I have been promising this post since monday. But I have always been too tired or in too much pain to write it or post it. I am going to start this tonight but it is late for me and I may go to bed before finishing so it may take several days.
The fact is before I even went to my pain doctor to tell me the result I knew things were bad. In the morning I can only sit in my chair for at most two hours before I have to get up and do something that helps relieve the pain. Mostly that is going to bed. I don’t sleep just lay their reading news or telling my self stories I create hoping to fall asleep. Randy sent me a headband with speakers but that just interferes with my own thoughts and keeps me awake. It was a good try and I bought one for Ron and he loved it. I will give this one to him. I go to bed and lie there only to get up and sit for a couple of hours to have the pain again overtake me. Once the pain gets that bad it is 10 to 15 minutes at most before I have to leave the desk and simply walk around or do something because the pain gets so bad so fast.
Also Tupac is on the desk being as close to me as he can. He is not lying on the towel I leave down for him but as close to the keyboard as possible even at time placeing his paws on the on the keybord hitting random keys. He wants to be as close to me as possible since Ron has been away so long. He feels he lost another human. I will be exciteed t0 see him react when Ron gets home on monday night.
So before the doctor told me the damage I knew something was badly wrong. So remember that even before I talked to the doctor I knew something had gone drasticly wrong. Sadly the MRI showed that.
Yup figured that would happen the pain levels are too high so I am going to bed. It is 8 PM my time.
It is now Saturday and I am trying hard to get this post done and out. But today my pain levels are very high and it is difficult to focus but I will do my best.
One of the things that the doctor told me was that my spine is no longer aligned; the disks are not lined up with each other but shifted to different degrees. Remember this was only the lower spine now they are going to MRI the upper spine. Second my spine has curved wrong. Then we got to the serious stuff. Degenerative discs, bulging discs, and discs so damaged that the nerves are outside the spinal channel. The arthritis is so advanced it is deep / spread in each vertebra. She tried to explain all the medical terms. At one point she excused herself to go speak to the surgeon I see for spine shots. When she came back it was with bad news. He no longer thinks epidurals will help me in my lower spine and I need nuero surgeon to do back surgery. Crap I cannot afford that. I am losing my sight, Ron has to have eye surgery right away, and the van needs 2 grand in repairs. That doesn’t even include my eye surgery and the repairs on our home.
While I did not understand everything she said I so desperately wished Ron had been there as he often explained these things to me later, and I have forgotten some of it, the situation is I need an MRI of the upper spine as well, she has refered me to her prefered spianl nueraal surgenon. Then I will need spinal surgery as the state and federal government won’t let them increase my pain medication because I can’t take the fentanyl patches with my skin allergies. I am being squeezed into a surgery I cannot afford or seeking illegal drugs for relief to be able to function.
I remember when I started in this clinic in 2009. They looked at my MRI of my spine and gave me 75 gm of morphine twice a day. I asked it to be reduced to half that amount and it was and I could live normally. But after the opioid “crisis” the states started to inject non-medical legislators into the medical field to show they were tough on abuse and misuse of drugs. It got ever more crazy until my life went from normal and even being able to work for a few years to not even getting enough pain relief to sit in my desk chair and blog for an hour. Now the federal government is demanding it be restricted even further, as RFK Jr. taking steroids can work out in jeans. On the restrictions I can’t get enough relief to blog for any extended time of the day. I spend half of my awake time in bed instead of at my desk. I struggle to stand to do dishes. I just told Ron that I cannot clean the floors before he gets home as I tried and it left me in tears. Even with our lightweight, easy to use cleaning devices. The damage to my spine and the lack of medical relief have gotten that bad. This makes no sense to me. Why deny me the pain blocking medications that allow me to fuction semi normally. It simply makes no sense to me. Why put me in this state what is the goal?
Do you see my point? Why put me and people like me through this? Do they want us to use illegal means for relief, or do they want us to suffer to death and go away? Do they care about us at all as they make these rules? There is more things my pain doctor told me about my spine I did not list yet, things like protrusions, spikes hooking nerves, some thing she kept say stenoisis, and nerves being pinched between vertebrae. At one point she mentioned I have advance degerneritive disc, I so wish Ron was there as I understood so little of it, then came the but you need a neurosurgeon and back surgery to help you because the state and federal government won’t let us give you enough medical relief to have any life. I hate this regressive holier than thou republican elected officials that swallow all the illegal drugs they can get from their providers while denying us poor people relief for bigoted racist reasons and their personal gains.
I am sure I left things out. I had to take after talking to Ron a saved 30 miligarm instant relief morphine because I was going out of my mind. I try desperately to save extras so when the pain is so off the chart I can get relief. But with the new restrictions, how do I do that? Why do the people in power who have access to pill mills and who have no pain and want to just make a name for themselves while doing the very thing they legislate against try to hard to make the live so people like me so hard? And I am poor and scared. Hugs
Scottie's Playtime 