SEPARATION ANXIETY (from diners)

I would so rather be in my diner than here at home.  My own coffee is dramatically better (Zabar's House Blend) but I miss the extra-friendly waitperson taking care I get a second cup whether or not I am ready for it.  True, I can eat as many of these awful cookies I must have been in an Altered State to pick out at d'Agistino's.  But where is my little chocolate mouse on that slab of chocolate mousse cake?

I am home because --

I think I had better start at the beginning.  

You remember that collection of symptoms once derided as psychosomatic -- chronic fatigue?  fibromyalgia?  Well, it has been decided that fibromyalgia is indeed a medical condition.  And I have been diagnosed with it.

Which I would never have noticed until my sleeplessness,  my horror of pain! pain! pain! as I struggled out of  bed, my shoulders (which hurt), my hips (which hurt), my knees (which hurt, but which I thought was normal as they are knee replacements), my fingers, even my fingernails, and my chronic symptom of spinal stenosis had gotten worse (fibromyalgia is sneaky) over time, until I could scream. (Well, I did.)

This is all prelude to the reason I am here, at home.  The reason is the medicine for  fibromyalgia, with the seductive name of LYRICA. 

I should never have spent all that time browsing the web for LYRICA.  The manufacturer was ecstatic, of course, although side effects had to be mentioned, which made the cure sound much worse than the disease.  Then, too, there was all that e-correspondence, home to persons with such  fanciful spelling and farcical grammar the bulk of the testaments had to be written by paid hacks in an effort to sabotage Pfizer or whoever, although now there is a generic.  I am addicted to other people's sad stories.

So, here I am at home staring at the little bottle of LYRICA (with the outrageous co-pay of $50) wondering what in the name of  whatever saint oversees medication, it will do to me.  Truth is, I took one last night and slept the night through. And for months and months, maybe years, I have not done that.

But how about the next pill?  And the next? What will they do to me?

How quiet it is, here at home!  How much I would rather be in the diner,  eavesdropping on the next table, waiting for those golden snippets of conversations --that bubble and coalesce with other observations of that beautiful dance of human interaction....

 The stuff of poems.  Of stories.  Of course, my hips would hurt like hell.