I never really had pain before. Yes, I get monthly cramps that are so bad I wish I had been born a guy- but that fades after a couple of days. I had real bad tooth pain a few years back before I got my first (and only) root canal. I've had back problems my entire life from being too endowed by Mother Nature. But to be entirely honest, if a doc asked me to put my pain right now on a scale of 1-10, and I could take away teeth pain and put that on a separate scale- I've only gone to the 10th one time in my life- for about 3 weeks non stop. That was when I had tardive dyskinesia from Haldol poisoning back in the Spring of 08 and couldn't move any of my muscles in my body. I still remember a nurse in the nursing home I was put in temporarily telling me the only other patients that scream like that are the burn victims. That was a ten. I've never experienced labor, but according to the nurses I have met labor pains pale on the pain scale that severe burn victims go through. Who knows. If I ever have a child, I can figure out where that pain lies.
Tonight my pain is about a six on my scale. It's driving me up the wall. I can't sleep. I'm in an ice cold sweat, questioning whether or not to get up and change the sheets. I figure no, I would just sweat through them again. The pain is in my kidneys, and my bladder. My legs and feet are so swollen with edema, I cannot move them. They are elephantine, the doctor guesstimates between them I am carrying around 25 pounds of excess water. (I actually have pictures I took with my phone, but I don't want to post them lest someone looses their lunch). My GP tells me to keep my legs elevated, and wrapped in "T.E.D" socks to help the edema go down. It's been almost two months now, I've cut out all salt from my diet, gone on a renal diet and still, I cannot move my legs. My feet look like planks of wood with little stumps for toes.
One of the side effects from my kidney failure last year and subsequent dialysis is dry skin. Not just dry skin, we're talking alligator dry. Sahara desert dry. I slather on Aloe lotions, Cocoa Butter lotions, every day. And it still itches, I want to scratch. I can't. If I do, it flakes off, like some type of horrible dandruff. So I just keep moisturizing and wearing black when I go out so you can't see how greased up I am. Let's face it. I'm at the point where I'm ready to take a page from Cartman and put all this stuff in the bathtub and just soak in it.
Cartman bathing in Calamine lotion, and a few Terrance and Philip fart jokes. Because the world needs fart jokes.
I'm learning to live with the pain every day and just try to work around it. It's hard. I don't want to let it destroy me.
How do you deal with chronic pain?
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