Wednesday 5 October 2016

A Quick Turnaround

For some reason I feel quite jittery today, not an anxiety thing per se but I would call it anxiety in the absence of a better expression for how I feel. I'm jumpy, a bit speedy. The muscles that do work on my body seem to want to vibrate, to get going, to move quickly. I'm shaking a bit but not the normal shaking; it's a higher tuned thing, up the scale.

If it were not for the fact that I had no coffee when all of this started, I would blame it on caffeine. After a cup of coffee, it got worse, so there is something to be said for that. It's like a miniature speed rush, the kind I remember from being a teenager and trying some of that kind of thing. I want to chatter, high speed. I want to babble, high speed. Yet there are no drugs in my system for this, no psychological motivator. It's just seeming to happen this morning, today, this afternoon.

Were I a healthier man, I would use this burst of undirected energy to do something, some sort of project. I would go cut some wood or clean out a shed or tidy up my boat. Were I a healthier man, I would go for a walk or even a bike ride, take off and go fishing in the river. But here I sit, unable and unwilling to risk the energy output, worried that I might wear myself to exhaustion all too quickly.

That's part of the conundrum of living this way, living with ALS, living with the perpetual exhaustion. I know full well that any energy I have, or feel, will dissipate fairly quickly. Within moments, or perhaps on a good run within an hour, I will be ready for a nap, tired from the simple exertion of having this energy. It's perverse. I feel like I have energy and that feeling is making me tired.

Stupid, fucking disease. In the time I've written this post, I've gone from buzzing with this energetic vibration to the edge of feeling like I need a nap. None of this makes sense.

No comments:

Post a Comment