Four years isn't that long in the span of a person's life. It is the average time you spend at college if you go or the time you spend in High School. It is half the time you spend in school before high school. Heck some marriages don't last 4 years. It is a short time until you spend 4 years in pain every day. Not one single day has gone by during the last four years without pain. There is a constant level of pain in my body every day. It never gets better than a 5 and lately it hasn't been better than a 6 on thew pain scale. That ranks it as moderate to severe range of pain. That is where it starts out and it gets worse as I do more activity through the day.
Think about that for a minute. For most people pain comes and goes. You stub your toe or drop something on your foot. It hurts like hell then goes away. Mine doesn't. I am not unique. I am not an anomaly. I am one of millions of people who live with chronic pain. It affects 100% of my daily life, from sleeping to eating to working. That is most of my day. I try and sleep, waking up to such wonderful twinges of pain shooting from my spine. Finally I get up and have some coffee.. Take my meds and start work. I sit for at least 8 hours in front of my computer working. Most days it feels like someone has shoved a red hot poker into my spine while I work. I try to ignore it and fight the pain. This drains me and by the end of my 8 hour shift I am literally drained. I have no energy left to do much of anything. No going out for dinner or a movie. Hell movie prices are through the roof and those seats suck, though I do admit they are much better than any seat in any doctor's office I have been in. Trying to make dinner after work sucks. It hurts to stand at the counter and cut stuff up or cook in the pan on the stove. Trying to get stuff in and out of the oven is an experience in pain. I have come up with many different ways of doing stuff to avoid bending. If I drop something I either have to get my wife to grab it or the fur babies come running and we get to play tug of war with it. A lot of the time when I finish cooking I am in so much pain I can't eat what I just cooked. Great way to diet. Hurt so bad you don't eat. Too bad I can't seem to lose some weight.
So how do you get through life when just about anything you do causes more pain ? You grit your teeth and bear it as best you can. You try and plan ahead for things so you can try and save up some energy if you need to go anywhere. Doing stuff at a moments notice is not recommended, at least if you want to get through the rest of the day. I work from home most days but a couple of weeks ago I got a call from the boss. I needed to come in NOW and teach a class to a group of five people. No notice at all. That 4 hours spent at the office just about killed me. I took my back brace, my TENS unit, my meds, a 1.2 gallon of lemonade and a pillow. Wound up not needing the pillow, didn't get much time to sit. The ride home was horrible. My spine felt on fire. I came home and went to bed crying from the pain. Great way to spend the day.
There is so much I want to do but just can't because of the pain. We bought our house about 12 years ago. I built beautiful raised beds along the sides and the front of the house for flowers. I loved to garden. I even made beds along the walk way up to the front door. I dug out the hard, red clay and replaced it with a mixture of topsoil and cow manure compost. Who needs Miracle Grow when you have cow manure, Mother Natures Miracle Grow ? Along 1 side of the front porch I put in two small butterfly bushes. This quickly turned into one huge multiplant with mammoth leaves. The 2nd picture is the leaves after two years. At that time the plants were over 6 feet tall. The picture below that is the butterfly bushes at one year old. I ahd a huge Hibiscus plant that came back year after year for almost 7 years with Jumbo red flowers. Now I have a jungle full of weeds. Can't really do much gardening when you can't bend or stand for long.
A couple of my favorite rose bushes
I would really love to get my garden back under control. Part of it is that the idiots who do the grass cutting have destroyed a lot of the landscape timbers I used to form the borders. They have knocked them out of place and run over them with their lawnmowers. I knew I should have used some rebar stakes to hold them in place. We have had 4 different landscaping companies or maybe it is five and they all have sucked. My yard used to be nice and lush and now the grass looks nasty any time of the year. Too bad I have no voice or choice on who does it, I would sure change that. But the actual garden part is all mine and it looks like crap as well. I have no more roses or any flowers really. They have died off and weeds have taken over. Apparently cow manure and topsoil can grow some real enormous weeds, heck last year I found a dandy lion that was over 2 feet across the leaves. A little salt and vinegar bath killed that but I need to get out there and take just about everything out then rebuild the walls with something stronger than landscape timbers so the landscape company idiots will not be able to knock them apart. The big problem is that is just about impossible with my back.
I also have stuff to do on the inside of the house. I need to get some bookcases built to hold our thousands of books. We have them scattered through out the house in boxes now. Just about every room, heck that is wrong, every room holds boxes of books except the bathrooms. I need to do so much house stuff including clearing out our back bedroom so we can actually use it as a bedroom if we need to. Now it is the junk room. We went from a junk drawer to a junk room. Started out as extra storage and just got out of hand. All of that is out of reach. My back makes doing any of those things just about impossible.
I am so tired of seeing how much I can no longer do. Hell I am tired of trying to do stuff and my back saying sorry, nope, we aint doing that. What the hell did I ever do to deserve this ? What exactly is this a punishment for ? Whatever it is for I think I have paid for any past bad behavior. I want my life back. I am tired of having to leave family get togethers early or missing out on them altogether. It sucks. I want to be able to go to friends house and sit down and play cards but I can't even do that. I am so wiped out by the end of the work day I am good for nothing else. I am sick and tired of my pain. I am sick and tired of waking up tired because I slept like crap thanks to jolts of pain throughout the night. I am tired of falling down thanks to my legs just not supporting me. I am tired of dropping stuff because my spine is getting even worse and now has issues in the cervical area as well. I am really tired of doctors trying to tell me that a pain level of 5 or 6 is okay and that I shouldn't hope for more than that. That is freaking bogus. I would like to see how they like it if they had to put up with a pain level of 5 or 6 all the time. I bet by the end of 1 week they would have changed their minds if it even took that long.
You know the more I think about it the more pissed off I get. Why is it okay to leave pain patients in pain ? Who the hell came up with 5 or 6 as an acceptable pain level ? Why isn't more research being done to help people in chronic pain ? Why is it okay for doctors to treat us all as criminals when what the majority want is to be pain free or at least to get it down to a level that allows for a better quality of life. Right now my quality of life is CRAP. I am not alone in this. There are around 100 million people who live with chronic pain. Isn't it time to fix this branch of medicine so that patients can get their lives back ? We need to do something about this and quickly. We need to step up and start to demand our rights. The way we are being treated is criminal. In any other branch of medicine, treating only half the issue would get a doctor slapped with a malpractice lawsuit yet in Pain Management it is the freaking NORM ! That is completely wrong. No other branch of medicine requires their patients to jump through hoops just to get some treatment. No other branch of medicine has so many politicians writing laws that practically criminalize patients. I am sick and tired of this. I want my freaking rights. I want to be treated as a human and not a criminal.