Pain

Pain is realizing this is true, not just for society, or the world, but for our personal lives as well: family, friends, church, hobbies… everything. Sure, growing up and growing older should involve maturation and changes in direction and perspective, but no one told me I would be betrayed by my own body and my closest friends and mentors.

I’ve had two personal, related “911’s” — events that shook me to my core and changed everything — that struck at the same time 4 years ago — and I’m still trying to figure out how to get through it all and get better. The medicines I take for my health problems keep me continually off-balance, and make it nearly impossible for me to marshal my inner fortitude to make the changes and do the work to address the long term issues.

It’s just… hard, man. Really hard. No one really understands, nor do I really want them to. I don’t want to put that on them. There’s nothing they can do about it. I’ve never been stoic. I’ve moaned and bellyached to everyone who would listen my whole life. This time, though, there doesn’t seem to be anything ANYONE can do about it, because there’s no one thing that’s wrong. If there’s a way out, it’s through a dozen small things done with a measure of discipline that I have never been able to muster, even at my best.

The outlook is bleak, and we’re on the precipice of a second civil war, and at the verge of the End Times.

Pain and Treatments

My health “journey” continues. I paid $500 for a genetic test that — of course — insurance doesn’t cover. I finally got the first half of the results.

I failed.

Turns out my body is deficient at basically everything related to my current condition… which is probably why I’m in this position. My genes make me both more susceptible to pain AND less able to deal with it, and I have no genes that would make therapeutic treatment of pain or depression easier. All of my mutations related to possible treatments are bad, and will have to be worked around.

NSAID’s are literally cancerous for me. Stunningly, I can’t process opiates. I’ve always thought that they didn’t do anything for my pain, rather just made me care less. Turns out that’s actually true, but I just thought that’s how they worked. No, they actually REDUCE pain for OTHER people (in addition to making them care less). But, hey, that’s OK. Not one of 18 doctors in three and a half years was willing to prescribe them to me anyway.

At least now we can get started with actual treatments, knowing what WON’T work? I guess? Doesn’t seem to leave me a lot of options, though.