My morning has started in the usual way, with just enough pain to make me open the Vicodin bottle. I’m trying to avoid using more than one a day. And last night, just as I got up from my chair to turn out the lights, I had some severe pain. Ouch! But I was able to get to sleep without too much trouble.
And as was lying in bed, I started wondering about the long term effects of pain. I know that I sometimes think that I just need to suck it up. Stop being a wimp. C’mon! How bad is it? Or…maybe it’s not real? Is it imaginary?
Pain. A terribly difficult thing to understand. It doesn’t show up on an x-ray and a thermometer doesn’t indicate its presence. Totally subjective. As is our response to someone else’s pain. I can smile and laugh while in pain. But you don’t know that. So we are tempted to show people that we really are in pain. Grimace! See? We’re not faking!
OK, the prognosis is for more of the same pain and even increasing until…I can get the Radio Frequency Lesioning injection. Then it’s a period of decreasing pain (two weeks?) and finally, hopefully, an absence of pain. For anywhere from 3 months to 3 years. Not the best solution, but it’s apparently the only one available at this time.
With the pain gone, perhaps I can get back to racewalking. Not competitively, just plain old walking fast. For now, I have enough medals and t-shirts to satisfy my ego. Except, I should go ahead and get the tattoos. 5 ‘walking man’ images to represent the 5 marathons I’ve completed. Permanent ego boosters.
