Back From The Methadone Clinic And On My Way

All righty, then! As a friend told me recently, this space is resembling a Lifetime Movie lately, and I'm ready to turn that around some. There has been grieving, and there's some more to come, but there has also been laughter, hope, and relief.

I'm gonna talk about the relief now. First, much stress was lifted from this weekend's journey to Tennessee for Bella's flowergirl debut in Zach and Angela's wedding when the sweet, wonderful (and incidentally hot blonde bombshell with equally hot-bomb husband) Melissa agreed to take on the task of caring for our sixteen (you read right) animals, plus all the wee fishies in the koi-pond, while we're gone. She's awesome--totally responsible, great with the animals, and they love her. The dogs are not overly thrilled at basically having to live a couple of days mostly crated, but if we boarded them, guess how they'd be living? Yeah. Crated. So at least they're on their home turf, with their own bunkhouses in their own home with their own classical music and all. And Melissa is a familiar face and voice to a good number of the dogs and horses, so that's great. The fish won't recognize her at all, but they wouldn't acknowledge her if they did. They're aloof like that.

Now for the BIG news. I GOT PAIN RELIEF. I'm a little astonished at the source, but after a three-and-a-half-hour consult with the reproductive endocrinologist today, I've been put on Methadone. That's right. I never heard of such a thing--I thought Methadone only came in the Kool-Aid down at the heroin-rehab clinic. Turns out, it's the going thing in chronic pain management. And I may be jumping the gun by gushing after only one dose, but MAN, I feel good, and have much LESS of a "drugged" feeling than I did on Demerol. I would encourage anyone with endometriosis who is dealing with tough pain to CHECK THIS OUT NOW. On top of everything else, it was CHEAP.

Here's the story with the Methadone. With standard pain-meds, you take them when you hurt, and you stress over having them when you need them, so you tend to "save" them for the really bad pain, and by that point, you're "behind" the pain, and it's hard to catch up and get full relief. So you take more, and besides not getting full relief, you wind up running out sooner. Methadone has a long half-life, so offers about a 12-hour window of effectiveness. I take one 10 mg. Methadone tablet every 12 hours, and have the option of taking one extra pill per 24-hour period for "breakthrough" pain, if needed. It's brilliant. I recommend it heartily. Unless you are, in fact, a heroin junkie...I'm not qualified to make recommendations in that case. But my doctor told me that Methadone is also making strides in many forms of chronic pain that are hard to treat, such as arthritis and severe back pain.

Aside from mere pain relief, I am now just beginning to see the sun peek through the clouds, and getting a taste of relief to come when, I'm guessing by Monday or so, I can rejoin the world, and do exotic things like, oh, I don't know...GO TO THE POST OFFICE. Wheeeee! Seriously...to live again? To merely fulfill my obligations? Seems like a nice thing, and I'm looking forward to it.

Tomorrow morning we depart for the much-ballyhooed wedding of Zachary and Angela, holding our breaths in the hopes that Dear Isabella will be in one of her ballerina princess moods when the time comes to do her flowergirl thing, and not in her "Batman Beyond" mode, wherein a magic-wand becomes a death-dealing weapon of doom. I might not ever live down the yelling of "TAKE THAT, JOKER!" accompanied by overagressive petal-chunking. We can only hope.

And--AND! We are travelling in style, in my freshly-detailed (and painstakingly organized by hubby) Tahoe, which is, as of this month (drumroll...), PAID OFF. O-F-F. OFF. Behold it in all its no-payments-due glory:Awwwwww, yeahhhhhhh. It's like having a brand-new car, I'm that excited. We had to stop doing so when we bought the new house, but prior to that we had worked really hard to make extra payments on the Tahoe in order to pay it off early, and we accomplished that. And now we can apply the erstwhile Tahoe payment amount to Alex's truck payment, and get IT paid off early, and then it's ONWARD to putting a dent in the mortgage, to ultimately live debt-free! Dave Ramsey would be so proud of us. Well, he'd probably disapprove of all dog-show-related expenditures, but still. It's progress, and I'm proud of us, a little.

Oh, and happiness? Happiness is a mailbox full of fresh, new, DaveToon shirts, the latest modeled here by Bella, who now refuses to give up her "monkey and a guy" nightgown.This led to a full evening of entertainment for us, beginning with her question, as she regarded the images on the shirt, "Mommy, is this a drawing?"

Me: "Well, yes, Sweetie, it is a drawing."

Bella: "Who drawed this picture?"

Me: "Dave did. Would you like to see some more?"

And so we visited the archives of Blogography, particularly the DaveToon 2006 archives (scrolling quickly past any images containing a cartoon penis--there are a surprisingly good number of these, it being only halfway through 2006 and all). I was rewarded for my efforts with a lot of delighted squealing of such phrases as, "Oh, my, he's NAAAAKEEEED!" (dream sequence with giant, banana-weilding Dave amid swarms of Bad Monkeys), "Look, 'dere's 'dat monkey agay-unn!" And my favorite:

"He is in bay-udd NAKED with a HORSIE--HAHAHAHAAAAA! And he hay-us a ba-nay-uh-na! And there is SPONGEBOB!!! AAAAH HAHAHAHAHAAAAA!!!!"DaveToons are seriously appreciable to preschoolers, who thankfully can't read yet.