My Disabled Pussy

My Disabled Pussy

So I’ve been all up my own ass about how hard things are right now, and realized that I’ve basically been stabbing myself in the feet and legs 3x a day to monitor the feeling but I’ve forgotten my own saddle region.

If you know me you know I recently wrote an article about how doctors don’t give a shit about sexual function unless it’s an erection for Disability Torah Project, and shortly after writing that I began my descent down this bottomless pit - and I’m still falling. I spent several hours this morning while my husband slept peacefully begging my own pre-schoolers to comply while I waited for my meds to work. They don’t bring me down lower than an 8 these days, but at an 8 I am at least able to force myself into the wars.

Perhaps one of my most reliable characteristics is the fact that I know lots of things, and I forget just as many things. And while I was waxing poetic about how important it is to be on top of your sexual health as a disabled person, I apparently immediately forgot that advice for myself, and have spent the last month ignoring my own vagina. Probably because intractable pain doesn’t do too much for a woman’s sex drive. While I love a good pain sesh, white hot lightening in my spine isn’t really doing it for me these days.

So once my huband woke up for the day (3.5 hours in to my day) I *very politely* suggested he take the kids to the park. And with a few minutes alone, I decided to “take her out for a spin” and see how the kitty has been implicated in the most recent devastation.

Did I ever mention I used to work in a catastrophe?

It feels like spending 3 years working my ass off in catastrophe response managing the biggest insurance carriers in the US really prepared me for this phase in life. I am constantly cleaning up my own catastrophic losses and documenting them for insurance approval. Sadly, there are way less hot arborists involved now though.

Anyway, I can make some good guesses about the state of affairs based on the fact that I don’t feel the need to pee so I’m scheduling bathroom breaks. And the fact that when I go to the bathroom, I have no idea what I’m in for, and generally speaking - I’m not fully evacuating. This I am only sharing because I thought pissing yourself was the worst, but as it turns out from a neurological standpoint - not being able to piss is actually even worse. So when I ran through the neurological damage questionnaire I was quite cocky about the fact I am not peeing myself that often (if you’ve had 4 kids you get it) but as it turns out - that’s actually WORSE.
Yum?

Anyway I slapped on some lube and decided to drive her manual, and unfortunately there’s no feeling there other than the elusive “tingle”, which feels like it could be the start of something special but is actually damaged nerves asking you to stop faffing about. Of course, it’s christmas eve, so if I want medical help then I’ll have to go to the ER, and going to the ER is really me making my life a thousand times worse from the car ride, and the wheel chair, and the waiting, and the standing and the imaging. Only to be offered pain meds (or denied pain meds that I didn’t even ask for) and told to follow up with a doctor who won’t have any appointments in the next 6 months. I’m already waiting on the neurosurgeon so … I don’t think I need another useless referral. But I’m wondering, how we got to a place where the doctor to patient ratio is so abysmal that there is no way to circumvent this line. It feels like a woman under 40 with hardware in suspected tethered cord syndrome should be triaged with more immediacy.

When I worked in catastrophe, we called this secondary loss. The first loss was the tree falling on the house, but the secondary loss was the rain flooding the bedroom the tree knocked a hole in. Which could have been prevented if someone had just tarped the fucking hole.

Wait don’t tarp my hole. Just. Do something to fix my fucking back??

So Merry Christmas to me, I am currently impotent as well as incompetent.