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bigskydreaming · 5 years

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In the best (personal) news I have had in oh, over a year, FINALLY got the results of the MRI back and it is NOT a tumor lurking in my nonexistent jaw joint area and causing all my Issues, as my doctor was worried about from the latest CT scans. Which, like. Yeah. I don’t really have the words for how grateful I am to hear that because like, hahahaha I was getting super tired of my rock bottoms introducing themselves to new rock bottoms, you know???

So I am currently buzzing and high on that news, life in general, and y’know, sleep deprivation, cuz ngl, it was definitely not fun hearing I should know by Monday whether or not like, I have cancer, only for that to be dragged out until freaking Friday. Hahaha what is sleep, I have had like, five hours all week maybe? Needless to say I am super behind again on work, rent, insurance and all that fun stuff BUT as long as I can say “but I don’t have cancer!” at the end of each of those things, like....yeah I’m gonna milk the fuck out of that qualifier for energy, as long as I possibly can lololol.

Did talk to my insurance ppl today though and I’ve got at least until Tuesday to pay my premiums, so got a couple more days of breathing room there. Can’t get it extended past that though because my doctor’s already gonna be calling in preauthorization requests for like, the actual surgery and stuff as early as Monday and I reeeeeally don’t want ‘okay but this dude hasn’t even paid up yet’ being a factor at all in whether or not they approve my 25K surgery.

Fingers crossed that my good luck continues to hold, as there’s a possibility this might all get dealt with once and for all, a lot sooner than I’d hoped for?? Like, cuz of the MRI she was able to get a clear view of exactly what the problem is, the inflammation around the joint and actual erosion of the bone, etc, which cut out a lot of the other steps we were preparing to take to isolate the exact issue before moving forward. It also apparently lit a hell of a fire under their asses cuz they were able to see not just that the joint is totally wrecked (which we’ve known for like, nine months now, wasn’t news), but just how badly eroded my jawbone is at like....the other point of the jaw that holds it at least somewhat connected to my skull still even though the joint itself is nonexistent? Idk not explaining that right because again, sleep deprived like whoa.

ANYWAY. Point is my doctor was like, so basically because of the constant damage being done in that area every time you open your mouth at all, you’re fracturing it further and its only hanging on by the barest sliver at this point - which, DUH, is exactly what I’ve been telling all these doctors it felt like, for over a year BUT I DIGRESS - so she’s all, yeah, we need to move this along as fast as possible because if you erode that area much more like, she doesn’t even know what that’ll look like in practice cuz she’s never actually had to deal with a case that bad, but reading between the lines it sounds like I would just not be able to close my mouth shut at all after that point, which....lol bye bye basic eating and talking? Idk. So its super fun being the worst case of this particular issue she’s ever seen personally haha yay me (but at least I don’t have cancer!)

So. Still putting it in the win column.

But yeah, so she found another surgeon that does potentially take insurance for the actual surgery costs, if we can get my insurance to approve it, and in the meanwhile now I gotta set up appointments at this OTHER imaging place for another more specific CT scan to measure how big the prosthetic will need to be, and they don’t take insurance there at all so that’s gonna be $600 no matter what. BUT, this new surgeon has a bunch of premade prosthetics they keep on site and so there’s a possibility they might be able to fit me with a premade prosthetic that’s already the right dimension instead of having to order a custom made one. And if I can get the surgery approved by my insurance and they find a premade that works, the surgery can be set up in as little as three weeks (which omg holy shit is that a light at the end of the tunnel, IT JUST FUCKING MIGHT BE crap I totally jinxed it didnt I fuck). If they can’t find a premade that works though it’ll still be the 4-6 months to make a custom one so, boooooo, we’re really hoping that doesn’t happen, cuz, again. I do not know precisely what several months of not being able to swing my jaw shut at all even lopsidedly and thus no eating or talking....like lmao what would that even look like how do you not like, starve in that case? Idk. So....super duper hoping that we can find a premade and get the surgery scheduled quicklikearabbit and not have to wait several more months and risk just eroding whatever it is that’s still up there in that general vicinity that’s left to erode, idk, like I said what are words right now even.

YEAH. SO. That’s my status update for those who’ve been messaging and checking in and whatnot, like, y’all are rockstars and I fucking adore you and am so grateful. I am now going to go sleep the sleep of the dead because hahahahahaha ow light is actually physically painful at the moment, I just came to sit up straight at my desk and I’m honestly feeling so attacked right now.

Then its back to work for me but also I might have some fic updates??? lol. Cuz of people who’ve donated and made non-imposing requests or suggestions for things I could write and thus mitigate my OMG I Do Not Deserve Your Generosity ulcers of doom. That I’ve been writing off and on but mostly just off this last week in particular where I unfortunately did a lot of like, staring at the wall watching paint dry except not really cuz they weren’t freshly painted or whatever, look you get what I mean probably.

Right. So. Assuming any of this makes sense to anyone and I’m not actually just stringing together nonsense series of words here at this point, still likely to be scarce for a few days to a week. Gonna leave my paypal link again, cuz I mean, yeah. I’m way more sick of posting it than anyone could possibly be of seeing my post it lolol, trust me, but hopefully there is a point now in the near(ish) future where I will once again be able to work productively and non-chronic-painfully again and thus not be in desperate need of the kindness of strangers 24/7. That would be so awesome omgwtfbbqicanteven. You don’t even know.

But also! At least I don’t have cancer. So. I actually have a bizarre amount of energy at the moment despite being two seconds away from faceplanting into my keyboard from exhaustion. Look I dont even get how that works either. I’m nuanced okay.

I feel like there was something to write here like in conclusion or in summation or tl;dr but also fuck it, I think I literally just heard my last remaining synapse fire in my brain I gtg ttyl byyyyyyyyyyyye.

https://paypal.me/bigskydreaming?locale.x=en_US

#i do the words so good #like omg look how good i do all the words

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fit-as-fxck · 5 years

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HRV and the Autonomic Nervous System

(pls, I just wanna ramble)

Lets talk Heart Rate Variability and the Autonomic nervous system. Nerd alert- this is something I heckin’ love. What we’re looking for here is fine scale variability across physiologic systems. Those little movements between rest are measured when you do a variability analysis. What you’re looking at is information about the autonomic nervous system- how much is rest and digest (parasympathetic) and how much is stress (sympathetic). Besides this, there is something that is called RER (respiratory exchange ratio), using the same algorithm (measuring HRV etc) to measure how the body uses (metabolizes) carbs and fat during training which is really interesting but super difficult to explain. This checks for something called metabolic flexibility using this fine scale variability. The more fine scale variability you have the more parasympathetic your system is, the more you are under rest and digest. As you lose that fine scale variability your risk for heart problems rises. Maybe someone on paper seems that they should be seeing certain results or in a certain state however, if something is off, checking this fine scale variability you may find out that this person is losing the capacity to use carbs for fuel or transition to fats for fuel during certain specific style training etc and you can adjust from there. This is all advanced science though, I don’t see the average person in a gym particularly caring about this but the high level athlete might. The average person doesn’t have an understanding of the short term or long term implications of this. BUT, I think everyone can agree that we all need the ability to manage or even flourish under stress. If you don’t have the ability to be parasympathetic at rest, your body’s ability to buffer stress is going to be impacted. Later I’m going to link this information to where I currently am in my training (which is royally fucked amen).

Let’s look at an example of a client on paper who seems great. HRV is really high, resting heart rate is really low. But how did she feel? Like shit. She could barely get off the couch, couldn’t train, couldn’t even work. By grabbing that snapshot where she probably went though a massive amount of sympathetic stress and at some point her body went from being very sympathetic but her ability to do work kind of gets worse. You don’t feel very good. Sleeping less, training harder and drinking more pre-workout to fix it is the wrong approach. You can get by on it for a period of months, even years, but your system is fucked. Wham, out of no where you become super parasympathetic almost overnight. If you think about the body as a survival based organism, it’s saying “Hey you’ve had all this stress and were trying to shut you down slowly over time. We’re cutting your performance but you keep doing all these things to override it. I’m gonna flip the light switch and make you so parasympathetic you’re not even gonna make it to the gym.” Reaching this point is extremely difficult because your body doesn’t have any sympathetic area to go to. It makes sense in the case of your body being survival based. When you get here we are shutting you down. To recover out of that massive hole takes time, months or years to even get back to baseline.

Now, let’s take someone at rest and make them more sympathetic. Let’s make them do 5x5 deadlifts at the gym and in that instance you WANT the ability to become more sympathetic. You want the ability to use more carbohydrates as a fuel source to create more ATP fast enough to fuel that exercise. On the flip side, when you’re done with that you want the ability to down-regulate (take a stressor and absorb it), to become more parasympathetic. When you’re more parasympathetic we see the body’s ability to use fat is greater. The tricky part is what are the cross over periods. Can we look at someones HVR to see how someones using those fuels or see what those ends of the spectrum are? In general what we see is that someone who is more on the sympathetic side has a much harder time reaching their body composition goals. But let’s go back to heart rate for a minute. If we make your heart more aerobically efficient, an adaptation to that will be a lower resting heart rate. If we’re trying to make someone more aerobically efficient we can use heart rate variability to see if someone became more parasympathetic overtime especially if a taper or deload is involved (pull all the other training stresses away). Resting heart rate can give you a pretty good idea of where you’re at. Again, we’re looking at how high and how low you can go.

Something to note:

Let’s talk about a study done on Monster energy drink. For the sake of research, the caffeine dose was based on body size. The HRV was measured etc what they saw was not too much of a change in HRV, resting heart rate was changed and performance was enhanced slightly with a fair amount of variability. People who were at both ends of the spectrum were analyzed so massive data came out and a conclusion could not be reached very well. BUT the interesting thing about caffeine used in the study like this is sometimes people went very parasympathetic before going sympathetic. Coffee was an entirely different story though!! Variabilities included: caffeine tolerance, absorption rates, and personal neuro-associations with it. Some people drink a cup before they go do something fun, sometimes before lifting. So for someone with a notion about it already, that plays a part on the effect they receive. Take someone who slams 2 cups a day before heavy ass deadlifts, well, their neuro associations was more on the sympathetic side (heavier dose, smell of coffee triggering to get amped up to lift). So this data gets hella messy quite quickly. I just thought that was super neat to mention. Don’t mind my word vomit.

Let’s take HRV and resting heart rate to see how someone should be training. Maybe we take look at it and decide someone shouldn’t be doing anymore sympathetic type training because their system cant recover from it as much. In this way, training can be manipulated to reach different goals- lets say we manipulate it in a way and then they come back and we test their aerobic capacity etc and find out that by adjusting it they essentially saw a better HRV over the long term. Finding that balance between wanting more of that capacity because its indirectly supporting something VS moving away from the thing you’re trying to get better at, is where its at. There are ways in which HVR can be used to manipulate training to reach an end goal that may leave the person better off.

Perception of Lifestyle stressors: (finally, this is what I wanted to get to)

-Take someone whose training should be the most stressful thing in their life right now, their lifestyle stressors should be relatively low or stable. But what we’re finding is it’s actually inverted. Different things dictate this: resting heart rate and also perception. If we have someone training super hard, we pull back the training for a period then what should happen is their HVR improves because we’ve essentially pulled back the biggest stressor in their life. If it doesn’t improve, then something happened that week or there’s some other baseline stress that’s going on. This can be evaluated by getting some context information. What else is going on in your life? Is your life outside the gym feeling like a goddamn dumpster fire?? It’s like filling a water bucket and multiple things can effect the water level if you have multiple things going in and going out. Here’s an example: An athlete whose HRV dropped but he just started his taper and it should be going up over time. Keeps dropping for 4 days. So what else is going on? because the graph isn’t making sense. Well, turns out his wife is getting pregnant, they lost one of their coaches at their gym, and he’s thinking of selling his house, all within the last 4 days. Yeah thats a lot of stress and that makes perfect sense. Eventually things get back on track, his HRV starts going back up but if we didn’t have that context marker we would assume it was his training or body that was going wrong. In a lot of cases we have unconscious stressors too, things we don’t even notice.

-Most stressors are on an individual basis and most of it is based on perception of it. How much of this is based on how we perceive something as a negative or a positive? Take this study for example: Maids at a large hotel we’re split into two groups. First group was told their work was enough activity to satisfy the daily recommendation and was going to help their weightloss. The second group wasn’t told anything but they all moved the same amount. Well, the first group actually lost weight over a series of weeks because they thought what they were doing was effective for weight loss. Take another study: People were given a set amount of pain in their finger and then they changed the visual input to the finger. They had them look through binoculars either the normal way or the opposite way - so the finger looked bigger or smaller. When the finger looked bigger they reported more pain. What’s even crazier is they had a measurement of the local inflammation of the finger itself and in the case where they reported more pain, they actually had more local inflammation. So the body literally listened to the perceptions of the brain. Let’s take another study done on the milkshake: The first group was told the milkshake was super “blah”, the second group was told the milkshake was super thick and fancy and calorie dense with tons of fat. Of course the perception of what they reported as tasting was different and even their hormonal changes were actually different even though it was the same thing. So how much do we actually understand on this? On another note: how much do we know about EMF (electromagnetic fields)? But what are we going to do? Walk around in a bubble? So when you take people’s control of this away and amplify the psychological profile of it, what the heck do u think? But anyways.

Nutrition:

Take someone who is very sympathetic and has a very low HVR. If they’re already very sympathetic what we probably want to do is counteract some of that cortisol and introduce them to more calories and carbs. IN theory the hormone that is opposite of cortisol that we can control is probably insulin. Are we purposely bumping up insulin a little? Yes, but we’re trying to buffer some of the stress in their life. Other interventions are breathing practices, meditation and relaxing more. Take someone who is very active in the gym and ask them what they do to relax and they CANT say go to the gym. The vast majority of the time they’re like idk. The fact is, you need a movement to handle stress and you need a non-movement to handle stress. But if you’re trying to handle stress by adding more stress all the time? Prob not gonna go well. Breathing is probably the biggest intervention to acutely change HRV (more sympathetic to more parasympathetic). Even the eyes can be involed. There is a condition called tree blindness. A person cant tell the difference between trees anymore. In Japan they talk about forest bathing aka walking in the woods and there’s even more interesting information about looking at fractal patterns. Distance is even involved, if you’re staring at your screen all day those little muscles that control the eye get tight because of lack of use. This muscle should be really really fast. When people get really stressed the fine scale muscles of the eye become less and that makes sense because if someone runs into the room with a knife then we’re going to immediately look at that person and we’re not going to try to look at anything else. We’re going to become hyper vigilant because that thing is the biggest threat to us. But some people’s baseline stress is so high that they walk into a room and their eyes don’t even move around much at all, or their head moves with their eyes all the time. This is a tell-tell sign that they’re on the sympathetic side.

I mentioned cortisol above but someone who is sympathetic with low HVR and tries to measure they cortisol, well, it may not always be accurate based on the measurement. But by measuring their HVR and resting heart rate every day they get to see a better pattern. Lets take that person and tell them to meditate every day for 15 minutes. They report that they don’t “feel” any different after 4 days, but lets pull their data and we see that their resting heart rate is getting better and their HRV is going up a little bit. So, that gives them feedback and they get a little bit of a win, a little bit of a dopamine hit to keep moving in the right direction. This can be applied using sleep too. If they have a massive sleep dept then they’re probably gonna need to sleep more for a bunch of nights in a row before they really feel any different. But if they can see their HRV data then they can see that they’re moving in the right direction by seeing a physiologic marker of their system to reinforce those small changes. You’re probably not gonna feel better right away but you can see that its beneficial.

Supplemental Interventions:

Higher calories seem to help most of all because it takes your body out of that state of constant stress. Personally, I fucked up regarding this. I didn’t eat regularly (or enough) and lost my appetite completely for the past 4 weeks further driving my body into this unwanted state. I’m building calories back up again to practice recovering my body back to normal but I’ll get into this later. A few other things are adaptogens (Ashwagana, maca) and reishi mushrooms. Removing caffeine completely is a huge part for me right down. I’m almost completely off caffeine (decaf coffee for me >:[ thx). Currently, I am supplementing with Ashwaganda, Magnesium, An adrenal reset, B vitamins, C vitamins for immune support, Maca root as another adaptogen/stress, Iron, Vitamin D, Fish oil is a given. It sounds like a lot but I shot my system into the ground over the past 2 years due to physical and intense psycho-social stressors (which I wont get into) and never let myself recover from it. Yeah, I fucked up. And then I got super sick and stopped being able to even eat. I carry constant fatigue, my arms feel tired all the time. Another part is how much light exposure do you see (not behind sunglasses or a windshield) to regulate your circadian rhythm? That is an anchor we need. Being tired during the day and then being wide awake when you try to go to bed is absolutely a marker of having a screwed up rhythm. Taking a walk outside and looking up at the trees, no matter how simple that sounds, makes a difference. Cold exposure: I’ll talk more about this when I talk about a recent book but applying cold therapy and thermogenic heat conditioning is a way to apply an acute stressor to combat chronic stress (releasing cortisol and adrenal etc in order to respond correctly to the psycho-social stressors). Dr Rhonda Patrick has amazing information on this. This may not be the best tactic to apply for the average person on the daily (I'm not talking turning the water to cold at the end of a shower to activate the acute stressor, I'm talking more than that). The problem we get into is that fitness is a culture of extremes and sometimes extremes like this don’t need to be applied. Some things we can get a lot of adaptation from with minimal effort. There is a time and place for everything and as much as I love hot yoga, right now I have to stick to normal yoga until my system can take it on.

The average person has decoupled movement from stress. They’re sitting at their desk all day, their boss yells at them and what do they do? They type faster but they don’t have much movement at all under a huge amount of stress without any outlet. If someone is buffering that with high intensity exercise they’re already doing the one thing that is trying to get them more coupled to that stressor. How do we fix those better? I tried and ran myself into the ground. Of course the stress I was under was paired with an intense lack of sleep, getting sick, literally not eating for over 24 hours every day, getting hardly any calories in, not resting and over caffeinated to cover up the weaknesses I was experiencing but eventually it all stopped working for me. Okay, I'm almost done.

HRV is essentially the overall cost of all the stress on the autonomic nervous system. And it’s in charge of a lot of stuff in the body. But it’s not a single predictor of performance. Most people have a very low awareness of their life stressors. Oftentimes, they don’t realize how much of a factor it’s playing until they see the data in front of them.

Personally:

So this is where I am right now. I’m having to learn to be super gentle with myself. I’m tracking several things along with how I feel every single day and sleep etc.

supplementing

sleeping

resting

meditation and breathing exercises

light yoga and mobility

walking and sunlight exposure

managing psycho-social stressors

eating enough calories

tapered myself off of caffeine (its almost non existent for me right now, thank you adrenals for shutting down on me, you motherfucker)

learning to relax

#personal #rambles #march 2019

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drreporting · 7 years

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Convalescence Pt.10

“Ah ha, I was right,” Amelia said as she looked through the chart, “The bladder numbness, the pins and needles, it all points to inflammation. Did you do the MRI?”

“Yeah, I’ll go get it now,” Derek told her, leaving her alone at the front desk with the chart. As Amelia pondered over the rest of the information in the chart, someone slowly neared her, looking over her shoulder.

“Whatcha looking at?” the guy, donned in navy blue scrubs, asked.

Amelia looked up at him, noticing his icy blues first, then his five o’clock shadow, before lastly admiring his hair. He was remarkably attractive, to say the least. Not to mention his accent was charming. “A patient chart.”

The guy looked down at her with a far too cocky smile. “Patient charts are for doctors, not patients with a walking stick and pretty blue eyes.”

“Very funny,” she humoured, rolling her eyes, “But I am a doctor with a walking stick and pretty blue eyes, not a patient.”

The guy laughed. “I don’t know who you are at all,” he stuck his hand out, “we should fix that over drinks, err...”

“Amelia,” she answered, taking his hand in hers and shaking it, “And I don’t drink.”

“I don’t drink either, Dr. Amelia,” he said, not wanting to let her hand go, “Not anymore.”

“You’re just full of tricks, aren’t you?” she retorted, letting him hold her hand still.

“Dr. Nathan Riggs,” he introduced himself, finally letting her hand go once he did, “Maybe we can go for dinner instead…”

“I don’t think…”

“What are you doing?” Owen growled as he stood between the two, “Get your hands off of her.”

“Owen, relax,” Nathan tried to tell the trauma surgeon.

“I’ll relax when you’re fifty feet away from her,” he bargained, folding his arms across his chest.

“Owen,” Amelia tried to call, “Calm down, we were just-”

“So you don’t want me talking to anyone here?” he inquired angrily, “They’re not all your property, mate.”

“No, they’re not,” Owen agreed, “But I don’t want you even breathing in the same room as her.”

“Why?”

“She’s married,” he growled, “To me.”

Nathan furrowed his eyebrows before looking over Owen’s shoulder at her. “I don’t see a ring on her finger, or yours, mate.”

“Say that again and I’ll punch you in your face,” Owen warned. Nathan kept his gaze, the two of them in a stare off.

“Whatever,” Nathan muttered, eventually leaving the tense situation.

Owen turned around to face Amelia now. “So you have your ring off for a couple days and you already start flirting with other guys?”

“Owen, what?” she exclaimed, “I wasn’t flirting with him; we were just talking.”

“Something you seem to be doing with everyone except me,” he snidely retorted, leaving after the comment. Amelia stood there in shock, trying to process everything that had happened in that short space of time. One minute, Owen hated her, the next minute he was willing to punch guys just for simply speaking to her. It was frustrating and tiring.

---

Friday 8th July 2017.

Tim walked into his office with pep in his step. After his plan to get Amelia to walk had worked out, and then his plan to get Owen jealous by getting Derek to get Riggs to speak to her, they were right on track for his next manipulative plan. He wanted to see how they’d operate around one another, post-sex, and now was the perfect time to test that theory as Amelia was walking on her own again.

“Are you guys happy?” Tim asked, “Because I’m happy.” Both Amelia and Owen looked at him with confused expressions.

“Why would we be happy?” she inquired.

“Good point,” he agreed, pulling out his notepad, “Let’s jump right into it then. Is there anything anyone wants to say before we begin?”

“I’m sorry for overreacting on Sunday,” Owen mumbled.

Amelia looked over at him. “I’m sorry for not talking to you. I know I should, I just…”

“Well, you’re talking now, I guess,” he shrugged.

“We’re talking now, yes,” Tim confirmed eagerly, excited to start the session.

When Amelia and Owen exited the therapist’s room, they felt oddly light. They’d talked about DC, eventually coming to the conclusion that both parties were right in that situation, and they talked about the accident, which was a little harder to speak about. It was very difficult for Amelia to open up about how she felt but, once she did, once she bared the darkest parts of her feelings for that entire incident, she found that Owen, too, felt the same way. He felt all the angst and pain and even more, considering he was on the viewing side of the entire thing. They both walked out of that room having a better understanding for each other. Which was good, because Tim was expecting them to go on a date tomorrow and not hating each other’s guts might’ve helped with that.

“I don’t know how to dance,” Amelia groaned as Owen dialled the number on the call card that Tim had given him.

“That’s what you said on our wedding day,” Owen chuckled.

“That was unprofessional, slow dancing,” she further complained, “This is a dance studio with a professional instructor. Plus I didn’t have an injured foot back then.”

“Your foot doesn’t look injured to me,” he snidely replied, looking down at her shoes and seeing how well she was walking in them. “Hey, good afternoon, is this Charlie?”

---

Saturday 9th July 2017.

“This is clearly some sort of sick, couples’ therapy dancing thing,” Amelia muttered under her breath as she and Owen stood in a line which consisted of five other unhappy looking couples.

“I think you might be right,” Owen whispered back, eyeing one couple in particular that had been arguing since they came into the studio ten minutes earlier.

“Okay,” a guy said as he and another woman entered the room, a duffel bag slung over his shoulder, “My name is Charlie and I’ll be your instructor for tonight, so let’s get right into it. I’m gonna teach you guys the basics and then leave you to dance on your own. Easy stuff.” As Charlie glazed over the crowd, he noticed Amelia and Owen in particular, the couple that his friend had told him about. Smiling mischievously to himself, he took his partner’s hand and demonstrated the simple, slow moves he wanted from everyone, before encouraging them to follow the next song he was about to play.

Turning towards Amelia, Owen offered a shy smile. “Doesn’t look too hard.” They took their places and waited for the soft flow of music to begin.

My funny Valentine…

Owen placed his hand on her back, her hand on his shoulder, and their free hands meeting on the other side. Together, they danced to the music, their footwork a little wobbly at first. As the song progressed, they felt themselves relax, and small smiles began forming as little mistakes were made here and there.

“Don’t look at your feet,” he advised her.

“I don’t want to step on yours,” she shyly admitted.

Sweet comic Valentine…

In his army green t-shirt and brown leather jacket, Owen looked everything but perfect. Especially with the running shoes that matched nothing he was wearing, shoes he opted to wear because he didn’t want Amelia to feel awkward about having to wear running shoes. They turned elegantly, their bodies in tune with the slow music as the warmth between them grew more powerful by the second.

You make me smile with my heart…

Owen almost jumped out of his skin when he felt Charlie push him closer to Amelia.

“Your form is a little off,” Charlie lied, “You need to be closer.” He took Owen’s hand and moved it to her lower back and took Amelia’s hand and moved it closer to his neck. With the new positions and closeness, the couple found their heartbeats growing steadily along with the warmth between them.

“Look at me,” Owen gently insisted, “If you keep looking at your feet, you might actually step on mine.”

Taking a deep breath, Amelia looked up at him, not regretting it at all.

Your looks are laughable…

From there on, their dancing became near perfect, from their breathing to how their feet moved; everything stayed in sync. Owen often talked about her eyes, how they glistened and popped in certain lights, but she had never taken the time to notice how his eyes shone as he looked at her with that sombre, admiring look. His eyes were a mesmerising icy blue that she’d never truly appreciated till then.

“Everyone is looking at us,” Owen whispered, snapping her out of her trance.

Amelia squeezed his hand slightly and smiled. “Really,” she chuckled softly, “I didn’t notice.”

Yet you’re my favourite work of art...

His eyes darted to her lips as the song came to an end, the temptation to kiss them unbearable. He wondered if she felt the same way.

Although the song stopped and the room became silent, the couple kept their positions. From this close, they could both hear the laboured breathing of one another as they stayed rooted in their position. Amelia couldn’t stop looking at him, even after the song had finished. The only time she looked away was to look at his lips. She wondered if he was thinking the same thing she was.

---

“My feet officially hurt,” Amelia groaned as she and Owen made the slightly long trek from the van to the front door. He chuckled as he quickly glanced at her and saw that she’d ditched the running shoes and was walking barefoot, although Callie had specifically told her not to do that yet.

“Charlie was very creepy,” Owen said, grabbing Amelia’s hand and swinging it in between them like a child. He held her hand partly because he wanted to catch her quickly if she fell, but mostly because he was on a high right now and he had the urge to hold it and feel her warmth again.

“Very, very creepy,” Amelia agreed, trying not to think much of him holding her hand and failing miserably so. She couldn’t stop thinking about kissing him since the beginning of the night and it was beginning to drive her crazy.

“Tonight was fun,” Owen said once they reached the front door, “We should do something like this more often.”

“Yeah,” she said, “I don’t want to sound cheesy, but I don’t want tonight to end.”

“Neither do I,” he agreed, his thumb rubbing along her index finger. “But Maggie probably has stuff to do tomorrow. I don’t think we should keep her…” It was then that he noticed the intense gaze she had on his lips. “Amelia…”

“I know, I know,” she sighed, her eyes unmoving, “No kissing, no touching, no…”

“No sex,” he finished for her, his eyes darting to her lips now too.

“I mean, we don’t have to…tell him,” she suggested. “He’s not our father or anything.” Owen knew the drill with her. She’d move closer to him, let their noses touch and then he’d end up instigating the kiss. It always happened. But it was different tonight. He found himself moving closer to her, contradicting his earlier statements completely.

“I want to fix us,” he said, “And his methods have been working so far, so I think we should stick with it. And we have a track record of fixing our problems with sex.”

“You’re right, you’re right,” she agreed. For a moment, she looked like she had given up on the idea, but then he noticed the lustful gaze had returned. “Although…we’re not necessarily having any problems right now, are we?”

Owen chuckled at her smart ass remark, finding himself losing his willpower the longer they lingered out here. “We aren’t.”

“So if we…” she tiptoed and nuzzled her nose against his “…it’s not necessarily because we’re…”

“Having problems…” he finished again for her, watching with hooded eyes as she closed the gap and kissed him once, testing the waters. Slowly, her hand slipped up his neck and to the back of his head as she kissed him again, this time longer.

She could feel him resisting, so she paused. “Tell me if you want me to stop.” After a long pause spent contemplating the pros and cons of going against their therapist’s advice, Owen shut his brain off as he grabbed her by her waist and turned, pressing her in between him and the door. His hand went to her cheek and his thumb brushed against the skin there as he kissed her this time. He scooped her up and wrapped her legs around his waist before stripping off his leather jacket and hers. He managed to lose his shirt somewhere between the trek from the front door back to his truck, but he didn’t care. Forbidden sex makes the soul forget a lot of things.

#things change #owelia #convalescence #omelia #amen #oweliafics #omeliafics #amenfics #owen hunt #amelia shepherd #tim #charlie #au #oc #nathan riggs #callie torres #derek shepherd #ryan shepherd #rosie shepherd hunt

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