Out of the Blue

For the past week, I've stayed at a ten on the pain-scale. Monday started out well - my knee felt good, the rest of me was fairly level. Things took a sharp nosedive with an extra dose of emotional distress on Tuesday morning, but I shook that off fairly quickly. It was just a confirmation of what I already suspected; that a person I had spent a lot of time loving had become someone I didn't know anymore. I didn't want to accept it, but denial only lasts so long. I've spent the past three months mourning the loss of that love and it is time to move on. So - I'm doing that; living life, focusing on being happy and getting well. Wednesday morning, I got up and tried to leash my dog to go for a walk, and I threw my back out. Immediate agony flared across the L5 region. I couldn't straighten up. So I did the bent-double duck-foot shuffle to the couch and pushed myself upright. SCREAMING pain. INCREDIBLE pain. Fortunately, my seventeen-year-old was home and she hel...

One summer, when I was about six years old, I was wading barefoot in the spring below the house when I stepped on a shard of glass. It pierced my foot about two inches below my fourth and fifth toes on the right. Because the water was so cold, I didn't notice right away - it felt like I'd stepped on a sharp stone. I kept wading, kept playing, until the ache became persistent. Sitting on the stone steps that led down to the spring, I saw a small cut which had been washed clean by the water. It hurt when I pressed on it, but there was very little blood. I put my shoes back on and went on with my day. I didn't tell anyone. I knew only too well what happened when you told people about things like that. They wanted to probe around in the wound and make sure nothing was left in there. In my short life, I'd already had countless splinters dug out of various appendages, and I was not eager to experience that again. Besides, it was just a little cut. I kept quiet, but the pain...

I have been plumbing the depths of my soul looking for some words of motivation or of hope. All I come up with is flat, meaningless platitudes. I tell myself things will get better. I tell myself I will learn how to cope with this pain. I tell myself that things aren't as bad as they seem. I am such a bad liar. A few years ago at Lent, I gave up lying to myself. It has become a habit to be personally truthful and I think that for the most part, that's a good thing. But it leaves me unable to self-comfort. I can't tell myself little lies and believe them, the way I used to. But I can still live in denial. It is a comfortable blend of not examining where things are or admitting how desperate I feel. I don't have to lie to myself to do this, I just don't spend time in self-reflection. I avoid examining how I feel. I push myself into other things; mindless things, like marathons of The Walking Dead or Supernatural, or hours of mowing my lawn - using the riding ...

One of the lovely gifts of RA is the accompaniment of chronic pain. People with RA suffer from stiffness, swollen joints, and extreme fatigue, too, but the pain is really something special. Sometimes - much of the time for me, thankfully - it is like background noise, that muzak you hear in K-Mart but don't really listen to unless the same song plays over and over, and it's a cover of something by Michael Bolton that you really hate. Most of the time, it's a down-beat version of some easy-listening song from the late seventies that is droning and annoying but possible to ignore. Yesterday, I had one of those screaming Michael Bolton days. Words aren't enough to describe the kind of pain I had yesterday, but I'm going to take a stab at it, because hey, why not? And also because a huge part of being honest about life and about my disease is not sugarcoating anything, especially to myself. It started with a low-grade fever, as it so often does. Around 10 am, my voc...

Hi. My name is Amy, and I am - well, I'm lots of things. And I'm not very fond of labels. Let me just say that I'm 42 years old. I have one failed marriage under my belt, a couple of bad relationships, and one really good one, which is ongoing. I like hiking, reading, writing, and playing the bongos. Until last year, I was in reasonably good health. Then, from out of nowhere, came near-constant pain, stiffness, and exhaustion. Lots of other things were going on at the same time - grief for my father, who was recently deceased, severe work-related stress, and kidney stones. But after the work-stress eased a little and the grief mellowed just a bit, after the kidney stones had passed, I still didn't feel good. My back was agony, my hips screamed, and my knees crunched with each step. My hands, wrists, elbows, and shoulders ached constantly. And I was tired - oh so tired - I could fall asleep within minutes, no matter where I was or what I was doing. It went on this way f...