Category: Chronic pain

Pain and Anxiety

by Midnight Demon, posted in Bipolar Disorder, blogging, Chronic pain, chronic physical pain, depression

Pain and Anxiety

Last night, I took my normal pain pills around 2200. At midnight, the pain got worse. My heart rate shot up and I became nervous, again. I had already taken my night meds at the same time I took my pain meds. It was too early for me to take my normal pills so I had to take a stronger pill. It took another hour for the pain to fade enough for me to sleep. I also took an Ativan to calm down. I spoke to my doc about this and she said the anxiety is the body’s response to not liking pain. Great. Now I have to deal with anxiety on top of my other problems. I don’t like being anxious or nervous. It really irritates me and makes me feel unsafe, like something terrible is going to happen. I have to mentally play with ideas of it just being a physiological reaction, that I am okay, even though I don’t feel that way. It’s very hard to mentalize when your heart is pounding like you ran several blocks. I don’t become out of breath but my breathing speeds up. I have to take deep breaths to calm down, or try to. It’s very difficult to do. And it also makes me feel helpless because other than taking drugs to stop the pain and anxiety, there is nothing I can do. I am not hyperventilating so breathing into a paper bag won’t help me. Music helps to a degree but not all the time. After a while, it just becomes background noise.

I have not been trained in any capacity to deal with anxiety. I don’t know how to deal with it other than take medication. But even then, I have to wait a half hour or more for it to work. In the meantime, I am very nervous, in terrible pain, and keep wondering what to do. I can’t walk because the pain is too intense in my foot, so pacing is out of the question. I usually just have grin and bear it. I don’t like doing this. It just messes with my head. And then I become agitated, which does me no favors. Last night, I tried to read. It didn’t work so I tried writing in my journal. If I could have done something physical, I would have but writing is the only thing that usually works when I am anxious. It is my go to whenever things are going wrong, or are perceived to be.

All this bullshit could be avoided if I didn’t have this pain syndrome. I didn’t do too much yesterday so I don’t know why my foot decided to explode at midnight. I had been resting for hours, but I got hungry and went downstairs to have something to eat. When I came back up stairs and propped my foot up, I got hit with the pain wave. Other than amputation, I don’t think there is anything I could have done to avoid it. I just don’t understand why because I had taken my normal pain meds two hours before hand and that should have avoided a 10+ pain flare. But that is the thing with pain syndromes. You never know when they are going to spike.

I need to pick up my niece later. I plan on ordering pizza before I pick her up. This way, the pizza is a little cooled off before gobbling it up. The last time I had pizza with my niece, she ate half a box! It was crazy but she was hungry. She ate all of it too, crust and all. She is too funny but is still growing like a weed. I just hope that walking to her school doesn’t aggravate my foot more than it already is. I really don’t want a repeat of last night. I have my appointment with my psych tomorrow so I really don’t want to be really drugged up or sleep deprived when I see her. It’s in the afternoon so I should be awake enough when I see her, but sometimes after a bad night of pain, I am not in a good mood the next day. Only day that I don’t have something planned is Saturday. I can rest all day then. I still need to finish my editing, which includes proofing what I have written and then putting those edits in the word doc. I have stuff to take out too, as one of my stories is listed twice, but under a different name. Don’t know how that happened.

So pain and anxiety is not a good thing for me, or anyone, really. Pain causes the anxiety and I don’t like it one bit. It makes me feel helpless. My therapist is on vacation for the next two weeks. I am to write her a letter and text her while she is away. She also wants me to send them to her so when she is back, they will be in her office. We talked about the anxiety part but really didn’t talk about what to do with it. She just wants me to take an Ativan. I am just afraid that I will become addicted to it, which is why I am so hesitant to even take the pill. But I guess, I need it so my heart rate slows down and calms my nervous agitation that doesn’t do me any good. I swear the pain is like drinking five cups of coffee the way it makes me feel. I just wish I had more control over it but I don’t and that is what is so frustrating! I hate not being in control. Pain takes that away from you and then your heart rate soars up and makes you feel even worse. So you are battling the demons in your head, the pain in your foot and the nervousness of it all because it’s a physiological response. How the hell do you combat it?? I guess I am going to have to research what to do about anxiety, an unknown entity to me. I never was an anxious person until pain entered my life. It doesn’t happen ALL the time but when it does, holy hell! I am noticing it more with each pain flare up. I really wish I had better control of my pain, like if I had a warning before the pain would flare, that would be awesome. But I don’t. It’s one minute low level pain and the next high level pain. Sometimes it is because I moved my ankle, either flexed it or moved my big toe. That is all it takes to set the pain off in my foot and/or ankle. It just sucks not knowing when to expect severe pain. It’s the million dollar question that no one can answer. And I am not okay with it, not one bit!

Writing Bug and Suicidal Risk

by Midnight Demon, posted in Bipolar Disorder, blogging, Chronic pain, chronic physical pain, depression, mood disorders, psychache, suicidality, suicide

Writing bug and Suicide Risk

I have the insatiable need to write. I thought about journaling but I don’t feel like entering my thoughts in a private journal. What I have to say is too important. It is about my suicidal feelings. I am torn, really torn, about what to do with them. I am in no danger tonight. But I picked a date and that date is slowly approaching. I have been trying not to think about it but it’s in the back of my head. I keep thinking/telling myself I don’t have to go through with this. That I can make it through. A friend of mine would be crushed without my help. And would be devastated with my loss. I can’t help but feel trapped. Like I can’t take my life because people need me to be here and I don’t want to be here any more. It’s a struggle I have been dealing with for years. I am tired of fighting this. I just want to give in to my thoughts, to not exist anymore. It’s painful to breathe. I am tired of the heaviness on my chest and the accompanying chest pains that magically appear and disappear on their own. Sometimes an Ativan is needed to get rid of these pains. I know it’s my anxiety when the pain goes away and the heaviness lessens.

Right now I feel like I am a burden to myself. I almost told my therapist today that I don’t want to meet twice a week anymore. I know she wouldn’t approve. She knows I have a date but I have not given it to her. I just can’t because I know she will try and stop me. It’s not like she is going to be okay with me dying by suicide. No therapist will. Then I have the agony of sending a copy of my book to a former therapist. If I send it now and she tries to get in touch with me after I die, I know the book was written in vain. Some writer I am. I write how much this process has helped me, how CAMS has helped me and then I kill myself? Good going. It just doesn’t make sense. I am afraid. I am afraid of getting older and I don’t want to live because I never wanted to be an adult. But my support system kept on telling me I was worth it and I believed them. So I am still here today.

I know one day I will end my life by my own hand. It is written in the statistics of suicide research. I fit every model. I am high risk because I have attempted multiple times, I have an abuse history, I am transgender, and I am hopelessly depressed. All these factors are not good in assessing suicide risk. The only thing I have not done is give away my most prized possessions. Though I really don’t have any. I have my suicide library that I value dearly but it hasn’t helped me deal with my suicide thoughts. I have not been cured of them and as one person in my life has said, I never will. I will always have these thoughts of ending my life. But do I have to act on them? Should I just let them fester until they boil over? I don’t know. Right now I am calm. I am just going through the motions of life as if I were living without thinking of taking my life. No one knows except my therapist and psychiatrist. (And now the blogosphere.) I really want to end my life yet I still want something from it. What I want, I don’t know what that is. I would love to complete my degree but I don’t have the money for it. I don’t even know if the stress of school will activate my paranoia and psychosis again. I do want to write another book. But I have no ideas. They are few and far between. Then I think I should go back to the hospital where I will be safe and possibly be able to think of something to write. But why bother with that if I just want to end my life in a month and a half or so. I am so torn. Ambivalence is such a bitch. And it’s not like you can do a pro/con thing when contemplating ending your life. Every time I do it, I seem to have more pros than cons. There are reasons why I want to end my life. I don’t want to be in chronic physical pain anymore. I don’t want to have psychache. I don’t want to live because I just can’t tolerate my self hate. I can’t tolerate being a woman when my brain keeps telling me I am a man. And the only reason I have not gone through with transition is because my mother won’t accept me as a man. So I rather die as her daughter than her son. I have nothing else to live for. I am only alive to keep my therapist and family happy. They know my suffering. I guess they rather see me suffer than to be dead. I have been fighting this depression for a really long time. I have been suicidal since I was eight. I first attempted when I was ten. That was thirty years ago. I think that is a long time to suffer from a depression that defies treatment. No pill alleviates my suffering and I have been on many. I am just a hopeless case.

I thought about sending this to my therapist but I am not going to. It is written by me and not my alter, Hyde. I am very tired but I am not in pain, least not physically. My brain just wouldn’t shut off until I wrote this stuff out. Now I am feeling sleepy and I think I can call it a night. These suicidal thoughts that come out are my midnight demons. They come out after midnight and I am truly in their grip. My heart is heavy and there is nothing I can take to make it light. My world is dark and gray. It has been like this for a very long time.

Marathon Bombing Sentencing and Other Things

by Midnight Demon, posted in Bipolar Disorder, blogging, Chronic pain, chronic physical pain, depression, mental illness

Marathon Bombing Sentencing and Other Things

The bomber of the 2013 Boston Marathon explosions has been sentenced to death. I was kind of hoping that he would spend his life in prison but that doesn’t seem to be the case. I feel very sad that another life will be taken, however justified. I am for the death penalty and believe that people who do horrendous things should die, and he did do horrible things, taking 3 lives at the Marathon and then an innocent police officer. He and his brother terrified the city for almost a week before getting caught. I hope the victims and their families can rest easy now that justice has been served. He wasn’t convicted on all his counts, just some and that was enough to warrant the death penalty. I am sure there will be appeals that will go on for months before the death occurs.

I have been in a rotten mood all day and this sentence just didn’t help it. There is a sense of relief as now maybe he won’t be in the news as often anymore. I don’t have to be reminded everyday of that day when my world came apart. I just woke up on the wrong side of the bed, so to speak. I have been moody as all hell. I think it’s partly because I have not really eaten today. I had breakfast early this morning, a slice of pizza left over from last night. I really haven’t eaten since then. I went to Starbucks and had my free mocha. I had earned the reward from my 12 purchases. I no longer use my Starbucks app because hackers have found ways to siphon money from your bank account using the app. So I just use my gold card.

I wrote a bit while at Starbucks in my journal. I wasn’t too distracted by people or what was going on outside, which is rare. I wasn’t even on my phone that much checking Twitter or Facebook. I lost 6 followers in the last 4 hours. I got a bunch of followers in the last few days so I am guessing they were bots or because I didn’t follow back (I hardly do, unless they are a bona fide real person) right away. I am not likely to follow someone with a name for “music xxx”. A lot of authors have followed me in the last few weeks. I still don’t know how they find me. Today I got a follow from a guy in the UK who is an author. Never heard of him before but his English isn’t too good as he had some grammatical errors on his profile page. I didn’t follow him back.

I was a block away from home when my ankle gave out on me. It exploded in pain and made it difficult to walk. I am still hurting. I took a pain pill about a half hour ago so I should be getting some relief soon. I just hate when this happens. My foot wasn’t doing too good before I went out but sometimes when I forced myself out, it settles down. The drawback is that I will have severe pain on the way home or after. Seeing as it just hit the early evening hours, I am going to have a long night of pain before I even hit bed time. Baseball game is on late tonight so maybe I will listen to it. Last night, I was out cold before the game. I woke up around 0400, which sucked. I then went back to sleep and I had a weird dream. The dream was that I was back in East Boston doing some police work. It was weird. When I woke up, I really wanted to go back to sleep to see if we caught the guy! My stupid medication app alarm went off, waking me up.

Despite my sleeping difficulties, when I woke up at 0400, I felt rested. Though I was kind of pissed at waking up that early. I must have slept for a good seven hours, a record for me. I really should have made coffee when I got up this morning, before my nap. I think I would have done better had I stayed up rather than fallen back asleep. But with me having to take pain medication, I don’t know if I will be up late or not. It’s weird that if I take the same dose during the day, I get sleepy and have to take a nap. But after seven in the evening, it can keep me up. I don’t know if my anxiety over the pain contributes to me staying up or not. Sometimes, I have to take Ativan to calm down some, just to get sleepy. Sometimes it works and other times it doesn’t, depending on the level of pain. I know by now what will keep me up and what won’t. If I have it in my mind to sleep, I usually do. It’s just when I get the writing bug in me during this time that I find it hard to sleep. If I don’t write, the longer I stay up and that means Hyde can show up. He will come out if I am exhausted, in severe pain, and can’t sleep because I need to write. It’s terrible. And the anxiety of not writing is sometimes worse than the physical pain itself. I don’t know what lies ahead of me tonight or how many pain pills it is going to take to get it under control. I am sort of dreading it. But I will have my baseball tonight and that usually calms me down enough so I can sleep, sometimes. If it is an aggravating game in which we lose, I can get hyper. And that usually means I am up till 0300. The only thing I have to do tomorrow is pick up my prescription. Hopefully, the pain levels will be down when I wake up and I can do this errand.

Rant of Doctors about CES

by Midnight Demon, posted in cauda equina syndrome, CES, Chronic pain, chronic physical pain

A rant on doctors (CES)

You are diagnosed with Cauda Equina Syndrome. A misunderstood syndrome that is a medical emergency. Yet the doctors never provide adequate after care. They think that once the surgery is done, you should be healed. They don’t tell you it could be up to 2 years or more before recovery is seen. Meanwhile, you become an infant. You have no bowel or bladder sensation. Are given catheters and told to do your own bowel program. I have tried this and has taken me 13 years to figure out what to make me go and what doesn’t. I was fortunate that I didn’t have to use catheters but I know others that do. What really pisses me off is that there is no help dealing with this syndrome mentally. It shatters you to the core. The pain that is dealt with is intolerable. The burning, the zaps, the throbbing, the stabbing. It never ends. You might get relief for a few hours but most of the time you have to learn to tolerate the pain. You want to give up and when you tell someone this, you are thought of as crazy. People don’t understand the mental anguish chronic pain has on you. I am feel so bad for those that didn’t have the help that I did while I was in the hospital. I was on suicide watch a few times but I got through it. I still have strong suicidal feelings because I just cannot tolerate pain any longer. But I am still here, despite these feelings.

Doctors don’t know everything. You may have to see several different specialists to deal with CES. I would strongly recommend finding a psychologist or therapist in your area to help deal with the debilitating pain, disability, and loss of self. Whatever you were before CES, it is now gone. You will never go back to that life. I will never be able to walk a 20 mile walk a thon because I can barely walk around the block without severe pain. As tough as it is, you must get used to this new life. There are no doctors that specialize in CES. Some have never even heard about it and if you look it up in a textbook, I am sure it is just a small paragraph. That is what makes this syndrome so damn frustrating. You have to see a neurologist if you want the best care. A GP or internist is not going to be helpful. Finding someone to listen is also key, though it may be hard to find. Don’t give up looking. They are out there! The weird thing is, as I was in the ER unable to walk, surrounded by neurologist residents and neurosurgical residents, not one of them told me that I had CES. It was my psychiatrist that told! I paged her at 4 in the morning to talk to her and get her opinion on what to do next. I needed to hear her voice because I knew she knew what I had. I have been lucky that both of my CES surgeries happened in the early stages and within the timeframe. Otherwise, I doubt that I would be writing how I recovered. It took a long time to get use of my legs again. I went from walker to cane to AFO to nothing. It didn’t happen overnight. It took months of rehab and perseverance. If I can get through the pain, you can too.