I’m having a pretty good day.
And by that, I mean, a pretty good “pain” day. That’s how my whole life is defined now.
Yesterday sucked though.
Yesterday I was in agony.
I think maybe it was because my birthday on Friday and my boyfriend came out to visit, and my whole family took me to Olive Garden for dinner, and maybe it was all too much for me and I was paying for it on Saturday. Or, maybe it was the weather. Or maybe it was because the fan in the living room was blowing at some crazy angle.
Or maybe God was just p*ssed off at me.
Whatever the reason, the pain was awful, and so, I ended up taking extra hydrocodone.
I’m supposed to take “one every six hours,” but I’ve been taking the stuff for months now, and many, many times “one every six hours” has the same effect as an M&M would.
Sometimes that means I end up taking “one every four hours.” Other times that means I end up taking “two every six hours.”
But then, every couple of days, I have to sit down and count out how many days I have left until I can get a refill, and then count out how many pills I have left and divide the two and start rationing it out.
As of right now, I have about three pills a day to get me to my next refill.
I already know that’s not going to be enough.
Here’s the thing, it’s not that I used to judge people who used excessive amounts of painkillers in the past. It’s more that, before I got sick, I just never even thought about them.
But now. Now, I sit down on Sunday mornings, open the orange prescription bottle, dump out the pile of powdery white pills, and count out each individual one, and by extension calculate how much pain I will have to endure over the next three weeks.
I already know that there is no way I can get through the next three weeks with three pills a day.
My plan right now involves one part prayer, and two parts new doctor, who I see Sept. 10.
But, my experience with medical professionals thus far though has been, “Oh well.” As in, “You better find a way, because as long as you’re not bleeding out, it’s not our problem.”
But that’s the thing, it really, really does feel like someone is stabbing me with a butcher knife.
I have endured the worst pain in my entire life over the last six months.
Pain that makes me consider suicide on a daily basis. As in, I seriously plan out how I can kill myself. As in, I was seeing a psychiatrist who specializes in helping people who deal with chronic pain because I was fantasizing about driving my car off the road or swallowing all my pills before I went to bed at night.
I am in that much pain on a regular basis. And I am not exaggerating when I tell that you that there are things in this world worse than death.
But because I am not visually bleeding out, because my blood work comes back normal, because nothing ever shows up on any MRIs, I get 120 hydrocodone a month, and no more.
If someone rushed into the ER with a gushing stab wound, they would never be denied the pain relief they need.
Or maybe they would. But that would be tragic.
Because pain eats at you. It messes with your head. And it changes you so much faster than you think it will.
And there is a pill out there that can take my pain away. And I don’t want to take it so I can get high. I don’t want to take it so I can feel like I don’t have any troubles, or like I’m floating or whatever.
I want to take it so that I can get some relief from the metal claw digging into my ribs and maybe think clearly enough to see into tomorrow and remember that I do want to keep on living.
It’s so, so easy to sit on the outside of pain and judge people though.
It’s easy to say things like,
“Well, you can’t just depend on the pain pills, because you’ll end up building a up a tolerance to them, and then where will you be?”
Or,
“You need to take the number of pills the doctor tells you to take because that’s what the doctor says and that must be right and he must know exactly how many pills it will take to take your pain away without giving you a drug addiction.”
But that’s all bullsh*t when you’re in so much pain you want to kill yourself.
When you seriously want to end your life because you cannot handle the amount of agony that has engulfed your right ribs, the very last thing you give a crap about is the possibility that “two hydrocodone every six hours” instead of “one hydrocodone every six hours” might lead you to a life of pain pill addiction.
Or maybe you are different.
Maybe you would have a clear head and think differently in that situation, and maybe you would be able to endure hours and hours of the worst pain you’ve ever experienced, while a bottle of hydrocodone pills that could give you the relief you need were sitting right there on your dresser, and maybe you wouldn’t reach for them.
But I doubt it.
