RapierFugue
Posts: 4740
Joined: 3/16/2006 From: London, England Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: LinnaeaBorealis I admit it being pain free sounds like heaven to me. I admit it I wish that I could find a Dr here in the States like yours, RF. I admit it part of the problem is that I tend to downplay the pain, so they kinda don't believe me. I admit I'm "lucky", in that my GP has seen me in the middle of an "attack" (when the whole thing goes into spasm and my world sort of ends) and has also seen me, as a result, lapsing in an out of consciousness due to blacking out from pain, then popping back in and screaming my arse off, then blacking out, then screaming, etc ... so I don’t have to have that dopey “now how much does it hurt?” convo one sometimes has to with doctors. I rate a 9/10 on the FLACC scale and somewhere around the 93rd percentile on the other scale, during attacks, falling to 6/10 and 70-ish % when not, i.e. even a “good” day for me is someone else’s idea of shit. My GP's comment after he'd injected me to stop the attack he witnessed 8 years ago was "good god man - I swear you aged 20 years, right in front of my eyes!". "Spinal stuff smarts a bit, Doc" was my reply :) I admit I’m totally tripping balls :) I don’t think I’m going to have this much again though coz I’m not really functional – the tablets say “do not operate heavy machinery” - I wouldn’t want to operate a sheet of paper ATM. It is amazing how long-term pain affects everything in your life. I’m basically a fairly jolly sort of chap by nature, without a great deal of self-pity or self-obsession, but there are odd days ( for me usually about one day a month) when it really gets one down, purely and only coz one gets fed up being in constant, 24/7 agony, plus the sleep deprivation is a bugger all of its own. I admit those sort of events & conditions tend to either make or break a person – it’s been 25 years now and I’m fairly sure it made me. I wasn’t much of a “battler” before that, but I certainly had to become one :) I admit I'd advise you to play it up as much as possible - for one thing there's no excuse for anyone to suffer too much in today's clinical environment and for another you can always not take something if you aren't in pain that day, whereas if you are and there's nothing to take you're proper rooted.
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