Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

(This was going to be a quick note about how I'm doing, but it turned into a long ramble about pain and drugs.)

I have no idea why I woke up this morning with "Lawyers, Guns, and Money" firmly wedged in my brain. (I do know why a little later "Octopus's Garden" started alternating with it.)

Boring "how I'm doing" stuff that I put here for the folks who worry about my when they don't hear from me (and when I fail to show up at rehearsals): I'm not doing all that great, and yesterday either I screwed up the timing of my drugs or the day just wasn't going to work out no matter what I did. I started off with pretty severe pain from my hips down, bad enough to reach for the drugs. The drugs helped for a few hours, and I actually got important to-do-list items done that were days overdue (like, ah, paying my auto insurance premium, which was overdue), and then the pain came back along with fatigue. This time the pain wasn't as bad as it had been earlier, but I knew I wasn't going to continue doing stuff without more drugs, and I've missed a lot of rehearsals lately and there's a wedding gig coming up, so I took the drugs at a time that I hoped would make them make me able to get to rehearsal. It almost worked, in that I got everything ready and almost felt well enough to get behind the wheel, but it didn't work well enough, because I didn't quite feel up to driving until a quarter to ten. Rehearsal runs from eight to ten, and the location of last night's rehearsal was an hour from my house. Then I got all frustrated and sulky.

To backtrack a little: I don't rate pain on a one-to-ten scale, partly because I've never been sure whether the folks asking me to do so mean a linear scale or a logarithmic one, and partly because I'm usually too busy trying to figure out what the pain is going to do to my plans to figure out what number to assign to it. So for me there's "If I find a tourniqet and a circular saw before the drugs take effect, the arm is fucking coming off," which thankfully hasn't happened in a while (there's a table saw in the basement BTW); and there's, can't-think-straight pain, and below that is all-I-can-think-about-is-the-pain and "I can't stand this"; then there's "I'm miserable, miserable and unproductive, and I can't even sleep," and "I'm miserable, maybe if I sleep I'll feel better, why can't I get to sleep?" (the first means I'll take drugs and possibly sleep, the second doesn't hurt quite enough for me to realize I need the drugs, so I stupidly try to out-stubborn the pain and fail). If I'm alert enough to pay attention to what I'm feeling, there's also, "I should not have to put up with this, I should take something," and also, "Okay, this hurts a lot but I'm not sure it's bad enough to warrant putting narcotics in my system" -- the problem is that there's also, "I can stand this if I have to but I won't get anything done, though I might be able to sleep, so if I need to get things done I'd better take the drugs anyhow," and I often don't realize that as quickly as I should. Below that are, "Wow, this hurts", "Wow, pain is tiring", "hurts enough that I'll limp when crossing the street", "I forgot that muscle hurt until I tried to use it", "Huh, this hurts" (distinct from "wow"), and the all-too rare "Okay, this is a bit uncomfortable" and the elusive, only one day and one afternoon in the past seven years or so, "Something feels different ... oh, nothing hurts!". The point of this paragraph is not pain-dicksizing, but to provide the context for the next paragraph...

I've got a problem dealing with the "I won't get anything done unless I take drugs" level. Because I see the narcotics (Vicodin when I had health coverage and thus had a doctor to prescribe it; Canadian OTC codeine now, which does not work as well and comes with caffeine which does unfortunate things to me) as "the scary drugs". The drugs one has to worry about building up a resistance to, which would be bad. The drugs one could possibly become addicted to, which would be easier to fix but still annoying. The drugs the government gets all funny and suspicious about. Fortunately that class of drugs (codeine, hydrocodone, and oxycodone) don't make me feel loopy or spacey or high, nor do they make me crash (though if the pain is all that's keeping me up, they'll let me crash), but they still count as The Big Guns, the drugs I'm nervous about. So I've got this idea that to take narcotics, the pain has to "be bad enough to deserve the scary drugs". And when the pain isn't "bad enough", it feels like I'm ... "cheating" or something ... to take them. So y'all can see the problem when the pain isn't bad enough on its own for me to feel I need the narcotics, but I'm not going to do the things I need to do if I don't take them. I wait too long. I try "resting just a little while to see if I feel better". I sometimes go four or five days telling myself, "Once I sleep, maybe I'll feel well enough to do things," before I finally realize what an idiot I've been, and take the drugs. If what I need to do is important enough and urgent enough, such as a gig (or, if I've missed too many rehearsals lately and a gig is coming up, a rehearsal), I'll realize earlier on that I need to give in and take the scary drugs, but a lot of the time I just get farther and farther behind while sitting on the fence.

(From the other side, there's the pain that's bad enough to warrant taking drugs but mild enough that Ultram (tramadol), a non-narcotic pain drug, might take care of it. On the one hand the codeine is easier to replace than the Ultram -- I used to have a prescription for it; now I've got a friend's leftovers that sie illegally gave me, and for which I am extremely grateful. On the other hand, if I take the codeine instead out of fear of using up my stash of Ultram too quickly, then I'm using the scary drugs for pain that "isn't bad enough".)

Another problem is that I'm not always sure how much, or which, drug I'll need. Note that none of these drugs make the pain go away; they take it down to manageable levels. (The one time Vicodin made my fibromyalgia pain actually stop, I'd taken it for dental pain (after a wisdom tooth extraction) on a day when the fibromyalgia wasn't at "bad enough for drugs" levels.) Sometimes I discover that I should have taken a larger dose, or that I should have taken codeine instead of Ultram, but it's forty to sixty minutes after I took the first dose and will be another forty to sixty minutes before I feel the effects of whatever I take next. (Yes, I know published references say it should be twenty minutes. In my body they take longer to take effect, and don't last as long as they're supposed to, just like most other kinds drugs for as long as I can remember.) If the thing that was important enough to take drugs for despite not-quote-drug-worthy pain levels has a schedule, this can be a problem. If I'm up against "how long before I get too tired (or sleepy)" limits instead of wall-clock time constraints, it's a similar problem.

So yesterday I did realize I was going to need drugs to function, but either I screwed up the timing/dosage or I was doing worse than I realized and the drugs weren't going to get me there anyhow. Either way, I wound up missing yet another rehearsal, not going to anniemal's house, and not even really sleeping well. But I did pay bills that I'd meant to take care of over the weekend. And I finally folded the tunics that have been sitting on the drying rack since a couple days after Pennsic, and put them away in the garb chest (a large Rubbermaid bin). And I wrote back to the folks at MAD to say that I'd like to play bass for their fall show, and will try, but that I wasn't certain whether my body was up to it. But I didn't restring either guitar that needs it, and I didn't get where I'd planned to go.

Today my lower back hurts a little less but my legs hurt a lot more, my neck hurts, and my arms are stiff. I'm going to try to get out of the house anyhow though. Wish me luck. My left thigh hurts intensely enough to warrant codeine on its own (I'm pretty sure my upper thigh is too thick to cut through with the table saw, BTW) which you'd think would make the decision easy, but I can't help thinking, "I took codeine twice yesterday; if I take it today will I be using it too much?" Overthinking: my curse. (Well one of my curses. There's also that were-catfish thing.)

I need to do something though. I haven't seen anniemal since Pennsic, and I haven't seen Perrine since before Pennsic (she's at anniemal's and syntonic_comma's house), I need to try to de-clutter one of the bedrooms enough to have a houseguest Monday night, and I've lost track of how many people I owe email. (I'd like to catch up on LJ comments as well, but really that isn't as high a priority as the rest of the list.)

Hmm. This isn't meant to be whiny. I don't feel like whining, despite being frustrated, cranky, and in pain. What it's supposed to be is an examination of a particular bit of upfuckedness in my head that gets in the way of my dealing with my body, and enough explanation of the context for that to make sense, along with a status update for friends who worry about me. But I wrote enough about pain that it's probably at least a little "woe is me" by default. Oh well, whine-avoidance would be nice but I'm not going to worry about it right now.

[Edit: This particular flaw in how I cope with pain isn't new, nor is my awareness of it. I've been aware that I do this and that it's a problem, but have not yet managed to fix it. Still working on that. And other things. There must be a way to retrain myself to a more useful pattern.]