We all like to think we are individual, but the thing that makes us happiest is to find someone just like ourselves, just one of the many things in life that I just can’t really get my head round. We all seem to have a list of contradictions that are part of our lives, like myself wanting to be pain free, but holding my medication at a level that allows my brain to be clear even when it means I have more pain than I need to. It actually feel like I live my life these days in a constant battle with pain, but I refuse to give in and take what is there and available to me. I sit here looking at a strip of tablets that I know all I have to do is take one and in 15 minutes the pain will reduce, but I still sit here looking at them and not taking them. Religiously now for more years than I remember I have taken tablet by the handful several times a day, tablets that hold me at a point that I can live with and without I know I would be in agony, so what is my problem with just taking one more?

Strangely a similar but equally very different situation has come to mind, as a teenager I was taken into care after my Father managed to break my nose and dislocate all my finger. I reacted badly for a while, skipping off school, not doing homework or detentions, not going home on time and on and on, it was almost as though rules were there to break and I did. When I was 15 my foster partners found they were expecting their own child and I was out again, but out and responsible for myself living in the YWCA. Within days I was a changed character, I went to school every day, even thought I was the one who would have had to write a note to say why I wasn’t there, I never even tried it, I became a model student. I was responsible for me and I took it seriously. I feel the same way about those booster tablets, they are my responsibility to take when “I” feel I need them, not written up to take day in, day out, they are under “my” control, when so little else is. I know that the future will find my taking stronger and stronger tablet and if needed an array of more tailored medication, that is something that I actually want to put it off for as long as I can. I am in no hurry to be on medication that is pumped straight into me, or drugs that will muddle my head and make me unable to hold onto reality, although I have little doubt that that is where I will eventually be. Those silly little morphine boosters that stare back at me, have become some kind of symbol in my mind for the fact that I am in control and I alone can decide to take or not, in itself a contradiction as I wouldn’t have them at all if my doctor didn’t prescribe them.

It is actually a really hard thing to do, to look the future in the face and accept what lies ahead. I doubt that many of us do, at least when others are there to see the sadness that takes over your soul. It’s a strange silent sadness, it doesn’t make you cry or tare you heart out, it is a sadness that sits there head bowed and unable to fight as it knows it will be beaten. I have to thank my neuro’s for sending me for a treatment that truly helped me and gave me back a life I thought was gone. That same treatment forced me to see the future, others at different stages, others so far down the line that they couldn’t even hold their heads up, or talk without a translator. Once every four months, for four hours I sat there, amongst those who are my future, I was seeing what life held for me, and it made me fight, but fighting something you can’t beat, can only ever at the best win you a reprieve. One silly little pill, one small touch of control, one thing that can change my day, but I fear giving into as it is opening that door to the future just that little bit more. Some out there will know exactly what I am talking about, others will think I am making more of it than is really there, but if my future was closing in on you, can you honestly say you wouldn’t feel the same way?

Sometimes I think if that that one tablet meant that I would be totally pain free, I would take it and say to hell with that closing future. Tablet or not the pain doesn’t end, it’s just controlled and some pains aren’t even that. I guess it is a personal choice, which route do you want to take, the quick one into total dependence, or the slower one with that bit more pain, but that bit more control. It’s not an easy choice to make and it’s one I make several times a day, that little control has become something far bigger than anything as small as a pill.