good morning ladies. I went to bed at 9pm last night and sleep a full 10 hours. I am grateful because I have a couple of off the grid days ahead of me. We are all traveling out of town to visit my ex's sister who is not expected to be with us much longer after a long battle with cancer. We will be staying the night and coming back later tomorrow. I am trying to take it in stride but I generally don't do overnighters well.

After the fitting yesterday I spent a couple of hours in the garden which was therapeutic and much needed after the long day in the world. I helped my son with dinner and he talked me into eating together rather then my usual pattern of eating alone in my room.

Lavie I have on occassion had a song stuck in my head but nothing like you describe. I can't imagine how crazy making it must be for it to be so constant. I can relate to how the build up of stressors can begin to magnify and or bring on new symptom responses. Certainly that has been my experience too. Especially the anxiety which is the most persistant debilitator in my life. I magnifies everything else and has totally changed how I live my life. I often think that my problems pushed me over the edge because I crossed over my stress threshold and have yet to recover any capacity to cope with stress, thus the instant flare of anxiety.

I have to admit you made me laugh there with the jumping out the window but you live in a ranger. Just too funny Lavie. I live in a ranger too so it made it that much more funny to image jumping out of any of my windows.

I feel the same about my activity on PC. I will branch out now and then to offer a post to someone new but mostly it is a small handful of people I follow. I have one special friend here who I keep connected here even when I pull away from the boards entirely for a period of time. I think that is why I value this thread so much. The closeness we have created has really helped to crack through some of my walls. Only since this thread have I attached avatar images to my name and revealed when I am online.

While I can understand how the songs in your head would be a major distraction the ringing in my head is probably easier to deal with. When I am doing the breathing it is not quiet because I am listening and feeling the effects of breathing in and out. So that helps to muffle the sounds. When I am sitting 'quietly' that is without the deep breathing it can be a distraction but by then I am being drawn into to images that appear in the darkness and so it serves to mentally distract me. I diffinately always need something to distract me or the ringing will get louder. That is why sleep time is the hardest. Nothing to distract me except the ringing.

There are times when it is too much to take, when the sounds vary in tone or my ears make popping or squeel sounds out of no where. I will press so hard on my ears sometimes that I end up with a horrible headache. I sometimes scream out loud and start to cry begging for it to stop but it just gets louder when I get that upset about it. It is all a catch 22. Anxiety makes it worse and the ringing makes the anxiety worse. gessh... like you say one thing after the other.... pretty unbelievable and it is so easy to feel defeated and want to just fade out.

On the flip side like that old saying goes, 'what doesn't kill us makes us stronger'. We may skirt the edge sometimes but we do keep returning to the fight for our lives and just think of the character we are building. We are mighty women warriors. For what purpose we have yet to see perhaps but I believe it is for a purpose and that is good cause to keep on keepin on no matter what gets thrown in front of us.