Relentless.

Photo copyright Aji, 2024; all rights reserved.

We don't make much of holidays like Mother's Day and Father's Day [or most others, for that matter]. But that was my Mother's Day gift from Wings:  a GF chocolate cake with blueberry icing. It doesn't take very much to make me happy, and this will be dessert for the whole week [it's a very small cake, and too rich to eat more than a very small piece at a time].

Right now, I'll take whatever I can get in terms of happy, because my body seems to be doing its damnedest to kill me.

I mentioned no sleep most of the last several night; I was so tired last night that I fell asleep instantly .  . and woke up two hours later, unable to go back to sleep. Two hours after that, my left hip suddenly decided to sublux badly, the worst it's ever been. No, nothing triggered it, it was like someone flipping a switch, and today I can, quite literally, barely walk. My gait is severely impaired, so is my balance, nothing touches the pain, and I can barely move. Besides that? Right now, the pain is everywhere.

I know people think I'm exaggerating when I say that. I'm not. Head, neck, shoulders, arms, elbows, wrists, hands, fingers, sides, chest, back, hips, legs, knees, ankles, feet, toes? All in pain. Every second of every day. No respite. None. Imagine what it's like to deal with that invading your consciousness every single second, unable to sleep because of it, and now imagine dealing with the financial and other stresses I dealing withe very minute of every day. Because this is my life. And the last couple of weeks, my upper and middle back have been getting worse and worse, arms too, now my hip, and my lymph nodes are unbelievably swollen. I feel like a have the flu — more accurately, like I have a fever, but without the, you know, fever, no elevated body temperature. Both of those things are not uncommon with lupus, nor with rheumatoid arthritis, and I have both. But the really unpleasant part of all this, aside from the pain, I mean, is that it could also be an indicator of something else, something much worse. But we're not going there. I have to deal with this for another ~3 weeks, until I can see the doc and get back on the proper chemo dose, and we'll go from there.

But the rest of this month is going to be an absolute misery. If it's getting worse daily [which it is], I don't know how I cope with it between now and then. I'm already getting virtually no sleep at all. The pain is worse every day than it was the day before. And if I'm being honest, it's scary as hell, because when you've dealt with these illnesses as many decades as I have? You know all too well the other, far worse things it could all turn out to be.

All I can do is shove it down as far into the recesses of my consciousness as my brain's pain receptors will allow, and get on with all the work that has to get done. The most important thing, of course, is bringing in sales, but I'm having no luck on that front right now. As it is,  I can't even begin to cover the things I need to cover. Wings is supposed to take the truck in to have that hose replaced; current estimate is ~$170, but we won't know for sure until they actually get in there. Yet another expense, in a year in which they've been absolutely endless. And there's no end in sight, either.

Because we still have to pay for that major medical stuff [and other] expenses later this month [and throughout, "we" means that I am the one who has to figure out how everything gets covered]; there's Wings's ongoing dental; we have some bureaucratic nonsense to take care of; and somehow, and I have GOT to bring in something for taxes. And the other demands on me are just as relentless [the ones that don't, directly, anyway, have to do explicitly with money]; there is no help for any of it, and I am at my wits' end over the latter ones especially. Combined with my illness progressing? I need help.

Meanwhile, my Patreon is still down by more than $700 a month over last year, and as our most consistent source of income, that is what pays our monthly bills like utilities and groceries and gas and so forth. What remains is not going to be enough even for that, never mind the taxes and everything else. Somehow, I have to bring in sales. If you're in the market, now would be a really, REALLY good time. I should have two new pairs of earrings hopefully by tomorrow evening, possible three. And as always, all the regular links are listed below, with sales, as always, being the most important:

• Sales here; 
• Testimonials here; 
• Amazon wishlist here (Amazon cards are most important now, because they go to buy things we can't get locally, like the protein mixes for Wings and GF stuff for me and all the cleaning and other household products that people in cities can get but we can't; and also the filters for the air purifiers, because we have only one left and the amount of dust and dirt they take in in these winds is indescribable); 
• Patreon here;
• Ko-fi here.

After such a grim 2023, and with this year starting off MUCH worse (and given that we're already approaching the half-way mark), we really need to get 2024 onto a better footing, so please share all of the links. 

All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2024; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.