Maybe I got cocky. Somewhere along the line, I must have said this pain thing is no big deal. I can handle it. Maybe I got too frustrated with the state of certain affairs in my life, piled a few too many things on my back and decided I'd pay the price later. That's all guess work and I probably never will know for sure. There's a whole new level of pain and suffering that I didn't suspect existed. "Star Wars" quotes keep coming to mind. "What a lovely new smell you've discovered!" I would just rewrite it as "what lovely new agony you've discovered!"
It's just a few days before a pain doc appointment and I spent a day screaming unabashedly. Melissa thinks it's a combination of heavy stress and too much physical activity. That tells you nothing about the situation because I made a decision to keep this blog noncontroversial. One major source of stress in my life is a lifetime of controversial situations that cause me to make mountains out of mole hills seemingly at random. I find myself raging about everything except the thing that's really bothering me. Well, I've made some emotional breakthroughs so now I rage about that stuff too.
Well, I'm not here to write about emotional pain. I re-learned the fact that everything can hurt at once yesterday. The headache can merge with the arm pain somewhere in the shoulder or neck. The arm pain can lead me to seek comfortable positions that could lead to the back pain naturally yet it could also just be the screwed up signals from my brain. My legs might have hurt from crawling up the stairs because I was so certain that I'd fall. The foot pain could be straight from the pain or from the lovely ways my feet get tangled up in falls.
It's almost impossible to escape writing about the lifetime of emotional pain here. Any sensible person who doesn't make a living as a cowboy or something else that physical with such poor benefits, would have stayed in bed today. They would have insisted that getting more than two hours of sleep should be the priority. I'm not sensible once I've been triggered. The pull of "get to work you lazy ass" is even stronger. I should be able to laugh at memories of being told that I have no tolerance for pain and need to toughen up. Instead, I keep telling myself "it doesn't hurt that bad" and "you can get something done before the pain shows up. I feel these things with yesterday's agony fresh in my mind and I think I should be able to prosecute the person who put those ideas in my brain.
That's where the controversy would come into play. Days like yesterday and the night before represent a different reality from the one where I get told that it just has to get done (for many definitions of it) and that's final. There is no way to reconcile those differences. I'm not a hoarder. I'm someone who never has days that are good enough to walk out to the dumpster without severe consequences. On my bad days, I have trouble making it to the bathroom. Writing that cost me some dignity, of course, but dignity ends up being cheap. The sort of help I need is hideously expensive.
That lifetime of emotional pain wants me to declare myself to be a wastrel. The fact is that pain control is as exempt from my usual penny pinching as I can make it. Yesterday, someone who was trying to be mean (for good reason) told me very clearly that a sensible person could see me as a wastrel with my priorities too screwed up. I had started it by being just as mean if not meaner. With that memory clear in my head, I can't remember the second part to my brilliant argument. All I can think is that I had better get my lazy ass to work and earn my oxygen for the day.
There is still part of me that considers myself a genius at coping. At least I can reconcile that reality with the one I'm experiencing now. If get the job done, I might be more comfortable later while I'm screaming in agony. It's coming. I can feel a normal day's headache already there.
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