Living with chronic pain

hey so this sucks.
new mri suggests that my four year chronic neck pain has gotten worse from a labrum tear and the discs are bulging bad enough to discuss surgery. i'm getting by on like three hours of sleep a night for the past few weeks. trying to keep my good humor.

I usually wake up starting around 3am, off and on, with a pain in my left side/flank. I've tried everything from new mattress to chiropractor to ultrasound. Pain goes away within an hour of waking up. Best theory is that it's somehow muscular. Most recent person I saw summed it up as "you're getting old, man." Sounds about right.

all this "it's getting old" and "you should do therapy" shit drives me nuts. I got an mri and they found a problem and ignored it for several years and now it's bad enough that i'm being taken seriously. i don't think i can chalk that up to "getting old"

so here i am two years later

the surgery worked fine for like two months and then this fucker re-tore. I'm making everyone around me miserable with my bitching. it's sapping my fucking joy is what its doing.

i mean fuck this is what i'm getting at

I'm so sorry, that sucks. I feel like I'm sort of half-in, half-out of the whole chronic pain thing, because I have migraines roughly once a week, sometimes more, and for years I had them more often than that. So I'm in pain a lot but I also get breaks, sometimes as long as two weeks if I'm lucky. I can feel the effect on my personality when I have a lot of them back to back, and I have huge sympathy for anyone who has to deal with this without getting breaks.

i'm sorry, forks and lily. on days when my back pain is bad it puts me in an awful mood. it's really hard to just go about the day feeling like that, especially when medicine that kind of helps also has the effect of making you really tired or queasy or floaty.

Fuck. No joke, I just threw my back out. 4th time in 8 years

Leaning over to pick up a piece of laundry

Oh shit! I'm sorry. It's always something that stupid that sets it off, isn't it? Once I messed up my back trying on a dress.

anyway, I'm lying here with a migraine looking at ilx, so solidarity to you both.

I started teaching again in person September 1st, and my migraines have shot up from once a week to pretty much every day. I'm starting to face the possibility that I may genuinely not be able to work, at least not this kind of job. It's too soon to tell; migraines don't like change and maybe they'll stabilize once I get used to this schedule. But it's alarming. And of course one of the things about chronic pain is it doesn't give you a lot of downtime to calmly take stock of your situation because you're always dealing with a pain crisis.

oof, i'm sorry lily. i don't think i've ever had a real migraine. i imagine it's just impossible to work through? or do you just sometimes get through it somehow? either way, i'm sorry.

It kind of varies! Some of them start mild and get worse over the course of the day, so I can get some stuff done early before they really get bad. And there's a performance adrenaline thing that kicks in when I'm actively teaching, where I can teach through a moderate migraine and not really feel it until the class ends and it all comes rushing back. Doesn't work with the really bad ones, but it's gotten me through quite a few teaching days. Sometimes I actually feel like I teach a little better on those days because I have to keep the energy really high or it all collapses.

And I do have migraine meds, but they work slowly and I think they might be causing rebound headaches. There are more migraine prevention drugs I can try, so I'm going to keep working on it; maybe there's a solution out there. I'm lucky in that my migraines don't come with an aura, so I don't have visual disturbances and I don't feel all that sick. They're mostly just like a really bad hangover headache.

I was in a college relationship with a chronic migraine sufferer, I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.
I got a nerve block in advance of potential radial ablation in my neck and that helped a bit. Anyone with experiences?

I recently read Joan Didion's The White Album and there's an essay in it about her experience with migraines. (It's here.) She says she learned to live with them, but it probably helps to have a writer's schedule rather than a teacher's. I've never had one, it sounds awful.

That essay is very similar to my experience, right down to the habit of denial. "I sometimes have headaches" sounds way better than "I have chronic intractable migraine," and I have never once checked the "I have a disability" box when applying for jobs, although I always think about it.

And the whole frustrating thing she talks about where people assume you did something to bring on the migraine, and in a sense you know you probably did: you slept too long or too little, ate too late, ate too much, exercised too hard, got too stressed, had one coffee instead of two, drove west when the sun was setting, etc., and maybe if you hadn't done one or more of those things on this particular day, you would not currently have a migraine. But the key point, of course, is that you are someone who gets migraines in the first place, and that is something you can do little to nothing about.

(I think I meant to write "ate too little" rather than "ate too much," which is not at all a migraine trigger for me though it may be for some people.)

Insurance is once again blocking my migraine meds. Two left to get me through to Saturday, when I'll get a refill of what's almost certainly not going to be enough for the month. Fingers crossed. They're not even narcotic, just expensive and insurance doesn't want to pay for them.

Now that I have meds my migraines aren't as painful as they used to be, but lately they've been coming with this side effect of feeling really down and hopeless during the headache. Which is almost certainly the migraine itself talking, but of course it feels like "ugh, this is my life, having migraines and never having enough time or mental acuity to get anything done, I'm behind on everything and I'll never catch up."

This is very tedious I know but I wanted to vent.

radiofrequency ablation to my neck has not gone well.

I'm sorry to hear that. Did it just not work, or has it somehow made things worse?

interested in the ablation fail story, it's a treatment possibility to a facet joint problem I have, that gives me intermittent lower back pain. Did it just not work or have undesired consequences? I also had)have lateral herniations on my lowest back disc. It been a long road dealing with these but they are two problems that I have managed to get into a place where they give me less pain than ever. I even started playing some light tennis again recently and the joy of actually running and moving dynamical (albeit slowly) is real.

i'm seeing the pain guy again soon but the issue thus far has been a sudden stabbing pain in between vertebrae and neck spasms. it helped with the shoulder stuff somewhat but the blank spot over my left delt that it's impacting is alternately insensate and stinging. also been having weird new mystery issues with my breathing that likely aren't related but didn't get going until after i did this. Lately my whole body feels like it's giving up.

I'm getting follow up surgery on my rotator cuff and relocating my bicep to my humerus on the 9th so this may be anxiety related. Don't really know anything at the moment.

really wishing you a successful surgery and some relief from the pain, forks.

thanks! it is a bummer and i would like to be back to being who i was and not the asshole I've become.

One of the things with chronic pain is that it doesn't have to even be the most intense or acute pain ever, but just the day in day out Sisyphean element can be so hard.

yup. anyway, i'm off to surgery next week and expecting that to be a total nightmare for the first week, a lesser nightmare for the second week and a severe hassle for the rest of november but with some hope of this becoming manageable by mid-december once i get outta the sling and better by feb/mar once i can jog again and explore yoga as a possibility once more. beyond that is something of a crapshoot but the surgeon says the bicep tenodesis should relieve some of the difficulty and keep this from tearing again so quickly... only lasted about three months with the first surgery before it tore in a different place. If I can get through 2022 (or god help me longer) without pain regularly limiting my sleep and activity, I would consider that a fair tradeoff.

oxy is right up there with the worst drugs in the world imo but day two through six post surgery, you would do pretty much anything to get out of your body.