I find myself in an unusual position today, my right thigh, yes I did say right, is in almost constant spasm right down the front of it. The pain isn’t any worse than I often have in my left leg, but just being on the wrong leg makes is 100 times worse for some reason. You wouldn’t believe just how something appearing where it shouldn’t be, can actually really make feel far worse than it should, maybe it will settle down as the day goes on, or maybe I will just start to accept it and get on with everything else the day has ahead.
You would think that by now I would just be used to spasm turning up all over the place but for some reason, they seem to attack again and again in the same established places, almost as though that is their home and they are staying there. With a little thought, I could pass over my entire body and point to the muscles that plague my life with their desire to not act like muscles should and just lock up tightly squeezing until the pain gets my attention and then some. To date, the spasms in my right leg have always been in the lower half of my leg, especially over my shin area and that is a pain that goes right through the bone as clearly it is attached to it.
I had just finished writing that when the shopping arrived, to my horror it was the grumpy guy and once more he was as grumpy as ever and didn’t like me suggesting that I needed a pathway between the kitchen and living room, rather than his desired placement of blocking me into the kitchen. On top of that there were substitutes that for once I didn’t want, so I had to find them, bending over shopping bags on the hall floor is not the best thing for my balance and his response when I asked him to look for them, well he found a new low in attitude and undistinguishable grumping. I can’t help wondering if the supermarkets actually spend anything at all in training their delivery drivers how to respond to either the disabled or the elderly, if it is anything at all, they aren’t spending enough. I never put anything other than the fridge and freezer and leave the rest for Adam to sort out, but the little I have just done has left me with not a single muscle that isn’t now causing me pain, they are beyond just fatigued. Despite my desire to have a job, it is small things like this that reminds me graphically, that I just wouldn’t cope, it’s easy to forget just how little my body will allow me to do when I am just sat here day in, day out.
It doesn’t matter how long you live with something, you always con yourself that you aren’t as ill as anyone, including yourself, thinks. The more time I spend caring for my conditions, working with them so that I can feel as well and as pain-free as possible, the more I find myself kidding myself that maybe I’m not that ill, that I could do more and have a more normal life. There are days where I have slept well, had nothing to do but sit and make the occasional planned journey through the flat, before resting or sleeping again and my spasms haven’t been too bad, that I actually feel quite good. I find myself by the evening once more feeling just that bit of a fraud, just because I have had a single good day. I guess that is the old problem of how I was brought up, even knowing that and knowing that trying to base my life on just one day is madness, but that doesn’t make the slightest difference.
I don’t know if it is just me, or if others have this strange memory problem, the one that turns anything more than a couple of days ago into either “hasn’t happened”, or “happened but not that badly”? It is almost as though your health is how you are at this very second, how you felt before is gone and forgotten. So if right now you feel good and someone asked you “how are you”, you would answer “Fine”, totally ignoring the fact you were in pain so bad that tears were running down your face just hours before. It also works the other way round as well, but it is a dangerous memory game as I know for that very reason I have pushed myself when I shouldn’t, into doing something that left me in pain, all because my brain was saying I was “Fine”. I know if it wasn’t for what I write here, I would at times have nothing to remind me what has happened recently and what patterns, improvements or failings are going on with my health. I have learned that I can’t trust myself to get it right, I have to accept that I am never “Fine” and try and get rid of that word from my vocabulary.
The hardest truth about chronic illness is you are ill, regardless of how you might feel right now, you are ill and you always will be, every second of every day and you have to live your life with that in your mind constantly. The spasm in my right leg has gone, that doesn’t mean I am better, all it means is a small area of pain has gone for now, it’s a thought pattern that is alien and even after 30 years of illness, clearly I still fight with accepting that first and very basic fact, I am ill.
Please read my blog from 2 years ago today – 18/03/12 – Tests with my new medication
In the post yesterday, arrived the prescription I had been waiting for after the visit from the nurse. She had spoken to my GP and just as all my prescriptions he had sent it onto me so that Adam could take it to the chemist. I have to say that I am not surprised by what I have discovered.
Two Rooms Plus Utilities 