So I might have exaggerated a little bit. (Me? Never!)
When I stated in my last post that I had started fifteen or twenty blog posts, it felt honest at the time, honestly. I just went through everything I have on Evernote and my email, however, and found the beginning to two posts, almost a full third one, and the idea for six more. Whoops.
One of the reasons that I love writing this blog is that it gives me a chance to express what’s going on with me as I’m actually going through it. I know I could probably re-create some of the emotion from afar, but I’d like to spend that emotional energy sorting through what I’m going through right now, instead of what I was going through in February and March. Therefore, I will take a friend’s advice and just produce the snippets that I started back in February. The other ideas aren’t necessarily fully linear (more generalized experiences that I’m still experiencing) so those will come out in the next few weeks as fully formed babies. But in the meantime, I will swallow my Type-A pride and just give you a taste of what I was going through, in its full exhausted, unedited glory.
Today, the first one. Tomorrow, you get the other one.
Pain
Created February 5, tinkered with on February 12
The trick with pain management is to stay ahead of it. The problem with that is that I don’t know when I need pain meds until I’m actually in pain, at which point I’m technically behind it. Frustrating.
If you haven’t figured this out by now, I’m one of those people that doesn’t like to take unnecessary pills. Usually if I have a headache I try solving it any number of ways before actually taking a Tylenol or Aleve. Now, however, I’m not dealing with a headache that might (usually) be a result of dehydration and can be solved with a glass of water. I’m dealing with a sternum and pectoral fascia and six-inches of skin that were split apart and now working on coming back together.
If I focus on what hurts, I can feel my t-shirt rubbing against the skin wound. I can feel my pecs tight and unused. My intercostal muscles, front and back, simply ache from lack of use. My shoulders and lats scream from being held so tightly as I curve them around my chest in a effort to protect it. My sternum fires off a dull throbbing; by itself entirely manageable, with everything else, debilitating.
If I get behind on my pain meds, I don’t sleep well, and I spend much of my time fretting about being exhausted and in pain and what I feel like I have to do despite it: respond to over 300 emails in my inbox, make sure the cats know that they’re loved, return calls, find my passion in life, pay bills, make sure I’m exercising for 30 minutes, eat, draft a complicated letter for a friend, do laundry, fix the buttons on the duvet cover, draft a blog post.
Until I stumble into my bathroom and open my medicine cabinet and stare at the three shelves of prescription bottles like I’ve found the holy grail.
I’m not entirely sure what the street value of my medicine cabinet is. Two different morphines, two strengths of Norco, and I heard somewhere that even my three anti-nausea drugs are valuable. Anti-itches, antibiotics (three kinds), antivirals, anti-fungals, anti-constipations, anti-inflammatories, anti-nerve destruction, anti-kidney destruction (that one has huge black X’s through it because I’m allergic – remember?), steroids.
