It's always nice when my in-laws get involved in my life. I'm not a loner by nature and they are among the few who will dare the potential wrath of me when I'm doped up on pain. No. I don't mean doped up on pain medication. That's only happened to me a few times and those were mostly in the Recovery Room of a hospital after neurosurgery. I guess you can include the intensive care ward in that as well but lesser medication has only doped me up a time or two in my life and that was always immediately after a doctor increased my dosage of pain medication.
This time, even they only visited with me for a couple of hours. My house is still in a post-apocalyptic state while I wait on the contractor who will be fixing that. That's not a complaint. He waited an unreasonable time for me to declare myself ready to be put on his schedule so I can wait for him now. It's only fair that any number of individuals' homes will be finished before mine because they moved faster. Things aren't very comfortable in here right now as they have not been since the great flood. Thus, my guests spent most of their time at their hotel with Melissa visiting them.
I have the lovely combination of a personality that needs to be busy doing something and a body that needs lots of rest. Every time the two come in conflict, I end up in severe pain yet I have yet to learn an effective strategy to deal with it. Every effective strategy I had in place involved my comfy reclining chair or one like it but it was damaged from years of me landing awkwardly in it and the flood finishing it off. It was one thing to deal with the back falling off halfway about one in five times I reclined but now back simply falls off. Thus, I don't recline it and I learned that the top isn't exactly placed right for my neck upright possibly more so since the additional damage.
Melissa, who is smarter than I am about these things, tells me to go to bed when I'm tired. That makes perfect sense except that I seem to have forgotten everything I learned about relaxing in the early years of being sick. Either I do something that occupies my mind and suffer from broken chair induced poor posture or I lie down in bed and suffer what feels like a phobia about doing nothing. Emptying my mind allows worries and doubts to creep in. I end up lying down and then hurrying to get up out of it when the worries become mortal terror and the doubts become self loathing. I'm afraid I have too many reasons to dislike myself to rest easily these days. I've done things that were inevitable and the best available choices but it doesn't mean that I liked doing them.
I'm not ready to tell you all about my personal take on the emotional pain of being an adult who has made choices for approaching 39 years. Sometimes, my intentions were noble, other times childish and then there were the purely nasty things I've done. Most of the last category took place in my first two decades when I was much healthier and far less secure of my survival. I would rather stick to the physical. The physical can be much less painful in so many ways. The main exception is that physical pain hurts a lot more visibly to the senses. Physical torture may not be the proper way to break someone but it sure is mighty unpleasant.
I got worked up enough that it reminded me of that insane post-op pain that my mind couldn't even categorize at the time. I just remember an ICU nurse rushing toward me with a syringe. I demanded to know what was in it and she told me after she put it in my IV. It was morphine and it knocked me all the way out. The nurse had probably been warned of my fears involving drug addiction. If she had given me a choice, I might have injured myself thrashing about in the pain. Instead, I grew a healthy appreciation for medicine. I take it as prescribed and only as prescribed while accurately describing my symptoms to the doctor once a month.
There was a terror that came with the pain this time. The terror told me that I simply could not survive hurting so much. An hour later, it told me I couldn't survive another hour. Hours later, it told me I'd lose it if it got worse. By that time, I had tensed up and cramped up terribly. The cramps were in my chin and I had new medicine prescribed exactly for that. When I took the muscle relaxer, I went into something much like my post-op experience. I endured pain, had meds kick and drifted off into something close to sleep. I was conscious enough to know that time was passing but not how much and afraid of the pain I could still feel on the other side of the lovely meditative wall I'd built.
On the other side of this horrible pain, I can tell you that I survived without going crazy or falling prey to addiction. I used my medication strictly within the prescribed guidelines and it worked. My doctors are smart enough to leave me some wiggle room in their orders. I'm smart enough to tell them exactly what I did with it. I'm smart enough to realize it probably wasn't a good idea to try out a muscle relaxer with a beer and the experience was pleasant enough that I won't do it again. Anything that feels quite that peaceful has to be dangerous. The stupidity to not realize I'd tried it until after both were down the hatch was a side effect of so much pain. That's one for the "coach" to help me remember. Never have a beer and muscle relaxers within reach at the same time.
That wasn't the time I went to sleep. When I went to sleep, it was just the muscle relaxer and the fatigue of severe pain. When I realized I'd doubled down on the chemical relaxation techniques, I was alone and decided not to sleep. Part of me was afraid of going into a coma or something. That should tell you how good I am at staying awake or how bad I am at sleeping. It's the same thing depending on how you want to look at it. Apparently, I was in no danger but I don't know what factors that depended on. I am pledged to avoid attempting to even toe dangerous lines much less crossing them.
There's a reason to stay alive beyond simple self preservation which I've developed over the years. Melissa loves me. I should have seen it but I always thought my childish greed was her reason for bringing things home to me on the rare occasions when she goes out with friends and/or family without me. I should have known better but she forgives me and that's good enough. She brings things home because she would rather have had me with her most of the time. That's because she loves me. She knows only a disintegrating amount of pain would deter me from being with her.
On another note, maybe chewing gum with such sore jaw muscles might have been a bad idea. It was worth a try since I can't set my jaw in a stressful pose while chewing a piece of gum. Even better, it's sugar-free.
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