August 24th 2009 archive

Pain Pain Go Away, Come Again Another Day

In last week’s BeamGreen post, I forgot to show you the pictures of Stogo ice cream with my Babycakes cookie!

     Stogo 2

Okay, all better.

Anyway, I had great plans for this weekend and none of them worked out. You would think that after being in constant pain for a year and a half and semi constant pain for 6 months, I would know what medicine to take to stop said pain.

I don’t.

My second GI doctor has given me a number of pain meds. None of them worked. And any doctor I saw following that one warned me to never take any of those meds anyway, as they will cause the underlying problem to become worse. That same doctor also gave me Vicodin, which the following doctors also warned would contribute to the problem getting worse. Although when the pain is bad enough and the others don’t work, that is the one I’d turn to.

So the problem is — if the pain meds I have don’t work and make the underlying problem worse, then what can I take when I am in pain?

I have trying to find out this answer for a very long time. Unfortunately, if such a medication exists for my pain, no doctor I have met with knows about it. I just called my newest doctor and left a message for her to call me back about this. This is because I have been in pain for days now.

Last week I was having a pretty great week, stomach-wise. Monday – Friday all was pretty good. On Saturday, I woke up lethargic and spent the entire day napping. At the height of my GI problems I was constantly lethargic, and now that I am better at handling my situation it has not been so bad. But on Saturday I was just out of it. I was also not able to eat much, which didn’t stop me from eating much at a barbecue at the boy’s family on Saturday. When the food is there . . .

So it is probably no surprise that I woke up on Sunday unable to move. The pain was sharp and the pain was pressure. It felt like little people are punching me all over. My plans to run didn’t happen. My plans to go to Missy’s sister’s wedding didn’t happen. I didn’t leave the apartment all day. I just laid around saying ow and reading books.

The books I read:
Everything Sucks: Losing My Mind and Finding Myself in a High School Quest for Cool by Hannah Friedman
Sickened: The True Story of a Lost Childhood by Julie Gregory
I Feel Bad About My Neck by Nora Ephron

All the above books were great.

And I just started Born to Run:  A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seenby Christopher McDougall — anyone read this? I am so excited about it!

Born to Run

The boy read it and made a unique in response to what he read. He will be writing a guest post soon all about it.

As you can see, I was on a major memoir kick. And I still am. After I finish Born to Run I have two more memoirs I want to get to, including Dumbfounded: Big Money. Big Hair. Big Problems. Or Why Having It All Isn’t for Sissies by Matt Rothschild.

Anyway. I thought for sure I would be fine by Monday morning. So I laid out all my running gear, excited for the perfect weather that they were predicting. I calibrated my Nike + iPod last week and was excited to get a more accurate idea of how far my run is and how fast I run. I set my alarm for 6:00 and went to bed early.

When my alarm went off, all I felt was pain. Intense pain, worse than Sunday’s. It hurt so much. I tried to picture myself running and my vision included lots of pain and going slow and being upset. I knew getting out of bed was not an option. I went back to sleep and had a dream that I was running in a strange marathon that included stops all over and talking to lots of people and going to all these places inside other places. I woke up every now and then to groan in pain and wonder how I would go to work. I considered working from home.

At a little after 7:00, I finally forced myself out of bed. Once I started moving around, the pain wasn’t as bad, but I still keep feeling intense stabs. And it still feels like someone is punching me. Which sucks, because when I went outside the weather really was perfect.

I hope I will be better for tomorrow morning. I want to run in this weather, I want to not be in pain. I want my doctor to call back with some suggestion for what I can take.

What is hardest for me is the realization that just because I feel much better overall these days, I am NOT better. I’m going to feel pain and discomfort and lethargy and there is nothing I can do about it because as good as I might be feeling, the problem is still the problem and that didn’t change. What changed is that I know how to deal with the problem much better. The doctor who will be calling me back is also going to have some other information for me about next steps going forward, so hopefully I will learn something new today. And hopefully the pain will stop.

Let’s wish for a run tomorrow!

Click here for FitnessNYC’s Physique 57 DVD giveaway — but don’t click because I want to win this one.
Click here for Prior Fat Girl’s cookbook and apron giveaway.