How Tired Is Tired?

You know, I always feel like Alanis when I use the word irony to describe certain aspects of my life with the disease. But I'm never sure if I'm using it properly. Funny how two degrees in English don't make me any more confident in terms of using the tricky words.

So, one of the side effects of the prednisone is sleeplessness. So not only does the drug make you puffy and chubby (it increases your appetite and therefore you gain gobs of weight, including awful water weight), but it also keeps you awake and makes you psychotic. Both times I've used prednisone in the past to treat the disease, the drug has made me nuts. I call it the 'prednisone crazies.'

The second time the disease flared when I was in my mid-twenties the drug made me so wacky that I was hearing voices and wanting to jump off high rises. It took me two years to crawl out of that depression. Luckily, I'm in a much better 'place' to deal with the prednisone crazies, in that I know what they are and how to recognize them before the black dogs descend and I start scrubbing the bathtub with a toothbrush and a bottle of bleach.

Annnnywwaaay. As it's been well documented, my blood went missing a few weeks ago, and as a result, I'm severely anemic, which makes you tired. Really tired. Like so tired you can't walk to the corner tired. Right, so the only thing you want to do is sleep, but the damn prednisone is keeping me awake. The result? I'm a bloody zombie: I can't think, can't remember my name most days, have trouble even writing a sentence. So I'm wandering through my days like an extra in Dawn of the Dead. I just lie in bed for hours, my braid whirring and whizzing, weight of the world on my shoulders, wishing I could sleep. But I'll say one thing for sure, when you wake up at 6 AM every morning, you feel the full pressure of the amount of hours in a day.

Now for the big question, is that ironic? Probably not, it's probably just my plain, damn bad luck, damn you Alanis for making me all confused.