I truly believe laughter is the best medicine…well as far as free medicines go.  I totally have a lunch sack full of pills that can give generic laughter a good ol’ fashioned run for its money, but nothing beats a laugh.  I’m not talking about the quiet snickers with your hand over your mouth because you don’t want to be caught laughing at a dirty joke type of laugh.  I’m talking the full out, snort till you choke, high pitched belly laugh.  I have always maintained that the life of a person with a chronic illness should be made into a sitcom just for the simple fact that the randomness could out-random even the quirkiest episode of Seinfeld.  I have a ton of non-sick friends shake their heads at me and say, “You’re making that stuff up, there’s no way that really happens to you.”  Folks, you can’t make this stuff up.  Nothing is funnier than the ins and outs of daily life and I am here to prove it to you.  Don’t believe me?  Read on.  Here is the honest truth, torn from the pages of a Spoonie’s personal day planner.  I won’t say who.  It’s not me.  It’s a friend.  A friend that looks a whole lot like me, but isn’t me. Ok, so yeah, she has kids and is from the south, but nope…not me.  Completely not me.  All names, dates and places have been changed to protect the innocent….definitely none of which are me.

 Monday – 6:00am

The alarm went off early this morning. I assume I was supposed to get up.  I didn’t.  The alarm went off again.  Now I’m late.  Getting up to shower was fun.  As I lifted my head off of the pillow, it felt funny.  Not funny, “haha”…although that came a few minutes later.  It was funny like, “hmmm, I wonder if I accidentally swallowed some radioactive plutonium in my sleep.”  Body was stiff, as usual, so I hobbled over to the bathroom mirror like the genetically mutated offspring of Egor, fingers cramped in a perpetual claw.  Ah-ha.  Examined my face in the mirror and realized that I had fallen asleep on my rice sock.  Yep, nothing says comfort like microwaved uncooked rice tied up in a sock that’s been places I don’t even want to think about.  In my quest for pain recovery, I took a nice big cheek flop in the middle of the night onto said rice sock.  I just shook my head as I stared at the small rice sized craters deeply ingrained into my left cheek.  Great.  This was going to look attractive for my afternoon meeting.  Oh , sure, I’d be all set if I was filming a Proactive commercial, but for a room full of business suits…not so much.  I might as well had just fallen asleep with my forehead on the back of my hand that imprinted the bar stamp from the night before.  That is, if I could stay awake past 10pm to actually go to a bar.  Oh well.  Time to go to work.  I have deadlines.  I’m pretty sure I have a few of them. I wrote them down so I would remember them.  If only I could remember what I wrote them on.

 Monday – 9:45am

Yay, went to the rheumatologist this morning…or was it the pulmonologist?  Wait, it may have been the cardiologist.  Oh well, it was an ‘ologist and I paid someone a $30 co-pay for the eighth time this month.  It was fun getting dressed this morning.  Meds weren’t working well enough last week so I got pumped full of more steroids or as I like to call them, Satan’s Tic-Tacs.  Didn’t sleep last night…tossed and turned and found myself at 3am, in the kitchen eating a slice of ham in one hand and a spoon full of peanut butter in the other.  Steroid nomming is no joke.  I’m guessing that between carrying enough water weight to fill up a baby pool and my desire to turn my kitchen counter into a 24 hour all-you-can-eat buffet, I may have repacked the junk in my trunk.  I know this because my jeans didn’t fit.  Oh, I got them buttoned alright. I laid down on the bed, held my breath and zipped them up with a coat hanger.  I just wish I knew how to tuck the top of the muffin back into the cupcake liner.  Pretty much waddled myself right into the waiting room and followed the nurse into the triage area.  She pointed to the scale.  I looked at her like she had just told me to walk barefooted on a tightrope over a tank of starved piranhas.  She asked me if I was feeling slightly edgy.  Is that like being slightly pregnant?  Either way she wasn’t getting me on that thing if she valued her hair being attached to hear head.

 Monday – 11:05 am

Doctor appointment is done with four new prescriptions and strict instructions to get more rest. I took my slips of paper and repeatedly pushed the elevator button.  I stared at my reflection in the mirrored elevator door and reached out a hand to smooth down the grease pit that once resembled hair.  I had just thrown it in a ponytail.  I woke up late…no time to wash it, so I get to walk around looking like I dipped my head in a fast food deep fryer. I drove to the pharmacy and made my displeasure at the five-person deep line known by a very dramatic sigh.  Within minutes, the pharmacist waved me over and called me by name, telling me that my anti-depressants and MiraLax were ready.  Super.  Now the entire line thinks I’m depressed and constipated. I threw a few dollars down and attempted to run like a bat out of hell to the car. I say attempted, because the initial full out run popped an already squishy kneecap and almost sent me sprawling out in front of the greeting card display.  I would’ve looked but I don’t think Hallmark makes a “sorry you were mortified at the pharmacy counter then completely bit it on the way out” card.  Finally…I hid out in the car and looked lovingly at my newly acquired pain meds.  Holding the bottle in my hands, I read the label…. “Take one pill twice daily by mouth”.  Who was the patient who prompted such detailed instructions?  Did someone actually take one pill and then hack it up before it dissolved to take it again later?  Apparently it was the same guy who designed child proof bottles.  Twist and turn.  Sounds simple.  It’s not.  I prefer my way of beating the bottle against the steering wheel until the top flies off and a rain shower of narco-skittles lands in my lap.  Good times.

 Monday – 2:52pm

Finally back at work with a swollen knee and random pain pills lodged down my shirt.  No time to care…time for the meeting.  After sitting down, I noticed too late I had forgotten my daily 7^th cup of liquid energy (aka Diet Coke).  This should be fun.  There’s nothing more entertaining than hearing about market shares and trend ratios when all you want to do is climb up on the table and nap for the duration.  Talk, talk, talk, talk…  Pretty soon I had tuned out.  I didn’t mean to, but brain fog coupled with a recurring battle with selective ADD tends to result in….ohhhh shiny thing!  As the presentation melted into one continuous emergency broadcast siren, I realized that I left my cell phone in my office.  Did the medication alarm go off already?  Did I take my afternoon dose?  Where did that random bruise on my wrist come from?  Was it there this morning?  I don’t think so.  Wow, all three toes on my right foot just went numb…hope there’s not a fire anytime soon, don’t think walking would happen right now.  Wonder if anyone here would care enough to carry me out or if they’d just hurdle over me as they ran towards the exit? It was at this time that I realized the entire room had gone silent and every eye was turned in my direction.  Instinctively I knew I had just been asked a question, of which I couldn’t have told you what it was if I had a tranquilizer gun to my head.  I had to say something….say anything….a good solid, standard answer.  “Of course I do…I’m a team player.”  The room remained freakishly silent.  It wouldn’t be until later that I realized I had been asked, “Do you intentionally try to break the copier by overloading it with 4 color printing…”  I totally need to an online concentration skill seminar.  Moral of the story….caffeine is non-negotiable.

 Monday – 5:30pm

Mercifully the day ended on a high note…I found my car in the parking lot.  This was an achievement worthy of a ticker tape parade considering I normally wander around hitting the panic button on my key ring, hoping it leads me to my car before someone calls the police.  I felt quite smug and proud of myself as I turned up the radio and sang along with the song playing as I began the hour drive home from work.  Unfortunately, two things happened simultaneously:  I stopped mid-way through the second verse of “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” with a complete brain block of what came next and I had absolutely no clue where in the hell I was driving to.  Blankness.  I might as well have been driving in the Serengeti desert.  Right, left, forward, reverse…I had no clue where I was, however the abundance of liquor and gun stores gave me a pretty good indication that I had taken a wrong turn at Albuquerque.  Thankfully, my trusty GPS pointed the way and delivered me safely to my home with just a minimal outbursts of the four-letter variety.  I dare anyone to tell me that brain fog isn’t real.  I would totally give them a piece of my mind if I could remember their name.

Monday – 8:27pm

My supply of spoons was running dangerously low and my body was beginning to ache like I had just been hit by a semi-truck, run over by a couple 4×4’s, drug down the asphalt then left for dead on the side of the highway like autoimmune road kill.  So, I did what every champion of chronic illness would do.  That’s right…I vacuumed.  I hope you’re all getting the blatant sarcasm there.  I vacuumed, I put away laundry and I washed dishes. Because every spoonie knows that when you have a shortage, the most obvious thing to do is waste the few remaining spoons on domestic manual labor.  After the Danny Tanner-esque mopping frenzy, it was all I could do to just pull on some pajamas.  Snow man pajama top and Elmo fleece pants….why not?  The entire day had been brutal and I didn’t care that I had about as much chance of being asked to headline the next Victoria’s Secret runway show in that outfit as I did becoming the first Spoonie in outer space.  I’m bringing sexy back ya’ll.

 Monday – 10:04pm

Finally collapsed into bed and let the day finally wind down to a screeching halt. Watched the last little bit of Grey’s Anatomy that I had DVR’d before the sleep meds took me away to my happy place, which ironically isn’t Starbuck’s as I initially suspected.  I’m actually not really a huge fan of Grey’s Anatomy.  McDreamy doesn’t do a thing for me but make me remember the horribly bad cheesetastic 80’s movies that Patrick Dempsey inflicted upon my impressionable teenage self.  I watch hospital ER dramas for two reasons.  One…I can identify with the guy who has been sitting in the Seattle Grace emergency waiting room for so long that he goes completely one taco short of a fiesta platter and punches Dr. Yang right in the face.  Who hasn’t wanted to do that? Secondly, medical dramas are the only shows that I can watch and completely understand all the techno terminology that is thrown around like the actors actually know what they’re talking about.  Pulmonary embolism?  Been there done that.  Arterial blood pulse oximetry?  Nothing like having a sewing needle shoved into your wrist until it comes out the other side. Infusion with some new sadistic form of chemotherapy?  Pop on an iPod and it gives new meaning to “pole dancing”.  It’s all medical jargon that makes those of us with chronic illnesses, for all intents and purposes, bilingual.  I found myself yelling at the TV screen that it was not symptoms of a heart attack, and that a simple chest x-ray would verify that the patient had pleurisy.  I remember thinking that Spoonies would make excellent technical advisors on these types of shows as the meds suddenly did their thing and transported me to that coveted Narnian land called, sleep.

The day was over and there is no predicting what new adventures are waiting for me tomorrow.  No two days are ever exactly the same and I never know if I’m going to wake up with a spoon shortage, surplus or just enough to get my car in the driveway at 5pm. Just once, I’d like one of those “boring, dull days” that I hear so many people complain about.  What a refreshing change of pace it would be to have my biggest worry be where I was eating lunch that day.

Oh…and for the record….I finished Grey’s Anatomy the next night.  It was pleurisy.  Stick that in your juice box and suck it, McDreamy.

Article written by Senior Editor, Stephanie Kennedy.