Dastardly prednisone

Sure, the world is going to hell in handbasket and still, what I am obsessed with? The progression of my skin from oozing running rivulets of poison ivy to glowing middle-aged health.

Poison ivy has taught me many things this summer. It has taught me that, aside from past recreational use, I very rarely take drugs. And this means I'm all kind of confounded by the fact that they affect you. Take prednisone - no, really, you take it. It sucks. And people take it for months and months, for years of their lives. I'm on the crummy 15 day plan and I want to grab a colonic detox seconds after my last pill has its 24 hours of working life. Sweats, strange moods, wakefulness in the middle of the night followed by lead leg crashes. Either I'm possessed, entering perimenopause or else, as I believe it must be, it's the prednisone.

Moments like this make me feel the proverbial pie in the face, except stronger. There are and always have been people in my life dealing with some form of chronic pain, disability, long term care need. I get all kinds of points for being an able bodied non-chronic-pain person who remembers that this is not everyone's reality. Too many points, of course, because this shouldn't be rocket science but hey, most folks don't pay attention.

Well, then some little bitty change to my equilabrium comes along - prednisone - and I can't stop talking about it with every person in ear range. Really, in a comparison sense, the effects are minor. But I don't like them, they won't go away, and in my pissy little strong health no pain way, that annoys me.

I sit here in my icky sticky cold sweat and leaden limbs moment and remember - there are people I love and people who I have never met who would call this a good day, who have relationships, children, jobs, and creative passions while managing multiple internal realities that conflict with their external focus. I told a friend this morning, it reminds me of being pregnant. You're sitting there in the room with a group full of people, you believe you are all sitting in the same room - this space where your outside skin connects the air and you are all sharing the same air, but while you sit there, there is this whole other wild universe of flipping baby going on as an underbeat or sometimes overbeat to the other realities.

I suppose that's one of the measuring sticks, isn't it? At any given point in time, how many realities do you have to deal with. I'm privileged (sorry Emptyman, it's that word again), most of the time, even when I'm multitasking, I get to deal with just the one right in front of me.