Old and new...

One of the things I find extraordinary about my new GP was how attentive she is toward pain.  It still astounds me that she know my hair hurts!  Not really my hair, but the movement of it in my head.  She knew.

I mention pain when going down the list of symptoms and have for years, but other than the arthritis, it is as if that mentioning goes in one medical personnel ear and out the other.  Taking my cue from those folk, I downplay it myself.  However, it is getting harder and harder and harder to do so.

My abdomen hurts all the bloody time.  More at some times than others, but never without pain.  It is why I wear such baggy clothes now.  I find that odd ... I used to wear them to hide my shame and now I wear them to hide my pain.  My slow innards have their own pain, from being swollen and distend to being rife with gas from the bacterial overgrowth by food lingering too long in the small bowel.  But most of the abdominal pain is neuropathic.  The specificity of visceral neuropathic pain is just wretched.

Going off the hormones showed me how much they seem to be helping the pelvic pain.  Sometimes it feels like cramps. Sometimes it feels like I have another cyst on an ovary (I had many in college).  Sometimes it feels as if my insides are tearing.  SIGH.

The burning, stinging, electrical pain that appears all over is its own special sort of hell.  I thought that it running along my spine was the worst.  Recently, however, I experienced it in the bottom of my foot for the first time.  Now that was the worst.  Funny how much the bottom of a foot can hurt.

In a way, pain has become very old to me.  And yet it is also ever new.

Today, I experienced a new pain for the third time.  The third time is something you can no longer ignore as a fluke or a one-off.  It is blinding, searing, crippling pain in my tongue.  Yes, my tongue.  SIGH.

It is, for now, fleeting.  Just a few minutes of sheer agony.  Whilst it is happening, I am certain I am dying.  When it ends, I struggle to believe what just happened.  Could I really have fallen to floor to curl in a ball?  The first two times, I picked myself and worked hard to forget.  Tonight, I began to wonder if this was new new.

Is this my new normal?  Lord ... please ... no!