Welp, on Monday I go back to work. My medically induced vacation hasn’t been as helpful as I’d hoped. But if I’m obligated to find a bright side, I guess I’m glad I didn’t have to pretend to be OK for three weeks.

The amount of pretending and ignoring it takes to get through an 8-hour day when you’re struggling to lift a fork to your mouth or open a bottle of Gatorade is hard to explain. It’s crippling, it’s depressing, and it’s scary.

***

It was my worst flare up to date that prompted me to go back to my doctor on September 29 and spend a tearful 40 minutes confronting my disability.

In that first full week off, I learned that gabapentin is not a drug that’s going to get me back on my feet. The night terrors and lost sleep I experienced on that junk instead set me back weeks, maybe months.

I quit taking it after waking from one of many nightmares to find I couldn’t move my limbs for a few moments. Immediately after I stopped taking it, I went from being scared the drug was going to permanently break my brain to worrying that my doctor was going to react negatively to my “non-compliance.”

***

Without much to keep the flare from snowballing, I spent the second week in more pain than usual. I honestly don’t remember much about it, except that when I went back to the doctor for a med check she was OK with me stopping the gabapentin and wanted to me to up my nortriptyline dosage to 20 mg at bedtime. Getting restorative sleep needed to be the priority.

***

Holy shit, have I ever slept since that appointment. Here’s the sleep I logged using FibroMapp for the first 7 days at 20 mg:

Saturday 10/14: 10 hours
Sunday 10/15: 18 hours
Monday 10/16: 9 hours
Tuesday 10/17: 11 hours
Wednesday 10/18: 10 hours
Thursday 10/20: 7 hours

The longest sleeps include daytime naps at moments when I just couldn’t keep my eyes open another second—in case you were wondering. On all 7 days, I spent my waking hours in bed, getting up only to go to the bathroom or take a shower or grab a Gatorade from the kitchen.

Dan cooked all my meals, washed and folded all the laundry, took care of the pets, shopped, rescued me from the bathtub, vacuumed, washed all the dishes, ran errands, picked up my prescriptions, met with the gutter guy, and plunged the toilets when our drains backed up. He even helped me get my shirt over my head because my arms were so weak I couldn’t lift them over my head.

***

So here I am at the end of my third week off of work, a little bummed and a lot miffed that I haven’t made any progress. I used up PTO and short-term disability and have nothing at all to show for it except a new walking cane, more medical bills, and a half-used bottle of gabapentin.