Symptom Log: Day 7

• Footdrop (Foot drags along floor during walking)
• Paraesthesia (Partial numbness, tingling, buzzing and vibration sensations)
• Anaesthesia (Complete numbness/loss of sensation)
• Neuralgia, Neuropathic and Neurogenic pain (Pain without apparent cause, burning, itching and electrical shock sensations)
  
• Ataxia (Loss of coordination)
• Intention tremor (Shaking when performing fine movements)
• Dysmetria (Constant under- or overshooting limb movements)
• Frigidity (Inability to become sexually aroused)
• Depression
• Cognitive dysfunction (Short-term and long-term memory problems, forgetfulness, slow word recall)
• Mood swings, emotional lability
• Anxiety 
• Fatigue 
• Uhthoff's Symptom (Increase in severity of symptoms with heat)
• Sleeping Disorders
• Inappropriately cold body parts

The footdrop came back yesterday. Early, early this morning I was woken up by a new symptom:

Neuralgia, Neuropathic and Neurogenic pain (Pain without apparent cause, burning, itching and electrical shock sensations)

My skin was crazy itchy and I kept getting these shooting pains in my joints, face, fingers and wrists. Often it would happen on both sides at the same time (Like both wrists at the same time) but more often than not it was just random shooting pain. It's still happening right now, with particular focus on my left breast.

In other news...

I have never wanted to smoke as badly as I do right now. I quit smoking over 18 months ago and have never really had the kind of smokers rage that I am experiencing now. I know it's not a physical craving. I know it's my conscious brain telling me that self-destructive behaviour feels good in the short term.

(SEE! All those years of cognitive behavioural therapy fucking worked, muthafuckahs.)

So all I need to do now is smoke a pack and a half a day, get shitfaced drunk, do some ecstacy, and sleep with a random stranger (or Finn) and I will have successfully reclaimed my crazyness and will have an excuse to give up on myself. Except that I am so incredibly unattractive, uncoordinated and tired that none of this is going to happen even if I put all the effort I could into it. The guy I married doesn't look at me with anything more than pity and angst, so destroying my life isn't going to happen tonight. 

(Again, I remind you how those years of CBT have worked. This is called "insight into my condition".)

On Monday, May 25, 2009 I have to be "ready, willing & able" to work or the Employment Insurance runs out and I am incomeless. This date haunts my mind because given the way I feel right now, that's an unlikely scenario. 

My immune system is supposedly in full crash, but I somehow managed to not catch Joe's plague by compulsive hand washing, not sleeping in the same bed with him, and not kissing anything but the top of his head for a week. OR the chemo doesn't actually work and there's nothing wrong with my immune system.

I have done five yoga poses each day since my friend Richard taught them to me on Thursday. (It was Thursday, right?)  I don't think it's helping, but it's not harming. Unless it's the yoga that caused my footdrop to come back and started the neuralgia.  *shrugs* I guess it's not worth thinking about.

Gawddammit, I want to smoke.