I’m serious folks. I am not kidding. I wanted to talk about pain. You all know what pain I mean right? That peculiar mental,  emotional pain that burns you alive and freezes you right out of your own life?

I have a few additional medical difficulties. I avoid talking about them because they are Legion. .  I have chronic back pain. Each disk in my spine is degenerating… Degenerative Disk Disease.

The physical pain is often marginally intolerable.  Meaning I can cook dinner 30 minutes after taking 10 MG of Oxycodone… for about 10 or 15 minutes.  Then I sit down and switch from trying to tolerate the pain long enough to cook (I can’t quite make it just yet) to fighting the overwhelming urge to abandon all remaining control and cry hysterically. 

I have such pain in my siatica area and shooting down my leg that I don’t want to breathe. Have you ever had physical therapy where they used the stim thingies? Yeah, the patches with electrodes that zap a current into the tissues they are rehabilitating.  The thing where the like to turn it up as high as you can tolerate.

Take the most discomfort/pain this has ever caused you, multiply that by the pins and needles felt when a sound asleep body part wakes and freaks your body out… multiply those together and add a dose of desperation and you’re getting closer than you were.

It is now 2 weeks after I began this post. Since then my medical people have narrowed down, if one can narrow it down, to the pain starting my L4 and L5 disks (spine). Like the rest of my spine they are degenerating.  Degenerative Disk Disease. 

After several failed attempts to ease the pain we settled on Tramadol as my base pain killer with Oxycodone as my breakthrough medication. They worked. And they made me completely loopy.  I backed off to 5 MG from 10 MG (Oxycodone) and that was better but I still shouldn’t drive.

And then the headaches started. I hoped that I was wrong about getting headaches after taking Tramadol for several days. No joy. It also brought nausea.  Nothing calmed that.

This morning I’ve stopped the Tramadol and taken Excedrine Migraine.  I hope it helps.

As for my Bipolar brain… I’m at a lower dosage of Lamictal but I’m doing surprisingly well. Chronic pain can be made less intense with anti-depressants. It is possible that my pain intestified recently because my Lamictal dose is lower.

These medical people also tell me I have FM (Fibromyalgia).

Terrific.

I guess I’m not a hypochondriac after all.

Again… terrific.