Pain

This has been a week of pain. Unrelenting, unyielding pain. Those of you who have fibro and arthritis will sympathize, because it has been both a fibro flare and a severe flareup of arthritis. Pain at this level just blurs everything else. You become the pain.

It is hard to think when pain hits this hard. I realize that the ability to feel pain is one of nature's great weapons for protecting us from serious injury. Something hurts; we stop doing it. If we are intelligent that is. You know how the old joke goes: "Doc, it hurts when I do this." "Well then don't do that."

But the pain of arthritis and fibro don't seem to me to serve any purpose other than remind me that I am getting old. And the accompanying fog of a fibro flare just makes it worse. You become convinced that you are dying, that the downhill slide has suddenly become slipperier and faster. And you don't remember that a few months ago you told your nearest and dearest the same thing, so now they all think you are simply crying wolf.

I had not realized how much pain had become a part of my life until I went back and read earlier parts of this blog. The first couple of years I see a clarity and passion and fire in my words. I was involved with the great out there, passionate in my fury and dismay with the Shrub. So many things inflamed my imagination: recycling, charity, politics, environmentalism. As I read along I saw how my increasing health problems began to suck my passion, quiet my voice, and most dismaying, turn my vision from the things that matter to MYSELF.

Pain and loss have brought me to a place of self-absorption that I find dismaying and disheartening. I feel a desire to apologize to my readers. I have descended into a world of reporting my latest angst, and have somehow lost way too much of my voice in the process. It has been difficult, that is true. But I would prefer to be a Randy Pausch in the face of all this, rather than Lady Misery.

How do YOU cope with pain? I cannot take most pain killers available. They don't make me loopy; they just make me plain old violently ill. If anyone has a magic fix for pain, please share it. In the meantime I'm going to make a huge and valiant effort to rise above my miasma of self-absorption and recapture some of my voice.

Wish me luck.