It’s Not All Peaches and Cream, F - Bombs and Alanis!
Here I lay at 1:00am. I can’t get comfortable. The RA has decided it wants to play and wakes me up. The pain from the RA is intense, raw and has been there all week. RA Guy says it best “ Imagine having all of your joints slowly pulled apart….Now, imagine not having to imagine it.”
It could be the humidity, it could be stress, it could be lack of sleep or it could just be. I lay here debating a muscle relaxer or pain pill. Also, how will I open those? My fingers aren’t working well, and despite begging for non child-proof caps on my scripts, I still have to deal with gripping and struggling with the child proof ones. Isn’t it ironic? Both the muscle relaxers and pain pills make me feel hungover, so I have to weigh the pain vs the side effects. This involves reviewing my calendar for the next day, assessing what kind of a day do I have? Do I need to cancel anything? Can I handle everything I plan to do? Do I cancel, and when I cancel do I tell the person why? Or do I not because sometimes that opens the door for conversations I just don’t always have the energy for. Conversations that often come with suggestions and advice (trust me, I stay on top of everything that may possibly provide relief). It also opens the door for teachable moments and awkward conversations. I am laying on ice packs and have a couple bags of frozen peas on my knees. My joints are so hot that the peas are probably cooked by now. I have rubbed in all the topical stuff my skin will take except for this new tube of stuff that I couldn’t open because the cap was to small and my fingers hurt to much to grip it. Isn’t it ironic? Nothing is touching this pain tonight.
It’s now 3:30am, I have stretched, I have done a meditation for pain (I highly recommend the app called Buddhify for a wide variety of topics). Now the F- bombs start. Isn’t it ironic? I review my To Do List. Do I just get up and slowly start moving? Do I continue to punch the pillows and drop F-bombs? Do I close my eyes and breathe through it? Do I get up and take a pill that will knock me out and potentially force me to call in sick, or do I choose to drag all day? Is this a long term flare? Is this it? Is this the time when the injections stop working? Have I been doing too much? Have I not been doing enough?
It’s now 4:22am. I think about my Mom, I take deep breaths, the kind that yoga teaches you. The healing kind. I list all I have to be grateful for and next thing I know, my alarm is waking me up. I love waking up to music. I hear Alanis Morissette singing her cover of The Police’s, King of Pain. Isn’t it Ironic?
