Care To Feel My Pain?
I was never a sick person until all of this hit me a couple of years ago.
The trigger? Pick one. I drank filtered lake water on a survival camping trip. I had two serious cases of food poisoning, one which sent me to the ER for help to stop the constant vomiting. Of course the staff wouldn’t listen to me about what made me sick, insisting it could not have been the salad I ate because no one gets sick from greens- shortly before everyone did begin to get sick from bad spinach and lettuce. I had two nasty spider bites that caused my leg to swell and left a bruise the size of a grapefruit.
Go even further back in my history and it could have been exposure to the polluted waters of Kowloon Bay. Or working in the Great Ape enclosure and Monkey House at the National Zoo. Or cleaning animal cages and human restrooms for the years I spent trying to put myself through school.
I’m a freelance writer with no insurance. Insurance doesn’t matter, since even when I did have a good policy, attended several specialists, no one ever helped me manage either the pain or the symptoms. Often too sick to work, my arms lined with bruises from testing, I came away with a stack of bills and a bullshit guess at what might be wrong. Patients with a list of symptoms as long as mine are considered crazy or a nuisance. Or both.
I suffer draining painful effects from my illness, which remains undiagnosed. Horrible stabbing stomach pains, nagging dull aches over my appendix, severe swelling and a feeling like being constantly kicked in the tailbone. Intense pain that lasts for sometimes twelve hours a day. That’s a small sampling. Pills don’t help it. There is no comfortable position to take for relief.
In spite of this, I still have to work, clean the house and try to keep up a schedule of running, yoga and other physical routines. Surprisingly, exercise sometimes helps when nothing else will. As does the feeling of getting something done, anything done, so I don’t fall even farther behind in my life. You think you don’t feel like doing your workout today? You have no idea and no excuse.
I have to sleep ten hours a day to be able to be minimally functional. This makes free time and fun time almost nonexistent as I try to perform in half a day all of the basic functions life requires. This isn’t a vacation, a great and reinvigorating rest. This is a desperate attempt to fight off the brain fog, the total lack of energy and the effects of being in both near-constant and often severe pain for this long.
To go to the bathroom, something most other people don’t think twice about, I require a list of items and a private area, because more often than not, there is some screaming involved. This isn’t something people let you vent about. Most get completely disgusted if you even refer to the subject. Anyone who has an issue like this, though, very soon sheds that veil of modesty. We will talk about bodily functions like you talk about the weather.
Talk about cancer, talk about heart disease and people will sympathize, even offer to help. Try to tell someone your digestive system is broken and they act disgusted and change the subject or they go away believing you’re a pussy with a stomach ache. I want to say, let me press my elbow and body weight into your side for about five hours straight. I give you about ten minutes of trying to fight the pain or breathe it away before you start to lose your sanity. I can move my elbow and you’ll get instant relief. For me, there is no escape.