Imagine a fire ant bite or a wasp sting. Now imagine hundreds of them inside your leg. Add to that the sensation of dozens of beetles crawling around inside that same leg and you’ve got a fair approximation of what I’ve been experiencing daily for the last eighteen months.
In addition to those things there’s been the occasional buckling of my knee, a weakness that causes me to drag that leg around in a zombie like fashion, and a shooting, stabbing pain through my lower back.
In an attempt to correct this, this coming Monday I’m going in for a spinal fusion. This means a surgeon is going to place screws in my spine, join them with metal rods and cut away what’s left of the disc. They’ll then seed the bone to cause the two vertebrae to grow together.
Of course, there’s a chance that it won’t work, that I could wind up with no change at all, or worse, that I could be paralyzed. And, while that worries me, I’m willing to gamble and have this done because I simply can not bear this pain any longer.
I’ve been giving it a lot of thought over the past few weeks and have come to realize just how much this chronic pain has taken from me. I avoid leaving home whenever possible, I don’t socialize at all, my thoughts are almost always about pain leaving little thought process about anything else.
As a result I’m cranky all the time and would rather sleep than do anything else. If I’m not scheduled to work, I will sleep upward of fourteen hours in a day simply to avoid being awake and thinking about pain. Comfort disappeared long ago. Sitting, standing, lying, they all hurt in equal but different ways.
So, off I go in a couple of days to be sliced open and modified; damn the risk.
If it works and the pain dissipates, I’m curious as to how much of myself I’ll get back and how much I’ll have to relearn. Sitting around doing nothing has become quite a habit after this much time and much of my personality has been subjugated by this old man that lives in my skin.
I just turned thirty-six, but it seems like I’m easily twice that. I relate more to the very old than to people my age. I’m a widower who can’t hear, see, or remember anything. I can’t walk for more than a few minutes without the aid of a cane. I only like old music and old movies and I can’t stand any of these damn kids. I wish they’d all just stay off my damn lawn.
Leave a Comment
No comments yet.
Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI
