There's Snoring All Around

It's not the latest that I've ever been awake. As a matter of fact, this is a time that anyone can generally find me on my computer. The strange thing is that everyone around me is asleep. My little brother doesn't snore. But he's in his bedroom. The three other beings in the room with me are my mom and my two dogs. And all three of them are snoring. Being in a room surrounded by snoring, surprisingly, makes me feel more alone than sitting awake by myself in the middle of the night.

Our family has had a hard time of it the past couple of weeks. A broken furnace, two broken cars, my "broken" head and a leaking sprinkler system. All of that takes money to fix and our family isn't exactly swimming in extra cash. Tonight we got some extra bad news about the sprinkler system. Turns out, the water main is broken. The nice man fixing the sprinkler system tried everything he could to patch up the leak so we could have running water. There was too much corrosion to patch anything sufficiently so my family is living without running water until the line is replaced.

If the sprinkler system is looked at as my head, the leak as my headache, the water main as my occipital nerve and the corrosion as my occipital neuralgia, then it is really easy to look at my life as running water in a home. I know that I have a lot in my life, all things considered, but my actual life is on hold while I am dealing with my headaches. The little bit of a life that I am able to live with this pain is kind of like the little bit of water that my family is able to get from the neighbor's hose. I am desperately seeking a replacement water main (or stimulator) so that I can bring back the running water that is my life.

When so many things in life are going wrong or are broken, it can be hard to sit alone with my own thoughts. I like to be surrounded by life. Dogs, people, television, radio, internet, outside with the birds, whatever I can get to. Whenever I am alone, the pain gets worse. I need distraction from the stabbing, shooting lightening bolts and the dull, constant throbbing.

But the worst is times like these; the times that I'm surrounded by snoring. I know that the people and dogs around me are need their sleep so I do not want to wake them up. I just want to talk to my mom or cuddle a puppy or even listen to my mom talk to someone else. When she wakes up for a couple of minutes, it's like a ray of sunshine cutting through the pain. While I sit surrounded by my sleeping family, the rational part of my brain knows that I am not alone. The irrational part of it wants them to all wake up and make some noise.

OwieKate ZipperHead

If you did not read the article from the New York Times tying kids' poor attention spans to the television show SpongeBob SquarePants, then please click on the title of this post.

I am into my fifth hour (yes, fifth) of watching episodes of SpongeBob because my head hurts too much to go out. I had invites to two different parties that I had to decline because even sitting up cause my head to spin and invisible needles to poke me all over the pace. My whole body aches. Every single time that I get like this, I feel old. Really old. I have to get up carefully, not only so I don't get disoriented and fall over, but because my joints hurt. For the first few steps I take, my back is hunched.

Now, after reading about the amount of pain I'm in a read might ask why I'm watching SpongeBob. The show is loud, fast and (let's face it) it can be downright annoying. I love SpongeBob. I don't have to think when I watch it. It keeps my brain off my pain for at least a while after after I stop watching. Sometimes, a mindless show taking up all of a brain's ability to focus is just what a chronic pain patient needs.