We went to The Big City yesterday (a 90-odd mile trek from Boonieville) to meet some internet friends for the first time. They, too, had driven to The Big City – from Boonieburgh :) – and were doing their Big City shopping (Super-Walmart, Sam’s Club, Menards, Home Depot, Fleet Farm, etc.; all the stores we don’t have in the sticks). We needed to do some Big City shopping too, so we met them at a mall.

They were soooo nice. :)

We met in the food court actually (isn’t that where you meet all your internet friends for the first time?! LOL) where I got a pile of Chinese food for $5.46 … I mean like, a mountain of food. It was obscene. And incredibly beautiful. Mom and I picked at the doggone thing for over an hour — and there was still food left over!!

(There are times I seriously miss living in the city — and that was one of those moments… we have zero variety up here. It’s boring little grocery store fare, or "fancy" grocery store fare for $45 + your first-born, or it sucks to be you.)

I then struggled through 2+ hours of shoe shopping. This is the eternal ritual: finding a pair of shoes that fits right. It’s always been like climbing Mt. Rushmore in a straight-jacket. My feet are picky as hell. Now that I have these excellent arch supports from the Good Feet Store, life is better …….. but I soon discovered you can’t just chuck your arch supports in any old shoe and be able to wear it. Some were too wide, some too narrow, some too tight, one rolled outward really badly, several rolled inward really badly … and WTF is with Reebok gluing their insoles in their damn shoes anyway?! Hello?? Dear Reebok: you’ve lost a longtime loyal customer (20+ years!), because you glue in your insoles! Stupid, stupid, stupid. Nobody else glues their insoles in. Just Reebok. Apparently they’re special. *roll eyes* Yeah … special enough to be left on the shelf!

So, given that I lost my hiking boots a few months ago (I think while changing out of my fire gear on the highway ……….. but I don’t know for sure??), I did at least find a pair of mens’ athletic shoes that will sufficiently substitute as hiking shoes. Didn’t find a single pair of womens’ shoes that were workable *roll eyes* but the mens’ shoes were a hit-it-out-of-the-park home run.

So the hunt for everyday shoes continues. *sigh*

I then screwed together all the bits of courage I had as we went to pick up our kitty at the vet. Our dead kitty, who’d been cremated. I was okay ’til we pulled in the parking lot. As we pulled up to the place, exactly 1 hour before the time we’d walked out when he died that night in September, those God-awful feelings all came flooding back. That horrible weekend, that horrible night. The worry, anxiousness, desperation, concern, love for my baby, frustration … and utter suffocating helplessness. The helplessness, that’s what really ripped me up. There wasn’t a single thing we could do to fix him, he just looked up at me with those sweet soul-filled eyes, trusting and loving me, looking to me for answers and security, clinging to me desperately as I held him as close as I could… broken. And I couldn’t fix him. It broke my heart. What do you do with that???? He could not be fixed. He was broken forever. As was my heart.

We had him put to sleep. It was the right thing to do, but an absolutely horrible thing to do. Even though we saved him from massive pain and suffering, I still wrestle with the simple act of taking a life — and a life I loved with all my heart, no less. I know he is happier now (I mean, I know this) but there is something in my soul that rages and reels at taking a life. Taking a life! There is no greater, purer Power that we can see with our own eyes, than life. To kill that life … that core part of me *rebukes* it. Who am I to take such a thing from someone else??? Yes, even an animal. To me, it means no less, it is no less, if it has four legs or two.

He was tucked in a little black-and-white kitty-shaped tin, in a paper bag with ribbons tied to the handle. The bag had been carefully labeled with his name. And tucked inside was a pawprint. A little print of his sweet little paw … a paw I couldn’t have back. A little paw I would never kiss again, or play with, or tickle, or gently touch. A paw that would never reach out to touch my hand again, nor cling to my shoulder for dear life as his eyes implored me to protect and love him forever. Seeing that, that’s when I really came unglued.

It all flooded back so vividly, so wholly, the emotion of it just swallowing me up. We climbed back in the car and I just sat there and cried.

But I held on. Because something I’ve learned the last few weeks, is that I can feel pain, but it won’t kill me. I can hang on and endure it, ride the wave, and push through, and it will in the very least dump me washed-up on some sh*tty abandoned shore somewhere. But it won’t carry me away forever, and it won’t kill me. It does end (or at least ebb), and I then I can crawl up to higher ground and brush myself off.

Sitting in the dark car, the parking lot illuminated by the yellowed glow of a magnesium streetlight, the same scene of that fateful night swirling and awash in my tears, I knew that I had to feel the pain and ride its wave, in order to deal with it. This part of the ride had to be ridden in order to process it and put it to rest. The rational side of me recognized that this was a normal way to feel, and so it was okay to ride it out and feel it for what it was. I didn’t die on the trail. This wouldn’t kill, or even mortally maim me, here in the car. I would be okay.

And I was. It took awhile. We shed our tears, we voiced our regrets, we mopped up our faces with paper towels, took a deep breath and pulled out of the parking lot. We had our boy back. And we brought him home where he belonged. Our baby is back home by his Mamas.

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A symptom which I have assigned to PTSD (as PTSD is the main mental operative in my life) that has developed in the last 15 months, is clenched joint muscles.

Not skeletal muscles, as that would be like back spasms? I don’t have back spasms.

But my left hip, the internal muscles which keep the femur pulled up into the pelvis, squeeze tight. Not the external buttock muscles. The internal ones. The result is that the femur is pushed up into the cartilage and joint constantly, and the hip joint (in my pelvis) becomes really sore. Not so much sore to walk on, but it hurts particularly bad to lay on.

Although I’ll describe it to my family that “my hip is spasming up again,” it’s not really a spasm, because spasms are involuntary. This is voluntary, but controlled subconsciously; It’s not like I choose to do it, like picking my nose! It just happens.

But “spasm” closely describes the tension and tightness of the muscles that are clenched up. It closely describes the fact I am not trying to tense up my hip. And after 20 or 30 minutes, the whole joint just aches.

I try to be aware of it, and consciously relax the whole hip joint. However I’ll catch it and do this relaxation exercise easily 30+ times an hour.. sometimes several times a minute. It’s a constant battle with this subconscious thing that keeps tightening the muscles up. And I do the whole awareness-relaxation thing because if I don’t, if I left the joint stay spasmed up, it is unbelievably sore for days. At its worst, I haven’t been able to even sit on the hip. Give that whirl in real life … NOT!

So I am perpetually distracted by checking whether my hip is tightened up, then stopping whatever I’m working on and focusing on forcing the muscles and whole joint to relax. Then I go back to whatever I was thinking about.

The net result is, I am constantly distracted, and inefficient, and I often forget what I was doing, or what I was thinking about. This makes even checking or acting on emails impossible at times… I can’t follow a thought process through. It is supremely annoying, and leaves me feeling incapable.

I am not proud to admit I’m voluntarily not attending my EMT refresher tonight, because a part of me is taunting the phrase "skipping class" in that slacker way. As in, I’m skipping class because I am lazy and would rather kick back with some beers and watch TV.

But I am not lazy, my TV is off, and I have no beer.

It all comes down to comfort level. Which is not to say, "it’s more comfy here in my jammies than bundled in a coat outside" but rather whether I am feeling strong enough to put myself in a situation that makes my heart pound and skin crawl in fear.

Read the rest of this entry

Tonight on 20/20 was a piece about a storm chaser, Jim Reed (you can apparently find his work at UltimateChase.com) who together with his chase partner, actively seeks out crazy weather of all kinds… hurricanes, tornadoes, thunderstorms, flooding, winter storms, etc.

He has, as you might expect, accumulated quite a collection of breathtaking video and still photos.

He has also developed PTSD, and is “receiving treatment” for it. The news piece cited some heart-wrenching circumstances as being difficult for him — hearing people trapped and crying for help when he physically could not help them, for instance. Completely and totally understandable; that’d screw anybody in the head for a while.

What I find odd though, is that he keeps going back.

The first tenet of treating PTSD is to remove yourself from the source. Read the rest of this entry