Wyzard's Wyld Euphorium

Accepting Of Self

 I’m coming out!

Claudia Wyzard

 aka

 Morinanna 

February 2020

What is life without drive, without  desire, without thriving? I’ll tell ya what it is, it’s a pretty shitty thing to wake up to,and yet here I am. I’m wide awake now. The time for grief has passed, winter is coming to an end and I can smell spring on the distance winds. Years ago I would have all my gardens mapped out, I’d be scanning a stack of seed magazines getting ready to place my order. But that was long ago in a far away place; a place that feels like a fairytale today. 

Today my life is a very different kind of fairytale, the handsome prince has come to save the day. Every single day when I wake up I’m so very grateful to have him in my life, but my days of gardening and many other things are long gone. That’s just my reality. I’m a much different person today. So let me reintroduce myself.

Good Afternoon I’m Claudia aka {Mori~} and I have a disability, well I guess if we’re all being honest here I should say I have several disabilities. I’m the same fun loving, gypsy spirited, artistic,creative,concert going , loving person I’ve always been.

I’m just very limited by my physical abilities right now. Actually I have been for a while now, but I’ve just tried to ignore it, hide it, think it’s not really true. Trust me it’s very real and it’s very true. Some days are pretty normal for a 56 year old hippie chick, and other days are  a living nightmare. 

          Most people when they go to sleep at night have some idea of what their tomorrow will look like. Maybe they have to work, maybe they have fun plans with friends, maybe they are looking forward to doing something they love. I don’t have that privilege I never know what tomorrow will bring for me. Some days I wake up feeling great and then a few minutes or hours later that takes a complete 180. Some days I wake up and know I won’t be leaving my bed no matter what I had planned for the day.

This makes me really unreliable. I honestly hate this part of my illness, I feel so much guilt for letting others down, but I’m working on that.So if you’re a person I have cancelled plans with I’m truly sorry really I am.

        So let’s talk about bad days, we all have those “normal” bad days, maybe someone cuts you off in traffic and makes you late for an appointment, or maybe someone you work with spoils your day in some way.Those things are just expected to happen in life. My bad days are so different there’s a raging war going on inside my own body. Some days taking a shower is just too much for me, and then on days when I have the energy to enjoy a nice hot shower I cringe at the thought. Am I going to find an army full of tiny ninjas with knives waiting for me? Because my nerves get really confused and have a hard time distinguishing between good  and bad touch.. Sometimes that hot water which should feel great causes extreme pain. The physical pain is unbearable at times, I have a combination of several things causing that pain. So I’ll give you a list of things that fight each other inside of my body. I’ll start with my deteriorating disk in my spine, the spine is the foundation to the body. Surgery was supposed to stop or help the pain I willingly put myself through those surgeries in hopes of less pain, but what actually happens is the disk ( the so called shock absorbers) right above or right below take on the brunt of the weight carrying and they quickly deteriorate as well. I mean I was pretty excited to finally get my neck fixed to be let down yet again, as I was still in the actual recovery stages and the disk right below my neck surgery decided to show its angry face and it’s breaking down now. When this happens it causes nerves to become pinched, and bone spurs start to grow from bone on bone crushing and grinding each time I move. Those bone spurs can interfere with information traveling along my body’s highway. Then the gap where my actual spinal cord is keeps getting smaller and tighter as I age. This is just the beginning of my journey into the world of chronic pain.

           A body filled with surprises and not the good kind like your lover bringing home flowers oh no I’m talking about arthritis and I say surprise because I never know where it’ll show up next. It has station command centers in my hips and knees and back. From those stations it sends out tiny soldiers to attack the small joints in my body like my toes, fingers, elbows and ankles. Eventually a combination of these tiny soldiers make their way into other vital  organs and cells. They make it past the strongest barriers and into the immune system, this causes extreme confusion in the immune system. The immune system doesn’t recognize the foreign invaders and they get so confused by the appearance of these foreigners who mimic my own immune cells that they cant tell the difference and instead of protecting me they too start to attack me. So let’s all just take a minute to welcome autoimmune disease to the raging war. You would  think by now my body would be getting pretty fed up, but wait there’s more, this rager in my body is just getting started!

            I’d like for you to meet the beast from within Fibromyalgia ( fibro). This is the strangest warrior of them all, I never know what kind of a fit it’s going to throw on any given day. From the tiny inconveniences to major pain and chronic fatigue. So let’s start with the small stuff, my skin and the nerve endings in my skin are constantly confused and sending the wrong signals to my brain. One day I might be able to wear that cute little black lace shirt and other days I put it on and I feel like I’ve stepped into a big ole patch of fire ants. So I normally just go for uber softies or fur. To help you understand what it’s like on most days, think back to a time when you have the horrific flu, the all over severe body aches and temperature changes. Yea that’s the one where you are hot but have cold chills, night sweats and unbearable non stop pain.It takes my muscles and ties them in crazy knots, it confuses my signals to my brain so that when I lay down to rest instead of relaxing my muscles tense up. They are so confused, causing major trigger points in a whole array of places.The hardest part is not knowing what will trigger it. It could be stress, a slight change in the weather, or something I ate. No one really knows for sure, because every person who has this beast has different symptoms making it really hard to medically treat.

 My story doesn’t end there, I haven’t even touched base on the mental stuff or the fatigue. You’re probably bored by now so I’ll end part 1 here. I’m Claudia and I have a disability. Follow along for part 2.

claudiawyzard©2020

artwork by Helena Nelson