One pill ~~ One day

“dent de lion and blue skies and wishing” 

PHOTO CREDIT: VIRGINIA SANDERSON via Flickr

In the back of my mind was an awareness that my energy was not only temporary, which I’m used to, but was induced by medication.  It was an odd feeling. 

I was temporarily able-bodied.  An inner voice kept reminding me that the clock was ticking.  I didn’t want to remember that I would have to go back to my life of being too tired to visit my family again any time soon.  I tried not to think about where my energy was coming from.  I’ve taken the medication before and always had this same experience.

For the most part, I managed to keep my thoughts positive and be grateful for the time with my mother and one of my sisters.

We had a very nice visit and ate home-cooked hamburgers at a lovely little country restaurant.   I got to see my mother’s beautiful and prolific flower garden.  I’d feared I wouldn’t get to see it at all this year.  Many times I’ve heard her say, “I wish you could see the…,” and she’ll mention whatever is blooming.

I didn’t tell my sister that a little white pill was the fuel I was running on.  I did however, end up telling my mother before I left, which I later regretted. 

I didn’t have to tell her that fatigue was disabling me.  I didn’t have to tell her that I had to take medication for my body and brain to work that day, but I did. 

I had wanted to spare them the details of how hard it is to live with pain and severe fatigue every single day.  Had I failed, I wondered on my way home.

I guess I also wanted to let somebody know the truth.  For some reason, I needed somebody to know that me making the trip was hard.  Plus, my mother is nearly psychic.  If I don’t tell her, it isn’t like she doesn’t know, which she reminds me of from time to time.

“You look so good,” my sister had said shortly after I arrived.  “Your eyes are clear.  You really look good,” she added, with a pleased look about her.

Part of me wanted to tell her that I was running on medication and how underneath what she saw, was a completely exhausted human being, but I didn’t.  I didn’t want to disappoint her.  I love my sister and it warmed my heart knowing she was enjoying the bit of time, when her little sister looked okay. 

I wished in that moment that I could give this to my family more often.  If my looking well made her happy, then I thought it best not to spoil the moment.  I did what my seventh grade teacher once told me to do if someone gave me a compliment.  I said thank you.  Nothing more. 

I’m just too dang tired to do things.  Too tired to think or make decisions.  Too tired to talk some of the time.  Too tired to clean or cook.  Too tired to go anywhere, like the grocery store.

I took the little white pill and had a good day. 

I choose not to take the medication very often because anything that can make this body get up and go, while it feels like I’ve been hit and run over by an eighteen-wheeler, well… I guess it scares me.

Thanks for visiting Dogkisses’s Blog!  Feel free to leave a comment.  Emails are never published. 

Thanks to Flickr member and professional photographer, Virginia Sanderson,  for her absolutely beautiful images!  I’m not a photographer and don’t speak their language, but I especially love the different textures she creates.   I encourage you to check out her photostream.

Related articles

• Fighting Chronic Fibromyalgia Fatigue (webmd.com)
• In all the fog, I write… (dogkisses.wordpress.com)

In all the fog, I write…

The Thunder Beings have roared and a hard rain is falling.  I sure am glad to be home.  I like being home with my dogs during a storm.  I also like knowing that as I write, my family are in safe places.   Shortly, I’ll be snuggling up with my furry family to watch a movie.  I can’t tell you which movie because I forgot the name of it, which brings me to the heart of this blog post.

I basically wanted to say hello to my blogging friends and readers.

I miss my blog.  I especially miss being able to think clearly enough to express myself through writing.

Normally, I can sit down and write ten pages about something and even though it might need editing, I’m able to communicate what is on my mind.  Lately, this is not the case.  I have a lot on my mind, much of which I’d like to write about in this blog, but I am simply too tired.   I’m also in a lot of pain.

I began this post last night and wanted to publish it while the Thunder Beings were here.  I finished it, which amazed me, but I couldn’t keep enough mental energy to tag it or put it in a category.

The Thunder Beings came back tonight just as I sat down in another attempt to write something that makes sense.  Another hard rain fell.

I don’t know who came up with the term, “brain fog,” but the condition is well understood by those of us who have Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and/or fibromyalgia.

Brain fog attempts to describe a medical mental fatigue that robs us of our normal cognitive skills and abilities.  For the past six months I’ve battled this fog consistently.  Normally, the condition isn’t this persistent and instead comes and goes, giving me times when I can still think.

Writing is hard when this is happening and I usually don’t even try.  I forget my words and have to use the dictionary constantly.  I can’t spell words I’ve spelled since elementary school.  My sentences are choppy and things aren’t flowing.

Brain fog can make a person nearly incapable of verbal responses.  It can have an effect on a person’s speech.  Words might get disordered in a sentence or we use a word that sounds like the one we are intending to say.

I know the words I’m looking for when I lose them.  I can describe the meaning, sometimes the sound or the first letter.  Written words I’ve known since I was a child look unfamiliar.

Mostly I’m tired and sleepy, but I can’t stay asleep long enough for my body to restore itself.  I’m half awake and half asleep.  It isn’t a good place to act from.

My body is as tired as my brain is.  Moving around is hard.  Bending over takes tremendous energy.  I can’t keep up with my chores and that stresses me out.

I’ve missed deadlines.  Many of my obligations in life are compromised.  I don’t get to go visit my family.  I’m also getting a bit confused and my short-term memory is shot.

The fatigue alone is completely overwhelming.  Add to that widespread ongoing pain in the nerves, muscles and deep in the bones and it is one mighty difficult condition!

Life goes on though.  It doesn’t stop for me to be sick or it seems, for me to get proper rest, but then maybe I don’t know how to rest.  Maybe I forgot.

Much of the time, I feel stressed.

I have an adult son, whom I love with all my heart.  He has challenges that I haven’t learned how to accept in a way that doesn’t cause me grief and anxiety.  I believe that accepting things the way they are is the best place to start when you want to change something, but honestly, I don’t feel like I’m doing a good job at this with mine or my son’s circumstances.

Being unwell causes me to feel like I’m failing my son, the other members in my family, including my dogs and a community.  I can’t say that I have the latter, but if I did belong to a community, where would I fit in I wonder.

When I have brain fog, I don’t feel like I have anything to offer.  I do love my family and friends, so I guess love is the one thing I still have to give, no matter what.

I worry about what is happening in this country.  The cuts in our system are scary to me on a personal level.

Being a disabled American makes me feel like a misfit.  The taxpayer’s enemy.  I represent to some Americans the reason our country is in such bad shape.  Somebody, “living for free.”  A flaw in an otherwise well-functioning system.

The doctor wonders what is depressing me!

Chronic illness impacts my view of myself and the world.  It’s a view that’s been filtered through pain, mental fog and bewildering fatigue, along with a very long decade of chronic stress.

I have the dogs to keep things real.  Plus, of course, I love them and think they’re the greatest little creatures to have ever lived on the planet!

One of my dogs had to go out a little while ago.  I was lying on the sofa.  He came over and sat there beside me, patiently waiting.

I felt like a million pounds of sand was lying on top of my body and it hurt.  After about eight minutes, which seemed like forever, I got up.

Putting his collar on him, I just happened to look at the sofa where I had tried to rest.  I saw the pain.  I saw the fatigue.

I didn’t want to ever lie on that sofa again.  I hurt when I lie down.  For a moment, the difference between the way I felt standing and the way I had felt lying down was somewhat mentally shocking.

I feel some better when I get up, but it isn’t long before I’m completely exhausted and must lie down again.

My dogs continue to be good for my health.  They keep me from never getting off that sofa.  They need me and I need them.

They took me outside after the rain stopped tonight.  I needed a short little walk and some fresh air.  They always know this.

Thanks for visiting Dogkisses’s blog.

Image via drburtoni’s photostream, Flickr.

Related Articles

• What Part of The Body Does It Not Affect ?!?! (mindbodyandsoulrehab.wordpress.com)
• Pain, Fatigue and Dogs (dogkisses.wordpress.com)

Freedom on wheels

The story I wrote about my having been confined to a wheelchair at age three was mostly true.  In this post, I’m going to tell you the whole truth and a little bit more.

I was supposed to tell 4 bold-face lies as part of this writing project, but I told more truth than lies.

Below is a copy of my story.   I underlined the parts that are NOT true.   The whole truth is in blue.

I was confined to a wheelchair, as a result of a childhood bone disease when I was a toddler.  The doctors told my mother I might never walk again.  I hated that chair! My brother, who is ten years older than me, used to take me and my little chair on wheels to the top of our steep road, which was deep in the mountains.  My two older sisters would stand at the top of the road, holding my chair, with me in it of course, until my brother made it to the bottom.  He would count to some number, which was their clue to let me go.  I would fly down that mountain in my little chair!  It was great fun!  The best I can remember, my brother always caught me.  My mother didn’t mind this game. I wasn’t happy the day I put my foot on the floor and was able to walk again because I had to give up my little flying chair.

The truth:

“A little doll’s chair,” is what my mother says the wheelchair looked like.  “It was just so small.   It didn’t look like it was for a person.”

I had Kohler disease, which is a rare childhood bone disease.  It attacked my ankle bone when I was three years old.  The doctors did tell my mother I may never walk again, but they also told her that it could go away as mysteriously as it had appeared.

I didn’t hate the wheelchair.  I’m pretty sure I loved it.  My mother says that I had crawled around for several weeks before she, “put her foot down,” and demanded that I be taken to the nearest hospital for x-rays.

Putting weight on my foot was intolerable.  The little chair gave me freedom to go outside and play.  At three years old, I guess you live in the moment.  I was too young to understand what never being able to walk again meant.   I was also too young to know the danger of flying down that road, but then sometimes, our memories play tricks on us.

About ten years ago, my mother and I visited the place we lived when I was in that wheelchair.  There was a housing complex with relatively small one story dwellings that was turned into offices for the Juvenile boys home.  My dad worked there and we had lived in the complex, which was for the employees and their families.

Mother and I were both a bit shocked.  The metal fence surrounding the property surprised her.  It was one of those tall fences with thick rolls of barbed-wire on top.  The place hadn’t been fenced in when we lived there.

I remembered the houses being massive with tall and wide dark windows.

“There’s our house,” Mother said.  There weren’t any big houses and the windows were those small rectangular ones you see in beach houses.

I remembered front porch being high up off the ground.  I sat on the steps every day, weather permitting, with my three year-old boyfriend, talking and waiting for the school bus to drop off my older siblings.  I remember being happy when he was there.  We were the best of friends and had terrific conversations about life.

There were only two steps, very close to the ground.  I couldn’t believe how much bigger things were in my memory than they were in reality.

I looked for the steep road where I took the wheelchair flights.  Mother pointed out our road.

“That’s it!”  I was completely astonished.  It was indeed a hill, but didn’t measure up by any means to the one I recalled.

I told her about flying down the mountain road.  She says she didn’t know anything about that.  I sure remember it.  My sisters say they remember too, but oddly, my brother doesn’t and he’s the oldest.  I think he forgot many things he did to his younger sisters.  Like the time he put me in a garbage can and rolled me into the road, but that was later and it was a country road.

I remember clearly the day I put my foot on the floor, which I did every morning, and it didn’t hurt anymore.  The pain was gone!  The bone disease went away just like the doctors said it might.

I didn’t mind giving up the little chair, but I did think I should get to keep it for a souvenir.  I remember wanting it.  Mother says she didn’t think I needed it and donated it to another family.

My ensuing enthusiasm for using my legs was grand.  At age five, I led a large marching band in the Christmas parade because the band leader said I was, “the best little marcher they ever had!”  I took jazz and modern dance classes, but then we moved to the country.  Dancing the way I had learned would have been considered a sin.  This disappointed me, but I soon discovered bluegrass and clogging, the latter of which was a required class in the elementary school I attended.

I didn’t have a bicycle though.  I’d had one when I was five, but then my brother got involved.  He let go of my bike before I learned to ride and I had a bad accident.  I was hurt pretty badly.  I heard my dad ask my mother if I would still be able to have babies.  I was confused.  She told him to shut up and get the car.

Because of that accident, my dad wouldn’t let me get near a bicycle for years, even though my brother always had one.  My two sisters never wanted one, which I always thought was weird and it didn’t help me when I pleaded for my own.  Finally, my dad gave in on my thirteenth birthday.

We went to the local bicycle shop, which was also an auto-parts and lawn-mower shop.  Everyone there knew my dad.  I’d been there with him plenty of times and they all knew I’d been begging for a bicycle for a long time.  I was often invited inside the owner’s house next door and his wife would give me milk and homemade cookies.  I loved her cookies and she made them the day I got my new bicycle.  It was a great day.  My dad let me ride it home, which was less than half a mile away.  You could throw a rock from there to our back door.

I loved that bicycle.  I could ride it fifty miles without thinking a thing about it and I did, often.  There’s a long story about what happened to that bike, but it is one sad story, so I won’t tell it here.

I grew up, had a son and bought us both bicycles when he was three years old.

His was a tricycle, but he begged me to take those two extra wheels off.  “Your bike doesn’t have them Mommy,” he said.

We took the wheels off, but I had a person at each end and several in the middle to catch him if he fell.  He did fall, but he didn’t have far to go and it was in the soft grass.  He didn’t get hurt.  He got up as fast as he could, before any of us could get to him and jumped back on the bicycle.  It was very funny.  I remember him looking back at us as he rushed to pick that little bicycle off the ground.  He never used those extra wheels and we had years worth of fun riding together.  We still enjoy riding together.  I like that.

I can’t go cycling like I could before being struck with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome or fibromyalgia.

However, I do have a fun bicycle.  I call it my magic little bike.  It brings out the best in me when I ride it.   I absolutely love moving and feeling the wind on my face.  That’s part of the magic.  Being able to move without pain.  (The trick to that is being on a flat road.)

My little bike also has pink and white streamers and an awesome bell!

Occasionally, I’ll still take my hands off the handle bars and hold them in the air.  I like that too.

Thanks for visiting Dogkisses’s blog!

Related Articles

• Memetastic Blog Award (dogkisses.wordpress.com)

MEMETASTIC BLOG AWARD

I was recently given the MeMetastic blog award!  This award is a fun guessing game for my readers.  Read on…

The award was given to me from Deb, at DorkyDeb.com.

THANKS DEB!  I think 🙂

Once you receive the award you must do a few things:

• You must proudly display the award in a post.
• You must list 5 things about yourself and 4 of the 5 must be BOLD FACE LIES.
  (your readers must guess which one is the truth)
• And you must then pass this prestigious award on, to 5 deserving bloggers.

Below are my five stories.  The five blogs I chose are listed at the bottom of the page.

Remember, only one story is the whole truth!

1) I was confined to a wheel chair, as a result of a childhood bone disease when I was a toddler.  The doctors told my mother I might never walk again.  I hated that chair!  My brother, who is ten years older than I am, used to take me and my little chair on wheels to the top of our steep road, which was deep in the mountains.   My two older sisters would stand at the top of the road, holding my chair, with me in it of course, until my brother made it to the bottom.  He would count to some number, which was their clue to let me go.  I would fly down that mountain in my little chair!  It was great fun!  The best I can remember, my brother always caught me.  My mother didn’t mind this game.  I wasn’t happy the day I put my foot on the floor and was able to walk again because I had to give up my little flying chair.

2) When I was fifteen I skipped school one day.  It was the first time I had ever done anything like that.  In fact, I never broke rules.  I was always trying to be the perfect student.  Anyway, it was raining that day.  I was driving my boyfriend’s truck.  My brother saw the truck.  He began chasing it because he didn’t like my boyfriend.  The road was curvy, but lucky for us, I had learned to drive several years earlier.  I was wearing a pair of, “Candies,” which was a style of high heel shoes popular in the ’70’s.  The heel got caught under the gas pedal.  We both wrecked.  I drove straight into a brick building at 80 mph.  My brother’s car slid into the building too.  The truck I was driving only had a small dent in the corner and I didn’t have a scratch on me.  My boyfriend had serious cuts and bruises.  My brother had to have nine stitches and it totaled his car.   I realized my brother must have done that out of love, so I stopped dating the guy and never saw him again.

3) I have an authentic Mile High Club button, which I had a great time earning.  A professor at a college I attended was also a pilot and ask me if I wanted to go flying.  Sure I told him.   He told me how he had always wanted the button, but never knew a woman brave enough to help him earn it.  I was young and daring!  In order to get the button and become a member of this club, we had to put the airplane in the hanger a mile high in the air, which we did, but not without turbulence.  The plane nose-dived.  I wasn’t the least bit afraid.  I thought it was great fun!  Shortly afterward we were flying normally again.  The professor, whom I obviously had great confidence in, couldn’t believe I didn’t get scared.  “I trusted you knew what you were doing,” I told him.  “I do, but I lost control of the plane.  We nosed-dived!”  he exclaimed.  “We did what?” I asked him.  “We are very lucky,” he added.

4) I love Comic Sans, Oprah and Dr. Phil!

5) I got caught speeding when I was 20 years old.  I had driven my dad’s car to a city an hour away.  It was raining hard and I had decided to see how fast I could make it back home.  I pulled over when I saw the blue lights, rolled down the window about two inches, just enough so I could talk to the officer without getting wet.  The officer asked if I’d been drinking.  I told him all about the wonderful drinks I’d enjoyed earlier.  He said he clocked me at 124 mph.  He and four other officers had chased me for five miles.  I laughed and told him that wasn’t a very long time at that speed.  I went to jail, lost my license and my father didn’t speak to me for a several months.  I learned some important lessons and never drove like that again.

Which story do you think is entirely true?

The Five blogs I chose as recipients!

Seeking Equilibrium

Jessie causing a calamity

Autoimmunemaven’s blog

planetjan

licoriceroot

You can visit the MeMetastic Hop to add your name to the list of recipients of this fantastic award.

I’ve heard that I’ll be hunted down by the creator of this award, pronounced meem-tastic, if I do not correctly follow the instructions.  I’m scared!

I hope you enjoyed my stories.  I also hope you will leave a guess in the comments, as to which one you believe is the whole truth!

Thanks for visiting Dogkisses’s blog!

Michelle.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Home

Good food, family, dogs, love, a little art and a digital camera…  Sounds like home to me.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

I LIKE THIS TREE

 

The Daily Post, Weekly Photo Challenge theme — “Home.”

Thanks for visiting Dogkisses’s blog.

My future is now

“After a certain age, there is no future.” Joseph Campbell

I’m forty-seven years old.  For the past couple of years, I’ve had acute realizations that I’m living my future.  The one I imagined when I was a child, the one I thought was so far away in my twenties and the one that in my thirties, was largely shaped and formed by turbulence and ensuing illness.

These acute realizations happen out of the blue.  I’ll be doing something, such as watching television or talking with my son and the feeling hits me.  I look around my home, taking note of the sentimental items I’ve kept over the years, the most special of which are displayed on the fireplace mantle or my desk.  I look at the pictures I’ve hung on my walls.  I look at my life and think to myself, This is it.  This is my future.

There is a sense of peace in this experience.  I like knowing that I’m here in the moment, instead of waiting to be somewhere else, in the future.  Then too, there is the realization that I didn’t prepare very well.  In fact, I may not have prepared at all.

“Every decision a young person makes is a commitment to a life course.  And if you made a bad decision of that angle by the time you get out there, you’re far off course.”  Joseph Campbell

I did get off course.  I made choices that landed me where I don’t think I would have chosen if someone had shown me a crystal ball.  A few people tried to show me, but my life was demanding.  I couldn’t get past the day, yet I still made it to the future, which is now.

“I’m not now participating in the achievement of life.  I have achieved it.”  Joseph Campbell.

I hope you enjoy this video.  The late Joseph Campbell was a great thinker who shared his knowledge and wisdom with joy and an obvious love of humanity.

Joseph Campbell Foundation

Video from YouTube, “Joseph Campbell–Myth as the Mirror for the Ego”

Thank you for visiting Dogkisses’s blog and feel free to leave a comment.

Related Articles

• More with Joseph Campbell (learningfromdogs.com)
• Joesph Campbell, first taste (learningfromdogs.com)
• Follow Your Bliss (karunamettacat.wordpress.com)

What I can’t say no to

I guess there are a few things I can’t say no to, but most likely, outside of not being able to say no to air, water and food, tobacco is the one thing I can’t say no to.

I didn’t begin this post with tobacco as my choice of something I can’t say no to.  I was going to tell you about something else, something more fun and exciting, but maybe I’ll go with the flow on what I’ve already written on this page.

Maybe I should tell it like it is how addicted I am to smoking and nicotine and how I feel like I’m going to explode, or rather implode, if I go too long without a cigarette.

I may be in denial because I had to pause to write the word cigarette.  It sounds ugly to me.  I wondered before I wrote the word if I want to tell of this awful habit, this complete failing of myself and my family, especially in my attempts to heal my body.  This one thing that feels like if I hadn’t ever started that my entire life would be different today.

I could have been a great athlete.  I could have gone to New York and studied modern dance.  I could have taken job offers as an aerobics and aquatic fitness instructor.  People offered to pay for my training, but smoking made me feel like going into a career like that would be misleading or false.

My habit got worse during a very bad time in 1996.  It got worse again in 2003 when both my son and I became ill.

One day during the summer of 2003 I was smoking a cigarette and thought of a local man whom everyone downtown knew.  He had schizophrenia because his older brother, “dosed him with large amounts of acid,” when he was fifteen years old.  He died in the mental institution when they committed him and put him on a new medication.  It was a tragic loss to all who knew him.  I didn’t know him as well as some of the men did, but I cried when he died.

I was having tremendous anxiety the day I remembered him.  I felt like smoking an entire pack at once, like he did.  He cleaned windows for local small businesses and the owners paid him in food and cigarettes.  He would wait until he had what looked like over a hundred cigarettes.  Then he would sit down at the coffee-house, put them all in a large pile between his legs, and smoke every last one of them back to back.

I always felt his anxiety when I saw him smoking.  He rocked back and forth and smoked hard and fast.

I saw myself in his memory that day I wanted all those cigarettes.  My son was in serious trouble in life and utter fear was overwhelming me with anxiety.  That summer, before my son finally received medical help, is when I remembered our friend who smoked the pile of cigarettes.  I went in the side room of my little home, opened the window, and smoked while I wrote an ode to him.

“The tobacco plant, Nicotiana, has probably been responsible for more deaths than any other herb. At present, tobacco smoking is causing over 3 million deaths a year worldwide, and if current smoking trends continue the annual mortality will exceed 10 million by around 2030.”  (1)

The Nicotiana plant isn’t what’s so bad.  It’s the addiction to smoking and nicotine that leads so many to the doorway of death.

Nicotiana tabacum

Nicotiana rustica

“Nicotiana tabacum, the plant now raised for commercial tobacco production, is probably of South American origin and Nicotiana rustica, the other major species which was carried around the world, came from North America. In 1492, Columbus found Native Americans growing and using tobacco, sometimes for its pleasurable effects but often for treatment of various ills.”  (1)

“As early as 15 October 1492 Columbus noted that dried leaves were carried by a man in a canoe near the island of Ferdinandina because they were esteemed for their healthfulness.  In the same year, two members of his crew observed people in what is now Cuba carrying a burning torch that contained tobacco, the purpose of which (it later emerged) was to disinfect and help ward off disease and fatigue.^{”  (1)}

One time a wasp stung me and my leg swelled and ached badly.  I put a compress of wet tobacco on it and the swelling went down immediately.  I wore a patch for a couple of days and my leg was fine.  My grandmother had taught me that when a bee stung my foot around age seven.  I loved walking barefoot and we had more than what I considered our share of bees.

I grew up in the 1970’s in a rural cotton mill town where everyone smoked, except my grandmother.  She was the only adult in my family that didn’t smoke.

I remember my dad smoking in the line at the grocery store, along with everyone else.  The store manager walked around with a wide broom to clean up the butts on the floor.  He didn’t seem to mind this at all.   He would greet people as he did this.  I didn’t think anything about it.

I smoked my first cigarette in elementary school.  I stole them from my grandpa.  They said he was blind, but he always knew when I reached into the drawer where he always had a carton of Winston’s.  I don’t know how he knew because the drawer was out of his sight in the hallway.  One day when I opened the drawer there was a dozen packs of Juicy Fruit.  He never kept his cigarettes there anymore.

I nearly passed out the first time I inhaled smoke, but that didn’t stop me.  I thought I was cool.  I would go behind the neighbor’s outdoor shed, which was beside the cow pasture and smoke.  I didn’t do it often, thank goodness.

It was when I was around fourteen that I began to practice the habit.  I’d ride my bicycle and hide a pack of Marlboro’s in my socks or if I wore my cow girl boots then it was quite easy.  Nearly all my friends would hide cigarettes in their boots.  The cool ones anyway.

I quit the habit when I was seventeen.  That was the year when I made life-changing good decisions.  I wanted good health and an education and I got both.  I had many accomplishments when I was seventeen.

I started back one day when my son was a young toddler.  I was sitting around the kitchen table at my former sister-in-law’s house.  I hadn’t thought of a cigarette in five years.  I was having a hard time being a single mother.

“Maybe you need one of these.  You need something to calm your nerves,” my dear in law said to me.

She handed me a Marlboro light.  I thought I’d smoke only one.  I was wrong.

I was going to write that I can’t say no to severe sexual desire that has gone past the point of no return, but I wrote a little about that in The Elusive Fence.

Thank you for visiting Dogkisses’s blog.  Please feel free to leave a comment.

(1) PubMed Central, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, Medicinal uses of tobacco in history.

(2) Image of sign via Wiki Commons

Click on images of plants for Wikimedia Commons description.

Topic #60 from The Daily Post, “What can’t you say no to?”

Writer or blogger

“So, what do you write about?” the eye doctor asked.

“Pain,” I answered.  I could have said life, health or my childhood memories, but pain seemed as good an answer as any.  The conversations at the eye doctor have the feel of the ones at the dentist’s office.

“Really,” the doctor remarked with enthusiasm.  “Where do you write?”

“I have a blog,” I said.

“Oh.  You’re a blogger.”  His enthusiasm was gone.  He didn’t ask me anything else about my writing.

Okay, so I’m a blogger.

I haven’t personally thought of myself as a blogger, even though I see nothing wrong with it and obviously, I am one.

I’ve always looked at it like I have a blog.  I like to write and I write in a blog.

I don’t usually say I’m a writer.  I say I like to write.

Saying I’m a writer seems to imply many things that are not true for me, one of which is, that I make a living doing it.

My sister and I were talking over the telephone yesterday.  I brought up the subject of blogs, since I’d just been to that doctor.

“I’ve never even heard of a blog until you had one.  I don’t know anything about them.”

“Well, people call people with blogs bloggers,” I told her.  “Apparently, some people don’t have such great attitudes about bloggers.”

“Well, I don’t see why,” my sister said.

My mom was asking what we were talking about.  I could hear her in the background.

“Michelle’s a blogger Mother!” my sister shouted out, as if that was new news and kind of cool too.

I laughed.

“A what?” I heard my mother ask in the background.

“A blogger!” my sister said, again enthusiastically.

“Well, I knew she had a blog,” she replied, as if to say, well duh, but my mother’s tone changed when she added, “but I didn’t know she was a blogger.”  The way she put emphasis on blogger left me wondering what she thought of the word.  It didn’t sound like too much.

I feel like a writer.  I want to do it every day.  Sometimes, it’s all I want to do.   I don’t think I’m that good, but I enjoy the process.  I don’t like throwing away ten pages that it took to get one decent and maybe even nice sentence or paragraph, but I sure like it when I get it right.

When I don’t write, it’s because I’m either sick or too busy.  If I ran out of ideas, I think my memory would have had to have failed me completely.  I simply run out of energy or can’t concentrate.

Writer or blogger, either way, I like to write and I write in a blog.