Blessed be the Normal

Pain and medication put me to bed at about 7:30 last night. I awoke at 0230, not to pain or discomfort but from the sheer wonder of sleeping 7 hours. And when I woke up and did my usual body check for pain, I felt… normal.

You know how you wake up and you don’t feel great, but nothing is bothering you and you just stumble through the start of another day? That to me is like getting 50-yard line tickets to the Superbowl and watching my team win. As in, it just doesn’t happen. Did this morning, tho’.

Nothing hurt. I could walk without limping (that does happen some days, but only because it’s impossible to limp with both feet. Try it sometime. You look like you’re rolling along a deck in heavy seas.) I could move my right arm completely and my left arm about half way. My feet didn’t even burn for awhile. I just strolled around the house, marveling at the wonderful feeling. Of course, it soon passed, and I had to take the morning drug fix, but I am blessed to have had that much. When I go to the prosthetics place for my Eddie Munster shoes I see people who have no legs, no feet, no hands or arms, and I know how lucky I really am, me who just has legs that don’t work well, feet that burn all the time, and hips that lock up after a few meters. Well, and I’ve lost most of the use of my left arm. But hey, I have legs, I have feet, and I’m right handed. I know that I have a disease that’s gonna kill me, but I’m allowed most of the original issue still, and lots of people aren’t.

Thank you, God. This is the Sarge and I really, really mean it. I have a wonderful wife and great kids. I have a 1-year old granddaughter who occasionally calls me while gnawing on her mom’s cell phone. I am doing better than I deserve.

Pain Blogging

I’ve been away for awhile, dealing with medical issues. I have a couple of problems that cause me to deal with permanent pain, of varying degrees. I’m diabetic and because I didn’t know about it for a few years, I developed a mmmuuuvvver of a case of neuropathy, which means damaged nerves that send signals of pain that have no other source. I also had arterial blockage in my femoral arteries so bad that they have replaced both of them with artificial ones. I think there is still some blockage and clotting but it’s much better than it was! Now my legs don’t cramp after five steps, and my hips don’t lock up until I’ve walked almost 100 yards. Better! My feet feel as though they had bad chemical burns, and they do it all the time. Sort of like how you would feel if you soaked your feet in bleach half the time and in gasoline the other half. They have a pill that helps with this, of which I take the maximum dosage. That does help, but it fogs your mind as though a sheet of glass had been slid between your ability to work and your ability to think. And dealing with pain every day all day long for 7 years has ground me down. I worked at defeating it every day for years and years, but it took first one edge then another then another until I realized I was not able to do the job I was taking good money for. Or any job, due to the physical requirements of dealing with pain. Today is the first day since late August that I can write, and now I’ve taken my meds and the fogbank is settling in. Now I’ll sleep, knowing that I’ll wake in 2 – 3 hours because of the pain.

My body reacts strongly to the pain when it spikes; every bit of moisture that it can eject it ejects; sweating, vomiting, diarrhea followed by shivering and freezing, and usually a sugar crash into the 30’s or 40’s. I have this mental image of a quasi-military unit in there, with the Field First bellowing “Okay, all of you non-essential liquid based personnel are being tossed out of the airlock right now! Move it people!! Oh yes, don’t forget to color yourself green before you leave at high speed.”  Cigna does the long term disability for my former company and they don’t think I’m disabled. All of my doctors do, and I suspect that Cigna’s medical report says I probably am, but the manager of disability claims folks, a guy called Person (might be a label so others can tell he’s human, or it could be his name) doesn’t believe. So in addition to dying in a lot of discomfort, I haven’t been ‘granted’ the income I earned for the past six months. Wouldn’t it be great if Person’s disbelief could take away the pain? I would hate to work in a place like that, especially if Karmic justice is a reality.