Pain
I’m blogging my pain, because I need to try to ‘process’ it somehow, have some semblance of control over something that has so much control over me.
I woke up this morning in pain. Pain is my alarm clock. I fight it in the mornings, trying to use some form of mental willpower as a snooze button. With fibromyalgia, being short on sleep is a recipe for more pain. Pain robs you of sleep, lack of sleep feeds the pain. Today I couldn’t fall back asleep, I lost that first battle of the day. That defeat as much as the pain brought the tears in bed this morning. I lay in bed hurting, praying to a god I don’t believe in, let me fall back asleep, no, no, no, it hurts too much.
This morning brought new pain. My fibro is always showing me how parts of my body can feel pain in ways I didn’t know before. I didn’t know there were so many types of pain possible in so many places. All the ‘regular’ pains were there with me this morning, the back, the neck, the hips, the shoulders. The new pains were in my arms, particularly my forearms, wrists and back of hands. It reminds me kind of when I had ‘vein pain’ from an IV medication that can cause vein pain. I didn’t know then my veins could hurt. I don’t think this pain is my veins though, but it reminded me of that because it was… different. Like it started in shooting nerves and melted hot and heavy into the surrounding muscles. I don’t know, it’s not really ‘muscle’ pain, though the muscles hurt, but. It’s confusing, the pains confusing, I’m using past tense, because I started with this morning, but the pain is still there. Pain is always there. This new pain in my arms, feels like tingling fire, feels like aching fever, feels like tired weak sore.
Normally most of my pain is in the body core, with secondary pain in my limbs. Usually my legs hurt more than my arms. Now my arms hurt enough that I almost don’t feel my legs. I feel like a torso with arms. A heavy cross of pain.
The first thing I did this morning was immerse myself in a hot hot bath, it helped a little, that and a muscle relaxant and some anti-inflammatories. Honestly they don’t really help much, maybe take 10% of the pain away, maybe the effects are more psychological than real, but when you hurt, you don’t care you swallow the pills that don’t work and hope they work this time, I just don’t bother with the narcotics or addictive pain medications because they don’t work any better than my other hopeful pills. The muscle relaxant and the anti-inflammatory doesn’t do anything really, just pretend hope, so I try not to take them often. Lessen the load on my liver. Sometimes I think I take them just because I want to give Wolfe a sense that he can do something to help, yes, bring those pills… thank you. I’ll be fine.
I know that like me, he feels powerless, and feeling powerless is frightening when it comes to pain. Swallowing those useless pills is doing ’something’. Like swinging a paper sword at a fire breathing dragon.
The Lyrica the Dr. prescribed me I’ve been taking now full dose for about a week. Yet this is the worst week I’ve had yet. So I’m not holding out for much hope. I should have noticed something by now if it would help me. I’ll take it for a few more weeks anyways, make sure, before letting the empty prescription bottle join another pile of useless empty bottles.
The peglyte I’ve been prescribed for my bowels isn’t doing much either… but I don’t want to write about that right now.
I stole some anatomy from Da Vinci, and coloured my arm pain… lets try to express this in another media, another small angle of control.
Look, this is pain, this is my enemy… I’ve written about him, I’ve drawn him, I study him, I look for weaknesses.. something I can use to conquer and defeat him, but this enemy, this fire breathing dragon in my body, at a cellular level… it’s me. I can’t cut it out of me, I can’t tame it, I can’t ignore it… I am pain.
