My codeine withdrawal symptoms are mostly gone now, just slight gastrointestinal problems every couple days. Mostly, I'm just living one long, terrible headache. Well, that isn't fair: sometimes it lets up for a few hours at a time, though I usually realize afterward that it's because I was doing something very distracting & therefore just didn't ( Read more... )

I made this new icon recently, because it's how I've been feeling lately: this little girl, wearing pink, standing so still and proper and erect, hidden inside a tree with her hands clasped in front of her, so perfect and yet so rigid, shut off from everything, protected but also isolated, perhaps hiding there from outside dangers, or perhaps put ( Read more... )

Fun fun day of overwhelming fun ( Read more... )

Another nice day!

1. Woke up with a headache that meekly subsided under the weight of 1 measly Tylenol #4 tablet. Take that, occipital neuralgia ( Read more... )

In therapy today, I was talking about how my feelings about myself have changed as a result of my physical therapy, about how I feel stronger when I walk with my shoulders back and my head held high than when I slouch in my lifelong habitual inward curve. We talked about how my posture has been one of the many ways that I unconsciously protected ( Read more... )

In a previous entry, I mentioned the writing exercise from this week's writing group, in which I wrote about "buttoning my lips," and I decided to write it up here so I can print it out and take it to discuss with my therapist. As always, this is an extremely rushed writing assignment in which there is little time for thought or planning: words ( Read more... )

I seem to have been neglecting this journal lately. I glanced at it today, just because an old friend from Scotland mentioned that he'd discovered it & that always makes me curious about what I've written, since I tend to be pretty oblivious how I'm presenting myself, and I was shocked at all the stuff that's happened that I haven't written about. ( Read more... )

A nightmare woke me up just now, and I was afraid to go back to sleep, so I got up for a while, figuring I could just play Ascension on Shannon's old iPad until I feel calmer. In the nightmare, I was going to have to swim across a river in order to get away from a scary guy who was following me, but I was very afraid to cross the river. There was ( Read more... )

I'm not so sure about this "soft collar." At first I got one that didn't fit well (despite the fact that a presumably knowledgeable saleswoman helped me pick it out), and it was so far too large that it actually gave me bruises all along my jaw after I'd worn it for about a day and a half ( Read more... )

Saw the gastroenterologist about the nausea. I looked back at previous journal entries before I went to see her, and realized that it's really only been about a month that the nausea has been better. I'd thought about canceling the appointment, but one month of very little nausea seems insufficient to nullify a year of terrible nausea. Maybe it's ( Read more... )