Pain in my... Katrina

I wake up roll over and ask the question that begins almost ever day since the storm. "How do did you sleep" I ask my fiance'. Every night as we fall asleep, the events surrounding the trauma/anxiety of the last 6 months starts playing again. It is kind of like the movie Groundhog's Day where Bill Murray is forced to live the same day over and over. The only difference being the dreams all are filled with anxiety, just filmed from different angles and locations.

What happened to the sugar plumb fairy? While bad dreams can make for a bad day, try months of them since the storm hit. What started out as being a bit tired has become intense pain. Everyone's pain seems to be different. Mine is in my upper back between my shoulder blades. Some days it is slight, others it feels like two rail road ties have been hammered into either side of my spine.

My fiance's pain is all over. In her sleep, her dreams cause her to clench her muscles as she actively holds the tension which is playing out behind her eyelids. She has been diagnosed with Fibromyalgia. She is physically exhausting herself through her sleep and her muscles and tendons are all painful. Her pain was so intense that it was regularly bringing her to tears before the doctors began medicating her sleep.

Will things ever get back to normal? We had a really bad rain storm the other weekend which started with a flash flood warning coming up on the local news channel and then our satellite signal was lost. The rain was coming down so hard, it started coming in through the ceiling in different rooms and even an A/C vent. As thunder struck near our house, it sent us back into our fears from the storm. What should have been a peaceful night sleeping with rain outside was filled with nightmares about flooding and the panic of trying to evacuate but not being able to communicate with anyone.

I realized our anxiety levels are high right now as we still own a house in New Orleans and there is another storm season coming. Yes, we are safe in Texas but we feel alone here. If you didn't go through it, you don't get it. Our anxiety has been like Formosan termites tunneling away within us. We realize we need to take care of ourselves but there is only so much we can control. We can't stop dreaming. We can't change what happened. All we can try and do is keep going and hope that in time, the dreams will fade but until then, we will keep talking about them and try to work through our anxiety. Relief from the pain only seems to come through moving on while trying to make sense of the feelings and dreams we have.
(photo credit: Ernest Svenson http://www.ernietheattorney.net)