Manatees and Unseen Scars

 My main problem that developed and became worse and worse was migraines. Some of my first migraines started in Florida. I had headaches before, and hangovers that made me swear to never drink again… However, these were WAAAAAY worse. I would wake up, get Rayne ready and to school, then go clean the restaurant for a few hours. I would come home and nap until Rayne needed to be picked up from school. It was the only way to battle the crushing pain. By the end of the nap I was typically more functional and finally on my feet by 4pm. We would make dinner, do chores, make sure homework was finished, then drive up to the restaurant to pick up my husband after closing. Rinse and repeat.

When my husband had days off we would make the most of them. We started playing Pokemon Go the second day it came out, and plus we had amazing locations to be able to access the rare monsters all around us. We spent lots of time outdoors, at parks and beaches catching mons with our son and dog in tow as well. Other times we would go out to the movies, but still, it was very difficult for us to make friends or connections outside of the restaurant crew. Plus being related to the owner made the coworkers treat you differently and feel like they couldn’t speak freely around us anyway. Homesickness was still a very strong feeling and overall feeling that loomed daily. My mother was able to come visit a couple times and she also made sure to zoom chat with Rayne at least once a week, since before the move he had been spending the night with her about once a week as well and they definitely needed their reading time.

We had a friend pass away suddenly and weren’t able to fly back for his funeral, as well as a matriarch and bonus grandma to me from our distant family group passed away as well. Being 1771 miles away was just too far and too expensive last minute to justify the trips there and back. I’ve had to learn how to grieve over distance, alone, and it was tough.

The beauty of the landscape felt like heaven. The beaches, the PERFECT weather! The dolphins and manatees right outside your bedroom window daily! Such a gloriously tamed yet exciting jungle life. I’ve always dreamed I was meant to be by the sea, a mermaid at heart. A scorpio and spiritual water sign and also a hypermobile wreck who only feels zero pain and truly at home in the water. I’ve seen many oceans and felt many beaches, however Florida’s beat them all! The natural appeal is very understandable and greatly enjoyed.

Still. I was not comfortable in my own skin. I tried so hard to fill the void with attention seeking social media and clout chasing for that dopamine rush. Still. I felt empty. Broken even. I kept repeating a word over and over all the time: “shattered” or the phrase: “shattered glass.” I felt like shattered glass. The pain wasn’t the same physical stress, but a lighter more general all-over feeling. I now know that I was suffering from lack of real rest, and WAAAAAY too much caffeine. Rest is the only way my body can catch up on healing the daily micro-tears and slightly extra wear than a normal person would need to deal with.

I was able to reconnect with an old work friend over facebook and we trauma dumped each other SUPER hard. She was only doing some part time schooling and had zero job and zero reason to not be available for me to talk and chat with all day long. I finally felt I wasn’t so disjointed anymore. We would message from morning till night. With both of us on the neurodivergent spectrum, we never had a lack of things to speak about! It was like having a pocket buddy and we supported each other heavily in major times of distress for us both. For her, trauma was something she battled on a moment by moment basis. Even two years past the traumatic event, her nightmares were still making it happen over and over again for her nightly. When we worked together I had been a great mentor to her and as we were now apart, I could mentor her through life while dumping my own troubles out there for distractions as well.

I was feeling like settling might be possible but still could not see any future in Florida at all. Not to mention, the cost of living there was INSANE and with a budding restaurant, there was no way Jacob was being paid enough for us to stay and put down roots either. I was hopeful a distraction would help, distractions seemed really important to making this transition work. I was too hopeful.

I even thought I was pregnant for a while. I was about 2 weeks late on my period and I was starting to feel strong food aversions and headaches constantly. One morning it was so bad I took some ibuprofen and later that day I got my period and cried an entire ocean of tears. I felt like I was at fault for a miscarriage by taking the ibuprofen, without even knowing if I was truly pregnant. Since I also suffered from ovarian cysts, a late period wouldn't even be that weird. I could NOT figure out why I was so very convinced I had been feeling so sure though.

THEN one week later, my bestie texts me saying SHE is pregnant. It all suddenly clicked and made perfect sense. It wasn’t the first time I had predicted something was up with her without being told, especially regarding pregnancy. We also gave birth to our firstborns only 2 months apart, so that connected us immensely and deeply as well going through that journey together at such young ages. The pull home was now stronger than ever.I sent gifts and uplifting gifs but I felt more helpless than I had ever been in my life. I felt like we had our first pregnancies together and I was missing out on this with her too. 

We moved to a condo closer to the restaurant and Rayne switched schools as well. No longer did I have insane long commutes with our one car. Rayne and I found a park we loved near the restaurant and would go shopping together often to keep busy. He would stay up late with me watching Survivor so we could go pick up Jacob at closing time. When we lived with Jacob’s in-laws Rayne was able to go to bed at a normal time and stay home while his grandparents stayed with him and ate their dinner post their loooong day shifts. Luckily Rayne was still easy to get up and ready for school. He didn’t mind it too much since it was just routine. There was a cook who would talk video games with him sometime and he loved going up there to chat and chill after the restaurant closed. He also didn’t have a great time making friends, having to switch schools every single year he had been in school so far did not help that fact one little bit either. The restaurant work got tougher and tougher and I was so sad about our situation all the time seeing my family’s struggles too.

We planned a visit back to Oklahoma that summer, around my bestie’s due date. And after two WEEKS of labor, her beautiful daughter was born! We were able to come down that very next week to visit that spectacular bundle of joy. She was a perfect newborn and it was so heartbreaking to know we would have to turn around and leave again shortly… Simple life just seemed so much less stressful. It just seemed logical to go back to less demanding jobs, the cheapest cost of living, and be surrounded by a support system of family and friends. So, we made a plan. Before the start of the school year we would move back again. Monotonous retail was the mind-numbing desire we craved post the high-stress, high-intensity situations we had been living/working in at the fast paced restaurant. It had been two years and we felt like we had done what we had set out to do, help get the restaurant on its feet.

 

2017

Fresh Start in the Sunshine State

When we moved to Florida my physical pain all but disappeared. The cold and extreme weather changes of Oklahoma are absolutely a pain source and trigger to some of the rougher pain symptoms. The good food and constant activities of the day to day restaurant drama kept me well fed and distracted. We even found some sources to help out to cope mentally further. The problem was I felt like I had completely lost everything. Before the move we had to organize, purge, and pack a whole house worth of items. I’m a bit of a hoarder, but I prefer to consider myself a collector, as the items I save and gather have purpose or meaning. I tie important memories to physical objects extremely easily. I blame it on my Dragon type personality that craves to hoard away any possible valuables. I believe this also comes from when I was a child, I would always somehow have exactly what someone else would need just because I randomly kept it. I was so crafty and could create something out of what others viewed as trash. My jewellery collection as a child was excessively massive as well. I loved going to garage sales and goodwill stores. Used book stores and antique stores hold lots of positive memories for me. I have an extreme eye for detail so finding a small treasure in an ocean of junk is a SUPER skill of mine. A week before the move my childhood cat passed away at the old age of 21. Hanna Panda was with me for so much of my life and meant a lot to me. She was my protector and you could always find her guarding my bed. It seemed massively symbolic that she passed the week before I had such a massive life change, moving so very very far away from "home."

Before the move but after the "stuff" purge, we actually recovered my husband's stolen car. It was disgusting and completely trashed, abandoned in a city parking lot a couple of towns over. I felt so bad for my husband who had to drive it back home. The insurance declared it a total loss and issued us a check. It was so unsettling to see such a loved possession disrespected and messed up in such gross evil ways.

We had to buy a car as soon as we moved to Florida. We knew nothing about car buying and were totally on our own searching in a strange new town. We found a semi-decent priced option in a Hyundai Sonata that test drove okay, so we went with it. Signing the papers was so stressful. We felt we were being swindled every step of the way, but we had no experience with the process to know what was normal or not. It seemed like those few hours actually doubled as they crept by so slowly. We needed a car for commuting to work and getting Rayne to and from school during the weekdays. Sometimes Jake was able to take the car and I was able to borrow his Mom’s car to get Rayne from school. My day consisted of soooooooo much driving. Taking Rayne to school, taking Jake to work, driving back home, picking up Rayne from school and then picking up Jake from work and driving back home. The restaurant was 30 min away and Rayne’s school was 20 mins. That’s a bit over 2.5 hours of driving every. single. day. Thankfully the landscape was gorgeous and the drive beyond beautiful. Even at night you felt like you were on some sort of SUPER nice, well cared for paved road straight through a foreign jungle wilderness. During the day you could get stopped at a bridge crossing and be entertained by passing dolphins while you wait. Or see massive ospreys swooping down across the road to get to their street light nests.

Ocean living is a lifestyle that cannot be matched. We lived on a super tiny island right on the water. The condo was so fancy it even had an elevator to take you from the bottom floor (garage, storage and a fully screened in oceanside hot tub patio) all the way up to the 3rd floor where the 3 bedrooms were. The 2nd floor was the kitchen, dining room and livingroom with a wrap-around outdoor balcony patio with double access on the north and south sides of this floor. One year we actually sat down to Christmas dinner and enjoyed a show from a huge pod of dolphins passing right outside the dining room windows. The manatee also liked to graze and slowly make its way around docks right outside. The water was so clear you could sometimes look off the dock and see small sharks swimming around too. The in-laws would rent a boat and attempted to go out once a week on the ocean. We would see dolphins out there often, as well as lots of manatees! The wealth and size of the houses, yachts and cars is a whole different lifestyle than I had ever even been exposed to before. Oklahoma is much different in that aspect. You can see wealth occasionally but it’s not the same. It’s typically used to buy lots of land and hide away. The cars are the status symbols and that's about it for what you will publicly see. In Florida it’s a whole different level of competition and popularity status around displaying your wealth.

I didn’t make any friends and I was no longer able to chill with my besties now 2000 miles away. My husband worked all day and night, and the only thing to talk about anyway was just the restaurant and restaurant things. I fell into grounding myself via music and started working on restaurant stuff too. I was given the job of recording bills and payments. I took over their social media accounts and email lists. Then, after a while I started the job of daily cleaning tasks around the restaurant too. I deep cleaned the bathrooms, swept the whole floor everywhere and mopped the entire place as well. Every. Single. Day. For 220 days straight. Only skipping black friday and my birthday by cleaning double the days before (in the morning before opening and at night after closing.) The consistent schedule and moderate temps helped my pain. I was no longer doing the insanely tough manual labor of working at the animal shelter either, keeping it to more light manual labor with the occasional deck scrubbing and window washing only. 

 

Life, Interrupted

 In 2015 my husband suffered a horrible incident where he was robbed at gunpoint during a late night pizza delivery, one of the last for the night. He had a bit too much cash and change on him. It was late, and he didn't want to waste time depositing it into the work safe. He walked up to the apartment complex and saw a very suspicious person walking around near his car. He passed the guy and got a SUPER weird vibe, but he did not act on that spidey sense. No one answered at the apartment he was delivering to. He got really freaked out and tried to rush back to his car. The sketchy guy confronted him as he was about to open the car door. He pulled out a gun and told him to give him the money. Jake handed over tons of cash and the guy got SUPER greedy, telling Jake to hand over his phone and keys. He took his keys but Jake refused to give up the phone. The guy freaked out and stole Jake’s car (with the Dominos car sign light still attached and on and everything.) My husband called the cops and instantly 2 patrol cars showed up in less than 2 min. Jacob urged them to go after the guy as he had just driven off and he could see the exact way the thief turned at the exit of the complex onto a long road with no exit for a long while. But they refused. They just took his statement and looked around the apartment area. About 10 minutes later one drove off and found the Dominos sign abandoned on the side of the road Jacob said they had fled down. So the thief literally stopped at some point to take it off very soon after leaving the scene. PLENTY of time for the cops to catch up and recover Jacobs car and catch the thief. This car was Jake’s absolute favorite. He spent years and years driving it delivering pizza countless nights. It was his first car he ever owned. It never had any issues, and it drove smoothly with not too shabby gas mileage too. He had been robbed once before but they had not flashed their weapon, leading Jake to believe there wasn’t one, and refused the previous thieves demands for keys and phone at that time, only handing over some petty cash.

After that incident in 2015, Jacob was traumatized and no longer wished to be placing himself in that level of danger going forward. His dad also just lost his long time high paying career job due to staff consolidation and downsizing the corporation. After working in the restaurant industry his whole life, Jake’s Dad decided he wanted to be his own boss and open his own place. This provided a great opportunity for us to start over fresh with a long distance move to the Tampa Bay area in Florida to help Jake’s parents open up this Italian restaurant idea.

I was still working at the time and did have to part with the rewarding job of working at the animal shelter. I truly loved all the medical details, surgery times, intaking evals and caring for the newest arrivals during their quarantine period before adoption. Spending all day with puppies and kitties was also a lovely plus. I would like to say I am an EXPERT at giving pets. I’ve used scritches and scratches alone to win over some of the most scared dogs and kittens. Being the first person to show scared and abused animals some love for the first time in their life.. and then rehab them and help place them into loving forever homes is a time I will never forget. It also led to extreme caregiver fatigue due to the extreme illnesses and constant death that comes with the animal rescue field. I completely dissociated away from any sadness while at the shelter. I got mad, I got frustrated. I cussed like a damn sailor constantly!! But I never ONCE cried. I saw and comforted every single other coworker there at some point as I tend to be the resident “counselor” wherever I go. There are also a lot of mentally struggling, high anxiety/depressed people who find it much easier to work with animals all day then interact with people. Including me. Little 15 min smoke breaks every 2 hours were the social times to let it all out. But never me. I could tell them about how many puppies I just lost to Parvovirus and still just comfort THEM through the emotional loss (a litter they had never even met…) It wasn’t cold-hearted, it was more just separating the emotional loss with the emotional joy of how many lives were saved. I knew the risks of the job and that it is physically impossible to save every stray, lost, or abandoned animal. It was something I did not notice was so extremely affecting me until I finally quit for our move to Florida. I may have lost some sort of work based support system and friend group. It was one forged in a time of trauma out of necessity to stay strong together. The loss of our actual best friends to such a major distance was the hurt that damaged me the most.

The luckiest thing that came out of my time at the shelter was meeting and adopting our most amazing forever-pup, Eevee. Her adorable black lab mom came to our shelter with her babies when they were only 11 days old. They went to foster pretty quickly after I met them that first week, but they came to visit for weigh-ins and shots as they grew up. At 8 weeks the pups came in for their spay/neuters and their momma went up for adoption. After recovery, I had my son and husband join me up there to look at some possible puppies. There was also a 16 week old shy male pup named Avalon who was also someone we considered. It was just hard to judge his personality due to the extreme shyness. When I brought out Eevee, she instantly gravitated towards Rayne and was licking him obsessively and just curled up next to him very sweetly. We were sold! They went home and after my shift I brought our perfect pup home. Her and our cat, Jack, who we’ve had since before my son was born, traveled along and made this LOOOOOOOONG 22 hour straight drive to Florida with us during the big move.     

 

 

 

Lyrica and Lies

 

The rheumatologist was about the same as the psych. This time I made the mistake of going alone as well. The Doctor scoffed at my Fibro Diagnosis as he didn’t believe it is a true real disorder that exists. He looked at me as if I were a problem to be solved, not a person in pain. But he did admit there was one single medicine on the market to treat it (Lyrica) and I would have to slowly ramp up to the high level of dosing to be able to see any pain relief based on clinical trial results. He said I would have to try that and ramp up to the high dose and see relief if I ever wanted to get an official diagnosis out of him. I felt so small, like a nuisance on his schedule. I could have cared less about his diagnosis. I just wanted pain relief and a less miserable quality of life. Sadly he seemed to not believe I was in pain at all and just some young drug seeking addict. I felt so discarded and inhuman in his office.

Of course I forced myself to try the “miracle med” that was the single medicine on the market at the time to treat Fibromyalgia. Lyrica is honestly just a fancier version of Gabapentin, a long time known drug to help with nerve pain and a medicine that might be more known to you. Gabapentin alone has a laundry list of debilitating side effects, and one I had witnessed someone I loved take and have a complete personality change because of it. I however hoped it was “better” due to being so fancy, AND EXPENSIVE!!! I had just gotten a new job at an animal shelter, but even with my husband and I still living with my dad and paying him a super cheap rent for us three to stay upstairs and share the house together. These pills were a whopping $95 a month and we were barely scraping by. I felt like such a burden to my husband already in our young, already semi-rocky, freshly married romance as husband and wife (due to the trauma caused to both of us after a year of me trying random antidepressants.)

As you can probably guess from me previously mentioning I’m super sensitive to medication reactions, ramping up on the Lyrica just wasn’t something I could physically handle. Extreme nausea and no appetite, mixed with dizziness and drowsiness. I was losing weight, barely gaining muscle and getting little to no physical activity outside of my extremely physical animal shelter job. Only hurting more and more the longer I was on the meds.

I finally took my mom with me to one of my rheumatologist appointments and was instantly treated completely differently. I received zero attitude, he treated my mother with courtesy and respect. He finally listened to me saying that Lyrica is not something I will be able to ramp up to the requested dosage for pain relief. However, the only answer was that he had nothing else to offer me and to seek treatment elsewhere. Just wow. Fired by TWO doctors in the span of less than a year, just because I was too difficult to treat by their standards. It was great to finally have him stop pushing and torturing me with the Lyrica at the very least, which I desperately needed to be off of at that point.

I started working more hours, increasing my strength and stamina, started eating less fast food, and my son grew and grew more independent thus no longer needing to be carried and/or held all the time anymore. My body reacted well to this lifestyle change and I finally received some substantial pain relief I had been seeking for the past year and 9 months. All while growing to learn my own body's limits, triggers and needs much better as well. My self intuition flourished off all meds and I became quite in tune with my whole body physiology. Still experiencing random pain and typical flair-ups, but in a much more manageable way of life.

My husband, Jacob, was a pizza delivery driver for Papa Johns at the time and we worked opposite timed shifts from when I started my Veterinary Assistant job at the animal shelter. This allowed one of us to always be home to take care of our son. However, this meant we only saw each other for about one hour a day at most. We would randomly have the same days off and would typically use those lucky chances to hang out with our one and only bestest friends, the BWR family.

We had first met shortly after my Bestie and Mr. BWR had gotten together and became pregnant. Jacob worked with them both at the time at Subway. At that time the Subway crew was just composed of a big super chill friend group. Mr. BWR also lived in the same apartment complex as my husband back then too. The first time I met my Bestie, she and Mr. BWR stopped by our apartment(I think we picked up a video game we had borrowed?) I remember my first impression was that they were the coolest couple I had ever seen in my whole life. Their instant vibe was off the charts. This was mostly due to the fact they were wearing completely matching outfits! They both had on an identical fit composed of a black T-shirt and the same shade of red skinny jeans. My neurodivergent brain loves patterns and this matchy-matchy couple was too much for me to not instantly love. Picking out semi-matching outfits for Jacob and I had already become an early obsession of mine for weeks before that. Jacob and I had fallen in love at first sight and were such a complete and perfectly matched pair too. Plus, their weird TOTALLY matched our weird too.

Jake was probably sliiiiiiiiiightly hoping me being friends with a then pregnant Bestie would be enough for my baby crazed brain, but nope. A month and a half later, on Valentines Day, I got the positive pee test results I had been wishing for and we were both SUPER excited. I nervously reached out to my Bestie on my own asking for advice and venting my own issues as well. We became very close quickly and I was most thankful to have not gone through that time alone at such a young age. One of my high school friends also got pregnant right after me and so I introduced her to my Bestie too. The three of us were able to form a little Mommy trio female support system for a while.

The BWR’s son was born only 2 months before my son, so it was a beyond needed support system form of bonding. The time spent together raising our boys and learning to navigate adulthood together as young family units. Plus our kiddos had each other while us parents all got the rare chance to chill out together when hanging out. Party. Eat. Party! Our other few college friends were a bit too SUPER party heavy and ended up slowly distancing themselves from us while I was pregnant and by 3 months after Rayne was born we pretty much had lost contact with the majority of them.