THIS TITLE ISN'T MORRISSEY-RELATED!

...though he and The Smiths are the best thing to listen to when you're down. Nothing else (and I like The Cure, too) allows you to wallow deep deep down in your own misery.

Moving on!

It seems (with crossed toes) that I may have been granted a reprieve. This happens to fibro patients -- the agony waxes and wanes. I think the more popular term is that we fibromyalgians (I prefer this term to "fibromyalgics." A fibromyalgian sounds like an alien, and to most people and most doctors we're the closest they'll get to seeing one) have flares, and I think this term is wrongly and stupidly applied to us. A flare would be an exacerbation of what is our normal, baseline pain. And we wish. The truth is that the so-called flare is the norm and the very limited relief of very limited duration --maybe a month out of a year -- is our reality.

The truth, like everything else, fucking hurts.

My reprieve happens to occur just as I'm coming off Percocet -- had my last one yesterday -- and the parents are making hay into gold on that score. Mom especially. I reminded her that it's an amazingly impossible thing for my cessation of taking pain relieving medications (I'm getting off Effexor and Mirapex too) to cause pain relief. And I've also reminded my parents that their pleas to allow me to "let the new meds work" and their reminders that the increase in Prozac and Lyrica, plus the addition of Cymbalta in about two weeks need a couple months to work are likely to have a downside:

In about six months (if I'm still in Lummox, so help me and my too-kind parents -- had to get that plug in because I have one trifle with them maybe once a month. Maybe. ...That, and they're keeping me alive) whatever the Effexor and Mirapex did for me is going to end, and they may have an entirely different animal on their hands. I've gone off my anti-anxiety meds before -- they work, ergo you're not weird, ergo you don't need meds -- and it has always been almost exactly six months before I found myself in an ER, thinking I was having a heart attack, knowing differently, but having a king-hell panic attack and in need of sedation, a referral to a doctor, and relief from the 49 percent of me that believed I really was having a heart attack.

The thing about having panic and generalized anxiety disorders? If I have an actual heart attack, I'll likely be older and more accustomed to the king-hell panic attacks I wake up with every morning. So if I wake up with a real heart attack, that should pretty well do me in. I'll just take a Klonopin and brush it off.

I hope I'm not the only one who finds that hilarious.

[Pain (the scales are back!): 7.5/10 -- It's not a big improvement, but it's still an improvement... However temporary.

Anxiety: 8/10 -- Good as gold!

Self-negating title: You read it, You can't un-read it!]

Mixx it!