I have spent the last 3 hours going back and forward to the loo and I am now totally wiped. I realised yesterday that I hadn’t been to the loo for at least two possibly three weeks, one of those issues that goes with everything else, but one I knew how to fix and knew that it was once more time to take the dreaded laxatives. I had over the last week take just one tablet on a couple of occasions in the hope it might give my guts the kick they needed, but I wasn’t surprised when nothing happened, so last night I gave in and I took my regular two. I woke just after 6am in extreme pain in my stomach, the same pain I know go through every time, I know it so well that I also knew that I was a long way from ready to actually go. All I could do was to get up and wonder around until it eased off, then head back to bed, half an hour later and I was back up this time with a purpose. It is always a long slow process, pass, wait, pass, wait and so on, all of it painful and all of it unpleasant, but it is the only way left, now that my bowels have shut down. The unfortunate thing is that all of it destroys me, I have little energy left and a huge desire to head to my bed and to just sleep, not just because I have lost a short spell of it, but it drains me in so many other ways, I have used a full days supply already and a bit more. When it comes to embarrassment, this is one that already up there and I hate to think how I will deal with it in the future.
It is all these side issues that seem to be taking over when it comes to my future that I never saw coming, in fact, I never once thought about them, why would I. Think of the things that embarrass you right now, now multiply that embarrassment by 100 and you are just starting to get close to what I see ahead. What happens once I am bed bound, once I can’t choose or even get to the loo when I want to and I have to have a trail of constant bedpans over several hours, once a day would be bad enough, but all of this? Dignity seems to be a growing victim of my MS, I am watching it vanish at an increasing pace and I don’t like it.

To date I haven’t actually tried even once taking a booster pill to help me get through mornings like this, I don’t know why I never thought of it until just now, pain is pain after all, but somehow pain coming from my bowels just doesn’t sound like something I should be taking it for. It’s strange how I compartmentalise pain, there are so many different levels and causes, some, in fact very few fall into the area where I feel comfortable about taking a booster, almost as though I am half expecting someone to sit down with me and ask me exactly why did I take each pill, how long did I wait and have I ever taken one for a none direct MS or fibro pain. I know it will never happen and I know that it doesn’t make a great deal of sense, but what about my life really does. I have spent the entire morning being sapped of all life by a pain that I found myself unable to move because of several times over, that had me standing holding onto the kitchen counter trying to breathe steadily, waiting for it to pass and then moving around again, just as I would have done years ago with labour pains, smoking more cigarettes than I have in ages and yet I never once thought of just picked up a blue tablet and swallowed it. I wouldn’t have thought twice if that same pain had been in either my arms or my legs, in fact, I would have taken it the second I woke, but my stomach, well that is pain we all go through, pain we all live with from time to time, so I have to too.

Pain falls into so many different cells, from the smallest that just edges itself into that word but a fraction, but we call it pain, in fact on the scale of life it is nothing, to the worst you can imagine, but trust me that isn’t the worst, there is always worse still to come. I never imagined that anyone could experience pain to the levels I have found in the last few years, I didn’t think that human body was either able to produce or to survive pain such pain, but I know better now. I don’t believe in any way that I have found the worst yet, that waits ahead of me, as every time I have thought I have found it, it manages to surprise me again. Right now I am on my normal level of morphine and all my other stuff that I take, but it hurts to move even my arm, every movement I make hurts to some degree, there is not a single action I can take that doesn’t cause pain. If years ago I had read what I have just written here, I wouldn’t have been able to get my head around it, to accept that the reality of life is never ending pain for anyone, trust me it is. I am far from alone, right now I haven’t the slightest doubt that there are millions around this planet who don’t have the same condition as me, but have the same pain levels I do for whatever reason. Painkillers help but they are miles from the answer, they make life bearable, not great, you don’t swallow one and magically the pain vanishes as it does when you have a headache, it just doesn’t work that way with chronic pain. I don’t believe short of being unconscious that I will ever be pain-free again, but that isn’t pain-free, just unaware of it.

I know that I am now at the point where I need to talk to my doctor again about the levels of the tablets I am on, but it is always to me a big thing raising the dose. Every step up is a step closer to the end, there is a point I see in my mind when pain control ends and life control takes over. As the doses rise, so does the sedentary effect of them, I am sure that there will be a point when to just keep the pain at bay, I will be more and more lost in a drug haze and that is something I don’t want to happen a second sooner than it has to. I don’t know if I have 10 rises or 20 to that point, but I am in no hurry to find out, if I can go one more day without taking more, then I will go that one more day.

Read my blog from 2 years ago today – 14/07/12 – Even pain can be comforting

And another weekend begins… I know it is Saturday as it is just after 10a.m. and I can hear gentle snoring, strange how soft snoring is a comforting sound but raise the volume and it makes you want to scream and hit the snorer. I suppose there are a lot of things in life like that, things that at one end of the scale is good at the other is really bad, you could say it about something a simple……