Dealing with Chronic Pain and Suicidality

Dealing with Chronic Pain and Suicidality

Over the past few days, I have been in moderate to severe pain. I have a pain syndrome that flares up without warning, usually right before I am to go to sleep. I will lie down and my ankle and foot will flare up with pain. Normally, I will just take a couple of pain pills, wait for them to kick in and then go to sleep. The pills work because it’s physical pain. What is really troubling me, lately, is the persistent pain, night after night after night.

It doesn’t matter what I do during the day. I can go out, have my daily routine of going to Starbucks and writing for a bit before returning home. I might be out for an hour or two, depending on how much I feel like writing and if the coffee holds out. Lately, despite drinking coffee, I just want to sleep. I have been sleeping more the past week that I have the entire year. A dear friend says that it’s because I haven’t been sleeping and I should take advantage of it because it might not last. I agree with that. It’s unusual for me to sleep all day as I never usually do unless I am deeply depressed.

The other night, I snapped when the pain hit. I became really suicidal and seriously wanted to end my life that night. Trouble was that I was in no position to do it. I vowed never to kill myself in my home where my family members could find me. I have a place that I want to go but the heat has been the only thing holding me back, at the moment. I feel like I don’t have a life. That this battle between chronic pain and depression is just too much to bear. I am tired of fighting it night after night after night.

It’s a tiring battle. I think that is part of the reason I have been so tired lately. I am just mentally and physically exhausted from dealing with my mental illness and my physical illness. No one knows how hard it is unless you deal with one or the other. The past few hours, I have been dealing with a rebound of songs in my head that sound like they are playing but they are not. It’s part of the psychosis. And for the past year, I have been battling that aspect of my illness.

I have known since I was 16 that I needed to be on medication for the rest of my life for my mental illness. I knew there was no other way to deal with it. Through trial and error, I finally found the right combo of meds. Unfortunately, finding the right antipsychotic meds has been elusive. Medications that used to work, no longer do so. I have gone back to the older generation of meds because they work for me better than the second generation. It’s a little bit more riskier because of side effects but I am not on that high of a dose. I just hope that in a month or two I am still on the same medication and that I don’t need to change. That is my fear.

I have known for a very long time the odds of me taking my life is great. I am in the high risk category of risk because of my past history. I can write about this history but it’s not important and will take up too much of time. I just know that one day my life will end by my own hand. I know that this will happen because I feel it. I know that it will happen sometime this year. My biggest fear is that if there is a heaven or hell, I will spend eternity with my father and that is something that sometimes keeps me here. But I don’t believe in those things but who knows what truly happens when you die.

They say that most people who are suicidal just want to end their pain. That is true. I want to end my pain and my suffering because no one can help me with it. Yes, I take pain meds to deal with the physical aspect of my suffering and it does help. But it does nothing for my psychache, for my psychological pain that I feel. I still feel that I should die because I am so damn tired of living this so called life. I don’t have a reason for living. I don’t have a purpose. I have nothing keeping me here. Sure I have my family that are dear to me. But what good is it if I can’t enjoy their presence because of pain? That I can stay with them for a short while and then have to go back up to my room to put my foot up because otherwise I am in too much pain to be good to anyone? Sometimes, I really think that my family and the people in my life will be better off without me.

New Favorite Song: Think of You

New favorite song: Think of You

I have been listening to this song since last night, non-stop. I cannot wait till I get paid next week so I can buy the album. Chris Young is one of my favorite artists. I am really surprised this song isn’t on the radio as it has over 13 million views.

I watched my niece for a little bit until her other grandmother came and got her. Afterwards, I went to the grocery store to get some half and half. I so needed a cup of coffee. Luckily, I time it right with the buses so I didn’t have to wait too long. It was really hot out and I was sweating by the time I came home. I made the coffee and then some breakfast. I figure I would have something to eat as I really haven’t had breakfast all week. I have been too sleepy to make it.

Last night I gave the run down of my illness for the past seven months. I sent it to my psychiatrist and will send it to my therapist next week. I then got the worst spasms in my legs and arms I ever felt. I swear every muscle group went spastic on me. It was awful. I took another Ativan and it didn’t help. Then I thought I was withdrawing from my pain medicine so I took a pill and things finally settled down. I didn’t take any pain pills the entire day because I wasn’t in significant pain. I won’t be doing that again.

I had felt so awful I thought about paging my pdoc to see if she had any ideas on how to stop the spasticity. But it was late (around midnight) and I was too afraid she might have me go to the ER or something. If taking my pain meds didn’t work, I would have called her. It was kind of urgent that I speak to her but thankfully, things settled down and I fell asleep. I did have a good sleep as I didn’t wake up till around 0900. I checked on my niece to make sure she was dressed and ready to see her grandmother. She said she washed up and brushed her teeth. So I am going on her word that those things were done.

I need to take a shower today but I think I will take it this evening. I haven’t really taken one all week. I finally called PT and have an appointment on the 12 of Aug. I need to get a new prescription because the one they faxed over is “old”. I don’t understand how they can get old. It was written a month ago so how can it be old? Just wasting paper.

Coffee really gave me energy. Maybe I can tackle the hamper I have been meaning to clean out. I might change my sheets. That will take some energy. Last time I changed them, it nearly threw my back out. I will take it easy though. I need to wash my comforter, too.

Evening Saturday Blog

Evening Saturday Blog

For the first time in the last two weeks, I missed my afternoon dose of trilafon. I am kind of beating myself up about it but there is nothing I can do about it unless my symptoms come back in full attack. They haven’t so I think I am okay with just taking 4 mg tonight. It was one of those, yea I will take it in a minute and then forgot when the minute passed. I do the same thing with my blood pressure meds, which is why I have an app that reminds me to take my meds.

I usually take my first dose of trilafon a few hours after waking up, usually after or while I am having my coffee. I figure if I take it with the coffee it fights off the drowsy effect. Today I had two cups of coffee and I was still tired by the end of the baseball game. I pretty much watched it from beginning to end, well, watched a couple of innings and then listened to the rest of the game. I am happy they beat the Skankees again. When Sandy Leon was batting, I just had a feeling he was going to hit a homerun. I didn’t say anything because that jinxes it. And when I heard Joe Castig say that ball is gone, I was whooping up and down on my bed. It was so sweet. That made it 5-1 at the time. The final score was 5-2. It was a good game.

I finally finished one of the books that I started but my Kindle ran out of juice. That is the only problem with technology, needing power. A regular book doesn’t need that kind of power. You just have to remember to carry it with you. I had already finished the single but at the end it had the beginning chapter of another Keller series. I think I already read it as it sounded familiar. The book is written by my favorite author Lawrence Block. Keller is one of his characters that I like. He plays a professional assassin. Block’s first book that I got hooked on was “Eight million ways to die”. He had this series by another one of his characters called Matt Scudder. I just fell in love with Matt when I was 15. He was struggling with his issues with alcohol and I was struggling to stay alive with my suicidal thoughts. Block’s books gave me the much needed distraction to keep going. I feel like I should write to him, but I don’t want to sound corny. I do have his email address because what I have to say will be longer than 140 characters in a tweet. I am not that tactful.

Now I am trying to get into a Scudder-like mystery/crime novel written by Robert Galbraith aka JK Rowling. I read the first chapter this morning and it was so meh. It was just so ordinary. It reminded me of a book by Block, “out the window”. I know that I shouldn’t be judging this like a Block book but when that is all you have read for the past two decades, you kind of have a standard. But this book, “The Cuckoo’s Calling” was a National Bestseller so who am I to judge it.

I have been reading my blog from two years ago. Seems like almost every day I wrote more about my pain than about the suicidality I was feeling. My blog has taken such a turn from being about my suicidality to chronic pain that I had to change the brief description as it was more about my physical pain than my psychache. I know I don’t write about my suicidal thoughts that much anymore. I still get them when my pain is off the charts. But it’s mostly my physical pain that is off the charts lately. My psychache seems to be in check. I guess being on an antidepressant has benefitted me the last few months. There was a time back in September 2015 after my New York Times article was published that my depression got worse. I am so used to it that I hardly remember when the episodes start and when things get worse is usually when things start clicking that something is wrong. It’s rare that I get physical symptoms of depression. But that is how bad things got. I just wish the weight I lost was more significant than it was. Only because I gained it all back, sadly. I was so damn close to losing my ideal weight but nope, it wasn’t meant to be. I am just grateful that my NP isn’t a big weight freak like my PCP was. It was really stressing me out and actually caused me to gain weight than lose it.

I have no idea where my writing is going. I have thought about it a million times but nothing comes to mind about what I want to write. It’s been months since I wrote something. The only thing that I did write while I was in the hospital was the first hour of my father’s home visit before he died. He lived only two hours after bringing him home from the nursing home. I still haven’t written it up. Nor did I finish it. The last hour was difficult to write without having PTSD symptoms. I never wrote it. Tonight I was thinking about the last time I saw him before he died. It wasn’t as painful as it once was. I also wrote a lot about him in 2014 in the blogs that I read. That was when he had a GI bleed and his hydrocele surgery. I didn’t write in detail about his illnesses because it is my blog and feel that I should be writing more about my feelings than him. He was the source of my suicidality for a long time. Now that he is gone, I am less suicidal. Don’t get me wrong, I still get suicidal. It’s just that his joking and torturing that made me want to die is gone. He just made you feel like a nobody. And that is how I felt whenever he was around. I also felt like I didn’t matter, that his needs were more important than mine, because they were. He had to come first and if he didn’t, he got so mad. That was how he was. And unfortunately, I miss the bastard.