the first thing I thought was ‘so THIS is what the rookies do in the off-season.” Dr. Cardinal is not a rookie. He is an experienced and knowledgable professional with a reassuring and friendly bedside manner. I kinda thought the toenail was in bad shape and I knew a tone fungus had developed too. I was expecting that my first meeting with the podiatrist would include me coming back to have a toenail removal procedure. What I wasn’t expecting was him asking if I’m allergic to lidocaine and poking me in the foot in four places so I’d be numb enough to have the toenail removed in a half hour!

As I understood him, my toe hurt so bad because the nail was about 90% removed already and the 10% was just tugging on my toe bed constantly while the rest of the toe wiggled. He told me it was like a loose tooth in both what it was doing and how easy remove would be. I love a doctor who knows how to use a metaphor well so patients can understand.

A half hour after the numbing shots he was back and grabbed a couple of tools. He wanted me not to watch if I was squeamish about blood and I’d just feel a little pressure. I didn’t even feel that. I looked at him while he was talking and looked down because I did want to watch, but he was already holding my toenail in a tweezer-like tool in one hand and dabbing my bloody toe with gauze with the other. He held a little pressure on it with the gauze and then wrapped it up and sent me on my way with after-care instructions and directions to come back in 9 weeks unless there are issues with the healing before that. The foot doesn’t heal as fast as the mouth, but after a little pain when the lidocaine wore off yesterday, the pain’s been minimal today.

I miss my cute feet. At dinner for my 40th birthday I wore sandals that showed off my painted toenails. I will not have exposed toes at dinner when I turn 50. I probably won’t even have 10 toenails to paint yet ! But my ugly toes won’t hurt either!

The Art of Pain

I’ve mentioned before that I do Art Journaling as my own therapy for the times when the MS feels like it’s controlling more of my world than I can handle. It really does help too. When I'm having a meltdown, when the tears and agony of what I can’t do is taking over emotionally, I feel compelled to create. I have sat in front of the computer creating a page at 2AM because I’m so wound up I can’t sleep. I can physically feel when the page is done. It’s hard to describe but I feel the tension release and finishing a page makes me feel good. It’s kinda like taking a drug that kicks in and you instantly feel better.

I did this page last week after an hours-long meltdown when I was unable to get out of my wheelchair to pull myself into the bathroom.

I’m A Mess

Credits: Life Aint Always Beautiful by LJS Designs, Melancholy by
Connie Prince, Distressed by Created by Jill Scraps

I knew the page was complete when the tension in my neck and shoulders disappeared. It felt like a vice just lifted off them and I relaxed. Art as almost a spiritual experience sounds strange, but that really is what happens for me. It’s kinda cool.

Like I’ve said before, art journaling is personal, at least for me it is. It’s like poetry. It has great meaning to the person who creates it. It might mean something totally different to someone looking at it and that’s okay; it’s what art is about. You may read a poem or look at a work of art and get a different meaning than the artist/writer expressed, but for the viewer art is not about feeling what the artist was feeling, it’s feeling what you feel. You’re not supposed to experience the artist’s feelings, but join the artist in experiencing the work of art.

If a work doesn’t move you or have any meaning to you, it doesn’t mean it’s bad or not art. It just isn’t for you. That’s oaky too.

Now I’ll share art that I probably get a very different feel from than was intended. I also have a little smile and snicker as my blog is probably the only place you’ll ever see one of my art journal pages and a Salvador Dali painting displayed in the same place.

Dali is best known for his 1931 work, The Persistence of Memory.

The Persistence of Memory, Salvador Dali, 1931

But when I saw his painting, Woman with a Head of Roses, done in 1935, I saw my legs!

Woman with a Head of Roses, Salvador Dali, 1935

Last week I met my spasticity specialist at Cleveland Clinic. He asked me to describe what my legs feel like and I told him the Dali painting described my legs better than I can with just words. Those are my legs. The left leg feels almost dead and deformed and the right leg feels like the draped fabric represents the muscles and tendons, weak and just hanging. The weakness feels just like that.

Before anyone freaks out about the description, it represents the weakness and frustrated emotional pain; the kind of pain that comes and goes. My legs do pretty much always match the Woman with a Head of Roses description but I don’t always feel the frustration and fear of that face in the back of the painting! And when I do I create works like that one at the top of this entry to quell the powerful dark feelings.

And there is my relationship of art and pain, Nani and Dali.

Happy Monday; Yeah, Whatever.

Word art by TLC Creations

Really I’m well known as one who has always loved Mondays; the fresh new start to a week, the opportunity to make a general plan, and all plans are always “this or something better.” But this particular Monday the 4PM temperature at the airport is 08. Remember that I won’t leave the 8 all by itself like mean ol’ Mother Nature.

Yesterday was an awful day for me; lots of pain and stiffness and in general blahs. I’d remembered the doctor saying I could take an extra pill of my light narcotic during the day if I was in a lot of pain. I double checked with David who was with me that day and he confirmed that I heard the doctor right; she said I could take another one if I needed it, specifically if I was having a lot of pain getting in and out of the bathroom when the water pill was doing its thing. So I took a supplemental “analgesic narcotic.”

You know since it’s a pill I usually take at bedtime I’ve never been awake to actually feel what the pill does. Oh wow! I didn’t feel anything weird, like a recreational drug taking control away or anything, but I felt, well I felt less! My arms and shoulders were really bad because they are responsible for supporting me and dragging my lower body in many places. The pain in my arms was just dull, the pain in my shoulders almost done. My lower back pain was almost nonexistent and my legs were more comfortable than they’d been in recent memory. I called the doctor today. I asked her receptionist to leave a message asking her to change my prescription to two a day instead of one. Because it’s a narcotic, it has to be a paper prescription and can’t be called in to the pharmacy. I need it refilled but I have 6 pills left. I won’t take the extra again without her okay to keep doing it. I don’t want to run out either I have a feeling it does more to let me sleep at night than I realize! But if I am able to safely take a daytime pill it will be fantastic. For taking one yesterday afternoon and then last night. I’m just now (5PM) starting to feel pain again. I want that every day. If we could work out a three times a day weaker dosage to keep the pain at bay, it would be heavenly!

I read a great article last night from the Washington Post about my favorite beverage! The nation’s top nutrition panel says “drink more coffee!" Americans only average 2 cups a day of the beverage they’ve discovered to have many health benefits. The benefits way outweigh anything that could be said bad about the caffeine. Be careful about how much you add, like cream or sugar, to your coffee though!

Multitasking, yes, I still do that, means a blog I started at 4 gets posted at 8. I have some artsy stuff to chat about in the next few days and Marco says he needs to write a blog. For now, g’night!