Tag: disability

Ankle Chronicles 5

by Midnight Demon, posted in chronic physical pain, medical, physical pain

Ankle Chronicles 5

I overdid things today, big time. My foot has been throbbing since I came home at two. I knew after I went downstairs to get the mail it would be the last trip I would make for the day as my ankle just said a big fuck you. I am feeling out of sorts and just maybe going a little nuts as I keep thinking my foot is talking to me. It is really angry at me and I keep wondering why the hell didn’t I sit down more today while waiting for the stupid bus. I had a half hour to kill. I was bored. So I walked to the meat market thinking I would get some steak tips for dinner but they were really expensive. It’s just my mother and I. I don’t need like fifteen pounds of tips. That was all they had and they were like twenty bucks. I suppose I could have frozen them now that I think about it. But I knew I would forget about them and I would be the only one to eat them as my mother doesn’t like steak anymore.

I have been writing in my journal about how angry my foot is at me and I keep thinking why. I know it is because I stood for a long time, but I am wondering why I had to have nerve damage in this foot. Compared to my right, it’s like it is louder than my right. I hardly notice that I feel my foot. My left is constantly screaming hello, I am here!! But that is it. I can’t talk back to it. I can’t tell it to shut up. I can’t tell it to go shove off. At times, I feel like it isn’t my own, that it belongs to someone else. I am not feeling that way now. I just want it to stop throbbing and burning. From my ankle bone down to my toes is a constant, heated throb. And I don’t mean heated as in upset. I mean heat as in hot fire. My ankle and foot feel like it is on fire. It’s not, I can assure you but it just feels like it is. I so want to take some Neurontin tonight and I might. Now the stabbing pains start. Someone is stabbing me with a knife in between the bones on the top of my foot. I can’t breath. The pain is really bad. I can’t move my toes anymore and that has set off some PTSD symptoms for me so I am in a hypervigilant state. I need to take some Ativan to calm me down. I would take some more pain meds but it’s too early. I just took my last dose about three hours ago. I am supposed to take the pills every six hours. I might be passed out from the pain but that is unlikely to happen with my anxiety being high. I have been listening to Mary Chapin Carpenter the past few hours to try and keep my mood even keel. I need to take something but I don’t know what to take. I am so distraught and the hopelessness has started to fill my soul. I need sleep. I need something to distract me from this pain.

I remember what my life was like before pain hit me. I was an active person. I was working. Now I have just become this hobbled person. I just can’t stand it. Every night it is the same thing. Every day I have to put my foot out of the blankets only to put them back in a little while later. No matter what I do there is no pleasing it anymore. I can’t even ice it because it just makes it very cold and screws up the nerve pain even more. I wish it was a clear case of CRPS but no, it’s got to be half a fricken case. A mild case. Or maybe not a case at all. Maybe this pain is all in my fricken head and I am crazy. I just know that I want to stop hurting. I want to be able to do stuff for more than a few minutes. I want to be able to walk without restraint. But that isn’t going to happen anymore. Hasn’t happen in three years and every time I push myself to go farther, it always backfires. Which sucks because the depression is lifting and I have all kinds of energy but no place to put it. I feel like such an imbecile.

Fuck it, I am taking my meds early. To hell with the consequences. I am in deep and serious pain that is driving me fucking nuts and I don’t care anymore.

PTSD is flaring

by Midnight Demon, posted in cauda equina syndrome

I took a fall last week, on my birthday. I didn’t think I did anything as I landed mostly on my butt and hip on the stairs. I just pretty much collapsed on the steps. Today my back is hurting and my left leg feels week. Also my thigh is twitching. All indicates that something happened. I don’t really want to have another MRI as the last one sucked but it’s the only way to know if I did something to my back. I am hoping it clears up by tomorrow because I really don’t want to end up in the ER on New Year’s eve. All of this worry and anxiety has flared up my PTSD symptoms with flashbacks of my second diagnosis. I keep hearing my surgeon tell me has never seen a disc fragment so big and that he has no clue how I was able to walk as my nerves were so compressed. I still don’t know how I was able to do it. I was working two jobs at the time and moving stuff in the lab as we had a freezer go down. It was a nightmare. Plus we had two interns from Mexico come to help out the lab and I was no good to either of them because I had to have surgery a month into their arrival. All of these memories keep flooding my brain. I really think I reherniated my L2/L3 disc again. It would account for my symptoms. What a way to ring in the New Year with potential surgery. I will be screwed and most likely permanently disabled if this happens.

To say I am scared is an understatement. I keep moving my foot and toes to reassure myself that things still work. I haven’t done any leg raises because that is hard to do with the laptop on you, LOL. I will do them when I get off. If I didn’t have thigh pain, I probably wouldn’t be worried but that is how everything started with my second go round in the operating room. The surgeon missed a fragment his first go round with my nerves and my left leg became fuzzy and then weak and then non-functioning all within three days time. So now I am at the fuzzy stage and I am freaking out!!

This is what I have to live through and I swear if it is CES again, I am not going to live through it. I will kill myself because I would rather die than be permanently disabled. I will have to have a fusion done to stabilize my spine and I have had too many people have them done and something go wrong. They never recovered and never was able to return to work. I don’t want that to happen to me. I know I am not working now but why should I go through the agony of losing what I regained again to being worse than what I am now. Totally not going to happen. I am too smart to let them talk me into a fusion. I just won’t. I rather be dead.

night time blog

by Midnight Demon, posted in blogging, cauda equina syndrome, CES, depression

Night time blog

I did nothing for my birthday. I stayed home listening to the rain fall and watched TV. My family came over and we had some laughs and some cake. I didn’t shower like I wanted to. I fell down the stairs and it kind of wiped out anything else that I was going to do. I am hurting and it’s worse now standing for even a few minutes. I will probably shower tomorrow.

I got a lot of presents that were just for my birthday, not Christmas like it usually goes. My Aunt gave me a Euro in a necklace that nearly choked me because the chain was too small. I like it but the chain didn’t fit right and was aggravating me the whole time I was wearing it. I usually to not wear necklaces. I will wear my Claddaugh ring, but that is only because I lost my high and junior high rings. Our middle school gave out rings because most of the graduates never finish high school. My starting freshman year was about 250 kids. Only about 150 graduated. Granted some had transferred to other schools (like my sister and a couple of my friends moved out of town) but the majority either dropped out because it was too hard or because they got pregnant. One of my friends didn’t graduate because she just couldn’t keep up with school work.

I edited my book for hopefully the last time before the editor sees it. I put in the indents in the paragraphs. I was reading it as I was going along, well, maybe not reading, skimming. And it still gives me chills on certain parts of the book. I know that part of it is because the book is so personal. I talk about every aspect of my life that has to do with my suicidality and the road to seeing therapists and psychiatrists. It was not an easy book to write. I do hope that someone can relate to some of the things I write in it. I know the title alone is a paragraph but I had to get CES into the title. There are no other books out there that deal with Cauda Equina Syndrome, not in the personal sense. People need to know about this syndrome because not all back pain is the same. And back pain can progress to CES if not taken cared of properly or if further injury makes it worse. I try to cover all aspects of getting CES in the book but I am not everyone. What happened to me, might not happen the same way to another person, even if we both had the same disc problem. CES is tricky to understand and most doctors do not know how to treat it, if they are able to recognize it in the first place. And this goes to radiologists too because they are the ones that interpret your MRI’s. They call something wrong because they haven’t seen it and you are fucked.

So this is how my day was. Nothing interesting. Except for the fall down a few steps. OUCH!

Reflections on the Year

by Midnight Demon, posted in blogging, chronic physical pain, depression, psychache, suicide, suicide attempt

Reflections on the year

This time last year I was deeply in physical pain and psychological pain and in the throws of a yet another nasty depression. I was asked to do a writing project for a friend and I didn’t think I would make it. I was sure by this time, on this date, I would be dead. And if I happened to be alive on Dec 17th, I would surely die by my own hand. I promised myself that if things were still the same, that this heaviness that I felt in my chest were not gone, that the pain in my ankle/leg/foot were not decreased, I was going to end things, permanently.

This year, things are still not a hundred percent better but things are less. My depressions are bearable when they hit. I have Wil Wheaton to thank for giving me the tidbit that my brain is not working right and that things will pass and be better tomorrow. My suicidality, though still a deep part of my soul, has decreased to the point where it is just thoughts I ruminate over and then give up. I figured out with the help of some books that this is always going to be a struggle for me, that my depression and pain are always going to be there. But like a former therapist said to me, you don’t always have to act on what you are feeling. These days, I am a little bit more hopeful about the future, though I don’t always see it. I still get hopeless every once in a while but it doesn’t last forever like it once did. I find that writing my blog has been a life saver for me. Mr. Hyde hasn’t come around in almost two months now and for that I am grateful. I have people in my life that have helped me see that I can succeed, even though I am disabled. It took a long time for me to accept my disability. Took longer to grieve it. But eventually, when I realized that part of the depression and suicidality was the grief I was not mourning, I took it apart piece by piece and wrote about it. There was nothing I could do about the pain except wait for the pain meds to work and for that I grateful that I have it. Also emailing my psychiatrist about the depth I was in helped as well. I don’t know if I am still going to have the same doc in 2014 and that scares me. I know that getting pain medication is going to be harder to get with new doctors and even harder as government rules will dictate the rules for prescribing rather than relying on clinical judgments. I don’t know what I will do then. But that is not my worry for today.

I don’t know what brought about the change. Maybe it was having a daily contact with someone miles away from me, urging me to continue my writing and work on a book. Maybe it was a little of owning the depression and taking charge of it, that it doesn’t have to rule my life like it would love to. I just know that I feel differently than I did a year ago. And though the impulses to kill myself are still a threat, I have a therapist that is behind me like a fungus that won’t go away. I really doubt without her countless sessions I would still be here. She really has been the one person that I can always rely on to be there when my mood is dark and gray. We might have our arguments about treatment but I know that she believes in me that things aren’t always going to be so bleak. I guess I have more people in my life now that believe that I can do things where last year I didn’t think I was going to survive my own lethality. I have been tested a few times this year to end my life. I have made several plans before today to end my life this year. My therapist can account for that. Though I have only had one psychotic break this year that required hospitalization. My hospitalizations have been fewer in recent years than they were in the past. I think that is more because I don’t think they help as they once did and that is a shame. You don’t get the care I once relied on.

Lastly, I have to thank country music for without listening to the same songs over and over for hours of despair, I doubt I would be able to make it though the horrible nights when I couldn’t sleep, either because of pain or despair or both. It is the one genre that I can relate to every song and let my brain do the escaping when I was writhing in agony. From songs like “water tower” by Jason Aldean to “Crash my party” by Luke Bryan, to Taylor’s endless songs and lastly to the other artists that I have followed but are not so popular, Casey James and Cassadee Pope. Without music, the heart just doesn’t heal from pain.