Category: chronic physical pain

I checked Twitter soon as I got up this morning, like I always do. A Twitter friend had written something like “it was nice knowing you Twitter” with the hashtag #RIPTwitter. I just thought he was saying goodbye to it. He doesn’t post often. Then I noticed the hashtag was trending so I clicked on it to learn more. Apparently, Twitter is thinking about changing their timeline to an algorithm rather than chronological, like Facebook. WTF. I like Twitter because of it’s chronologically set timeline. I dislike Facebook because of its stupid algorithm. You never know what your friends post currently unless you change the settings to “most recent”. It’s so annoying. I sincerely hope they don’t change because then I won’t be on any social media sites. I will be alone and isolated. It will be very sad.

I slept pretty good despite waking up at 0345 in pain. I had breakfast at 0430 and then went to sleep. I didn’t get up till around noon. I had lunch then and now I am thinking about making biscuits and gravy. I haven’t had it in a while. I might have rice with it.

I’m feeling depressed. I had leg pain when I got up and it was just a reminder that even though my CES injury was 15 years ago, I still have pain. It really triggers my PTSD whenever I have pain down my leg because I never have gotten over the injury. It was very traumatic. Tomorrow is my anniversary and I just can’t believe that after 15 years, I am still trying to recover from it, emotionally. My body failed me. I took things for granted like walking, going to the bathroom, even wiping my own ass. The whole time I was in the hospital, I had to have someone wipe my butt every time I had a bowel movement. It was humiliating. I am sure that the way I wipe it now would be frowned upon by some professional, but it is what I learned to do because I can’t reach the way I used to.

I have relearned to walk three times in my life. There was a time when I thought I would have to walk with a walker the rest of my life. There was just this uncertainty that I would not recover. No one told me I would recover. They just thought I was lazy and didn’t want to get “better”. I did what the physical therapists told me to do, even though it hurt like hell. I think the greatest thing that got my strength back was doing stairs in my house that I was living in at the time.

I was in a relationship at the time of my injury. But afterwards, it made sex difficult. I would hurt so bad that I just couldn’t orgasm. It was just too painful being touched and getting excited. The relationship suffered because of this. I was also raped during this time. The partner I was with thought that I could get pleasure but she just didn’t know I was in pain, despite me telling her to stop multiple times. I lost interest in sex. I still do. It doesn’t interest me like it once did. Even when I shower, I have to be careful not to excite myself. You don’t realize how sensitive the genitals are until you get hit with this type of nerve injury.

But these things you take for granted until they are lost on you. You don’t appreciate walking and all the muscles it takes just to take that first step. How the hips are connected with walking in addition to the other muscles in the leg. It took months to walk just to walk with a cane. Then I was told I was “babying” myself because I was still walking with a cane. I think that was the worst someone could tell me. I think that maybe, looking in hindsight, that if I continued to walk with a cane, maybe my ankle wouldn’t have been so fucked up as it is now. Now I am truly disabled. I can’t walk too far without pain. I can’t stand too long without pain. And I walk with a cane now so that I can try and walk farther without pain. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. All depends on the day. I once measured that I could walk 0.4 miles without pain. Now, with my current back injury, I doubt I can make half that distance. My hip would explode. Maybe after physical therapy this go round, I will be able to.

I just don’t know what to do anymore to not be in pain. I can’t sit in a chair for more than a couple hours without my ankle swelling up. Yesterday was a good indication of that. I had sat at Starbucks for a couple of hours before having the appointment with my father for another couple of hours. I still wish that someone had noticed that I wasn’t walking correctly all the times that I was having physical therapy. Maybe I wouldn’t be disabled today if that had happened. But then. I really didn’t think I would get CES again. It’s hard to know if the second diagnosis caused the ankle to behave the way it does now or if the original injury did. Chicken and egg question. I will never know.