SWI — Shopping While Impaired

After post­ing last night’s dol­lar diary entry and work­ing on today’s, I decided that not only did I need to make Shop­ping While Impaired an offi­cial entry tag but I also needed to write a post explain­ing this par­tic­u­lar term.

About three years ago I went through a really rough patch with my health. About two years ago I was diag­nosed with sleep apnea, fibromyal­gia, and a screwed up thy­roid gland.

The sleep apnea was a real shocker espe­cially since I don’t fit the pro­file, ie. I’m not over­weight. And a real pain because I sleep hooked up to a CPAP machine every night.

The screwed up thy­roid gland resulted in half of my thy­roid being removed. The stu­pid thing is still act­ing wonky and I will have to have the rest of it removed soon. This means a sec­ond ugly gash of a scar across my neck and no ques­tion about whether I’ll have to con­tinue tak­ing a syn­thetic thy­roid for the rest of my life.

The fibro, though, that’s the icing on the “life sucks” cake. Some­times, when I’m really, really lucky, the fibro takes a vaca­tion and I feel like a nor­mal middle-aged woman with two teenagers and too much to do. When life is going too well, how­ever, and life decides to take me down a peg or too, the fibro kicks in. On good days, I feel like I have the flu. Gen­er­al­ized body aches and feel­ing like I’m run­ning a low-grade fever (even though I’m not). Those are the good fibro days. The bad fibro days.… Those are harder to describe. Take the flu-feeling body aches and low-grade fever, add all-over weak­ness and fatigue and brain-fog, then top it all off with shoot­ing and some­times sear­ing pain in var­i­ous parts of my body. One minute I’ll have a sharp stab­bing pain in my wrist or elbows, next it’ll feel like some­one is drilling into my femur. Or I’ll have sharp, infection-like pain in my ear or feel like some­one has stabbed me in the face right under the cheek­bone. The pains are sharp, some­times inces­sant, some­times inter­mit­tant, often wan­der­ing. And the very worst part is that it’s chronic. Chronic pain will really mess with your mind. Oh and of course there’s noth­ing that I’ve found that will relieve the pain. No painkiller touches it.

Days like today, the pain level is high enough that I feel con­tin­u­ally nau­seous. It’s days like this that any shop­ping done is likely to be a lit­tle nutty and impulsive.

Watch out, she’s Shop­ping While Impaired.

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