Tag: CRPS (formerly RSD)

Ankle Chronicles 10

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

I had to pick up my father’s prescription at the pharmacy today, which meant a lot of walking. It was only about four or five blocks from his apartment to the pharmacy but my ankle decided it wanted no part in it so rebelled. Then I guess the way I was walking to compensate, threw my opposite side hip out. I was not happy. I just wanted to sit and rest but I couldn’t because there was no place to really sit and I wasn’t going to sit on the ground. I get to his apartment and he isn’t there. I started panicking. He knew I was coming over. Then I saw his girlfriend coming towards his apartment. I was really starting to get worried. It’s not like him not to be home when he knows people are coming over. She went to the office while I waited in case he came home. Soon after she got on the elevator to go down, he came off the opposite elevator. I was happy but miffed. He says I should have called him, which next time I will. I see him every week at around the same time so I don’t know why he thought he could leave his apartment.

I had lunch over his place as he cooked and then I left. More walking to the train station. I was a little annoyed with the bus on the way there so decided to take the train home. The bus at the closer station to my house was late, which meant more standing on my already flared up ankle. I wasn’t sure if I would be able to walk the block and half home. But I sat on the bus and let it rest a little bit. It was a little better by the time I got to my stop but soon as I put weight on it, it flared right up again. I am not doing anything the rest of the day. I got my hair cut this morning and I had lunch thanks to daddio. I should be good for the next few hours until my stomach wants more food and then I will have to see if I really want to eat. I will have to go down the stairs to the kitchen which I know my ankle will just love (saying this sarcastically). I just hope I don’t have to go to the bathroom.

My father gave me peppers which I handed over to my mother. She loves green peppers. I do, too. She usually makes peppers and eggs which is alright. I used to love to eat them raw but lately, my stomach has been picky with raw vegetables so I have to eat them cooked. I don’t know why it bothers my stomach. I take a stomach pill that should protect my stomach and not cause any problems. But eating raw peppers causes me to get heartburn.

I started getting a little hyper this morning. I know I was really irritable when I was going to my father’s on the bus. The bus driver was being trained so was driving really slow and of course, every stop had a passenger to either pick up or drop off. Then we got to a busy square and there was a lady whose card wasn’t working. Must have been trying to make it work for more than five minutes and to me in my manic brain was forever. It drove me berserk because it held up the people behind her. I just wanted the bus to fricken go. I should have taken the fricken train but the bus stops near the pharmacy that I had to go to so I could do less walking. I was getting very annoyed that even Luke Bryan’s music wasn’t calming me down. I guess it was good that I walked as much as I did just to relieve the stress and agitation I was feeling, even though it caused me pain. I still feel annoyed and I don’t know why. I feel like I drank several cups of coffee when all I had was a cup of tea at like seven this morning. This manic stuff has got to stop eventually, right?

I took an Ativan because I am starting to feel desperate over my situation. I know that if I page my pdoc, she might suggest the hospital and I don’t want to be in the hospital. I am not homicidal or suicidal. I just feel really agitated and I don’t think they hospitalize you for that. I am not psychotic, even though I have been talking to my voices more. But they are my normal voices, not different ones. I am also not delusional or paranoid. I just am irritable and agitated. The most the ER would do is give me drugs to calm me down. I have drugs at home I can take. I don’t need to be in the ER to take their drugs or waste time there. I might take a trilafon if the Ativan doesn’t work. Least I am cooped up in my room with the AC on. I also took my pain meds for my ankle to calm it down. I am just so annoyed that I am in pain. Maybe the pain is what is causing the anxiety to shoot up. Not like that hasn’t happened before. I am just so tired of feeling like I am going out of my mind. I actually would love to be depressed right now because it is what I know best. I am not used to feeling like I am really nervous and agitated and anxious all at once.

Pain Rant 2

by Midnight Demon, posted in chronic physical pain, depression

Pain Rant 2

Last night around this time, I got a searing pain in my ankle. Tonight I am having the same pain. Yesterday I didn’t do anything. I didn’t leave the house or go up and down the stairs a million times. Nada. So this pain is weird. I don’t know if it is nerve pain or not. It’s so hard to tell because I am in pain all the time and this is the second night feeling the same pain at around the same time. I can’t stand when pain occurs, without warning. But today I walked a bit so I am expecting pain but not like this. It feels like I have been standing on my ankle too long.

The pain is sharp, like that of a knife cutting into me. It is most unsettling. I can’t move my ankle without severe pain and I already took my pain meds a couple of hours ago. I should not be having any pain at all, which is why I am thinking this is nerve pain. I suppose I should probably take my nerve pain meds to see if that calms this down. I hate taking them because I get the hungry horrors afterwards.

I also have been a bawling mess since I heard about the Sox manager having lymphoma and will not be managing the team for the rest of the year. It broke my heart to hear this news. I feel bad for him but I know he is in good hands. It was fortunate that his hernia surgery happened when it did because they discovered the mass during it. If he didn’t have the surgery, his chances for surviving would not be so great as it would still be undetected.

Sure the Sox have sucked all season and have been plagued with injuries and so forth but hearing this news just made me sadder than anything. And now I got to deal with this pain in my ankle and I don’t know what it is from. It’s swollen, but that is always the case. It’s in the same spot as it was last night and the same intensity of pain. I just want to cut off my ankle or just make some cuts into the ankle to relieve the pressure or at least give it a reason to fucking hurt. But I am too scared of causing more damage. I am afraid that if I do cut deep enough, I might nick a tendon and that would not be good. I hate being in so much pain. This pain is different than the pain I normally deal with. And it’s not like I can consult a doctor right now to deal with the pain. It’s way after business hours. I doubt they would be able to help me anyways other than saying to go to the ER or something. I doubt the pain will last that long. It’s already starting to fade, just as it did last night. I hate it when pain comes in spurts like this. It’s like when I get zaps on my feet, there’s nothing I can do but wait it out. Now my foot is starting to throb just like last night. I fucking hate this shit. I am so tired of being in pain every night. And now I got this new pain to deal with? Why the hell am I living? I was supposed to kill myself a month ago. I never got the chance because my fricken therapist and psychiatrist didn’t want me to go through with it. Fuckers. I really dislike them right now. I am glad my therapist is on vacation so I don’t have to deal with her. But I see my shrink on Monday. I don’t know why I bother seeing her. Meds aren’t helping my mood that much anymore. Sure, it is keeping the mood swings in check but that is all its doing. I wish the meds would help this pain that I am in. But the pain doesn’t last long and just causes bad throbbing in my foot when it leaves. How do you explain that to a doctor? Sometimes I think I am losing it, like it’s all in my head or something. Seriously question my sanity because the pain is so painful that it takes my breath away for fifteen minutes and then it dissipates and I am just left with throbbing. What the hell. I can’t deal with pain like this. I can take another pain pill in about an hour from now. What am I going to do until then? I am can’t stand the throbbing/vibrating that my foot is doing right now. I wish ibuprofen could help me. I would be taking handfuls of the stuff. But it doesn’t do shit.

The thing that is aggravating the most is that I haven’t moved in the last two hours. I have been in my bed, reading Harry Potter when the pain started. I could see if I was doing something like standing or walking or going down stairs, but I wasn’t. I was an inactive peapod. And all I did was flex my ankle and BOOM, pain! I fucking hate this shit. It’s a good thing I don’t know how to use a chainsaw or other power tools. My ankle would be seriously in trouble of being amputated.

I’m going to take some Ativan and hope that brings me some sleep without the bad dreams I had last night.

An Oxymoron

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

I had an interesting conversation with my psychiatrist tonight. She confirmed I am on the right meds and that comforted me. I told her I was a little hypo and she said to let her know how things go. She wasn’t going to make any changes and I wasn’t asking for one. These things need to ride themselves out, as I have learned over the years. Medication isn’t always the answer to every problem that you face.

My mood was all over the place today. I got really irritable and angry over someone’s comment that they left on my blog today. I don’t know why it bothered me so. I had a long conversation with the voices over this. It helped to air it out and once I did, I wasn’t as agitated. Then I got a stupid migraine and that made me scared. My face went numb within minutes and my eye felt like it was going to pop. I took my migraine pill and waited anxiously for the pain to subside. I had just started to read a research article when my eyes went blurry and the migraine started. I guess I will read that article tomorrow. I am not in the same mood I was in before the migraine hit. After the migraine subsided and I was feeling better, I read some more of Harry Potter. Hogwarts got me the escape I was looking for. Reading has been suggested by a doctor who does man therapy. If you look it up, it is pretty dumb. But men need something stupid to be able to laugh at themselves and break up their manliness. I know I do at times. I don’t know if his particular therapy has helped men but I took his suggestion of reading a book to escape to relax.

I also told my pdoc about my sleeping habits as of late. Three to four hours a night I have been getting, which doesn’t help someone with Bipolar illness. I am lucky I can sleep during the day to try and catch up but I don’t always. Sometimes napping causes more trouble. I never feel rested unless I have a six hour nap. I usually am able to get one over the weekends usually. I don’t know why that is. I tend to sleep better during day time hours than at night anyways. I am a night owl. The funny thing is, I was never really able to work a night shift. By 4 or 5, I was so tired that I needed sleep. And if I got it on my break, I usually slept for an hour, which was against the rules. One time I think I slept for two hours and my supervisor wasn’t happy. But I no longer work so I can stay up till whatever time and sleep all day if I want to.

Today is my therapist’s birthday so I will be texting her a lot. I will stop once she texts back a “thank you”. I can be a pain in the ass, too! She always makes a big deal out of my birthday so it’s payback.

My ankle is really hurting me for all the walking I did today. I have a bum ankle due to nerve damage that I got when a disc exploded in my back. The disc compressed the nerve that controls the muscles in my ankle and foot. I never was able to regain the strength in my foot after surgery. That was 14 years ago. If I didn’t get strength back in the first two years, I am certainly not going to now. What I am left with is pain due to a pain syndrome no one can identify. Some have called it complex regional pain syndrome, others have just called it tendonitis. But if it was tendonitis, rest and ice should have cured it by now and I have been resting it for three years. The pain has gotten a little better but on days like today where I was walking too much, it flares up and is hard to settle down without pain medication. I don’t know why they call it pain medication when the meds are supposed to relieve your pain, not cause it. Just an oxymoron, I suppose.

The article I was going to read before my migraine made it impossible was on the language of suicide. I am a suicidologist from the inside out. I love studying about suicide and read everything I can about the subject. I have the experience to go with it as I have attempted more than a few times. That is why I write this blog. It helps to write out my suicidal thoughts and feelings I am having in the moment. I know that if I don’t write about them, I am as good as dead. After I write my morose feelings, I usually send them to my pdoc and therapist, well sometimes just my therapist as I am afraid of sending them to my psychiatrist. I sent her a goodbye email once and that ended poorly. She sectioned me and I spent the next three weeks in the hospital. It wasn’t fun. The police came and when they couldn’t find me because the ambulance had already taken me to the hospital, they broke into my house by smashing a window. I was very upset. So I am hesitant to send my pdoc my suicidal writings.

It has been at least a month since my last writings. I haven’t really felt suicidal since I gave up the day I was going to kill myself. My therapist and psychiatrist were against the idea of me dying. Go figure. I still am angry with them for keeping me here. I had everything planned out, sort of. I knew how I was going to die, but I just didn’t know where. I didn’t want a family member to find me so that sort of kept me here. But the writing that I was doing before I gave up my date were my one outlet. Now they are gone and I don’t know if I will be that productive ever again.

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!