Exhaustion dims the mirror and increases the pain

I continue to be on the mend, but after I resurfaced onto the web, life around here went nutZ.

Tess' chicken pox became so severe that she was almost ready to imitate Cartman and take a bath in calamine lotion. (See "Chicken Herpes")

My mother woke up to the New Year with a high fever and vomiting.

So my brother and I went shopping for them. That was really pretty cool- I wanted to have more sense of family and community than I'd had in Chicago, and it has VERY much born out here, especially during this preposterous what-ever-the-Krishna-is-going-on-with-my-bones period of life.

I did the entire shopping trip on crutches, with my brother pushing the cart. Not surprisingly given my mad bongo skills, it went great.

However, the net effect of all of this was increased exhaustion and pain.

There is a very strong link... can't tell if its a 1:1 scale, or if at some point you get so tired that your body becomes hyper aware of pain.

Either way, today I'm at about 2/3 of where I was when I resurfaced, so I'm going to take reengaging the world via the web slowly. Taking time and rest and healing has to be my focus...

My mother is doing better, her fever broke yesterday and hasn't had any more GI problems. As for Tess... I'm going through the house looking for every zinc containing skin product we have.

The ground is frozen here, such that I can roll my wheel chair across the yard, so I'm planning on going round the house and across the yard and being upstairs a bit today for the first time since I came home from the hospital. Its great that I am so adept at using the crutches, I'm sure the doctor will give me a gold-star-smiley-face for that Tuesday, but they're quite unsuitable for traversing a frozen slightly snowy yard.