Pain, pain. Go away.

I can’t believe it, I wanted quiet to soothe my pounding head and I actually got it…. for the next half an hour, my house is still and pensive, just waiting for our downstairs neighbors and their three year old and my boyfriend and his best friend to all fill the walls and ceilings with voices and laughter again.
Right now all I can think is that I need to find a way to climb out of this flare up. I am not living, stuck at a 7 on average on the pain scale for almost 10 months, a screaming 8 today, and that’s with all the medication I am allowed to take at one time and all the meditation, biofeedback, and visualization that could possibly be squeezed into my day. Doesn’t my agony warrant some kind of pain relief, or am I not deserving of that for some reason? This week has felt like I am being tortured, I cannot think to save my life. Even the weight of the hood that protects my neck from the cold wind is compressing my neck and causing fiery misery. I am mixing up words, my face is slumping on the right side, non-stop colored lights and floaters in my vision, my pain is bouncing around from minute to minute, from an 8 through a 10 and back down to a 7 again, but we will call it an 8 because I don’t like to admit it’s any worse than that. Totally random things, a thumb, then a shoulder, a kidney, then an eyebrow, a hip, an armpit, a shin, then my thigh, abdomen, toe, face, then my other shoulder. It’s just madness. The pain is making me feel crazy, like I need to rip the offending body part off of me, or like it is being ripped off. The headache is getting worse day by day, and at this point ignoring it is no longer an option. Not to mention I threw my low back out (thankfully not the most painful of all the times this has happened, but out enough that I can’t bend over and have to shuffle around with my knees pressed together). My neck/skull on the right side are in the 9-but-I’ve-learned-how-to-make-it-seem-like-an-8-because-it-never-goes-away range. It’s really that flu-like ache that is so all-encompassing, just like when a healthy person has an actual virus, that it’s impossible for me to go about a regular day no matter how willing I am to push through the pain aspect of my illness.

I want so much to be able to use my Saturdays for something fun. I feel so bad for my boyfriend who has been every bit as profoundly impacted by these conditions I am dealing with, and I feel particularly bad today that he had to run all the errands himself. I am not the same kind of girlfriend that I was to him before the car accident. Then again, I also feel bad for myself, never getting to go thrift store shopping, see my friends, take walks, practice yoga or make everything from scratch with love, and on top of that feeling like a burden. I miss being the old me. The competent, smart, working, thriving me that was stolen away when I started to get really sick and the chronic pain became constant chronic pain from which I could seemingly find no relief.
Don’t take your health for-granted. If you can walk up and down the stairs and you can do it without fear of terrible pain, you should celebrate that fact right now! If you can cook dinner or pursue your hobby or your career, hug those abilities close and thank your body for making it possible. If you work out, even once a month, and get sore afterwards, soreness is so pleasant compared to how I feel even on a really good day!!! Rejoice in feeling sore and that you can work out, because both mean that you are in much better health than I am.

Happiness is a state of being, but that doesn’t mean that having good health doesn’t help, and that it isn’t incredibly difficult (ah, but not impossible, and that’s what this blog is really about) to be happy when your body feels like it’s being tortured.  I usually try to end all my posts on a more cohesive, happier note, but sometimes that’s just not a part of today’s story. Sometimes I am angry at the pain, and sad for what is lost, and there is momentarily no solace except that this too will pass. Tomorrow is always a new, hopefully better day.

Thank you to all the sweet and lovely people who read my rants, who respond when it is hard, and who reach out when they are under a mountain of health concerns of their own. I am so very grateful to the beautiful souls who have graced my life throughout sickness and health. Again, I’m not sharing the  way my pain gets to me so that others feel sorry for me, I know my pain is not as bad as it could be and I know I don’t manage it perfectly by any means. I am sharing this because maybe someone whose sister, husband, daughter, wife, mother, uncle, etc has told them they are ill or in constant pain, and who nodded but had no idea what that meant, maybe they will read what it is like to be traveling in the land of chronic illness. Maybe this information can be used for education, to bridge the gap between the land of the healthy and the land of the sick so we don’t have to travel alone so often.