Pain

I've been trying to get back to "normal" life this week, but it's been hard because my back has been in one of it's worst hurting periods ever. I don't know why, as time as gone on I find I understand less about why my back hurts instead of more. It's been affecting my sleep (most nights I spend the whole night sleeping on my back on the heating pad, not a good thing but it's the only way to get any sleep), I've increased my ibuprofen use to about 8 a day (way higher than usual and my blood pressure is not happy). I've had some good periods, yesterday wasn't bad for most of the day (as long as I kept up a regular schedule of plenty of ibuprofen), but then I've had non-stop pain days also, those days are very depressing. You know those 1 to 10 pain scales that medical people ask you about, well I've been seeing that # 10 much too often lately. I did go to acupuncture on Monday and felt great for a number of hours, then I went home and dozed off while reading in the late afternoon so waited too long to take my ibuprofen and woke up in agony. Once it takes hold it's harder to get rid of.

I realized that I was starting to project into the future about this pain. What happens when we go to Mexico if I am in this kind of agony, especially as we are going to have some monstrous travel days (2 flights and a 4+hour drive). I was picturing my whole summer being pretty much ruined which was really depressing since I just got my summer reprieve! Then in my support group yesterday we talked about how to get through chemo, one day, one hour, one minute at a time and I realized I needed to take my own advice and go back to thinking about my back pain that way. Just get through this moment, don't worry about future ones. It's hard, when I am really hurting it's so easy to go down that abyss of despair, but I think it actually makes the pain worse.

You know I've been dealing with this chronic pain for almost 2 years now, you'd think I'd be better at this by now. It's like reinventing the wheel over and over again. And as soon as the pain leaves and I feel good, it's all "out of sight out of mind" and I forget about all my good intentions.