Day In The Life...

I live in Florida and we just had a hurricane go through, Irma. Luckily I am in the panhandle so all we got was a tropical storm in our area. Some wind, some rain, and a dent in the van where a branch fell on it from the tree. Weather definitely effects chronic pain conditions and I am no exception to that. For the last couple days I have had lots of muscle spams, sciatica, tingling/numbness, shooting pain, and a higher pain level over all. A bad few days so far.

Since this is Chronic Pain Awareness Month (September) I thought this would be a good day to do one of those "Day in the life..." type posts. I think it will be a good idea to give people information on what it is truly like to have a bad day with a chronic pain condition. This is how it effects me, but I figure it will at least give people a rough idea of how it might be effecting someone in their lives and hopefully it will promote understanding.

So lets start with over night, sleeping. (Sleep? What's that?!? LOL) Due to the increased pain and severe muscle spasms I was not able to try to sleep until 2AM. I had a hard time getting comfortable enough to try and fall asleep because when I shifted position the muscles in my back (just under my shoulder blades all the way down to mid thigh on both legs) tightened up and started to spasm. This causes extremely sharp and intense bolts and waves of pain to shoot through the entire area. When it first starts it is extremely intense and takes my breath away. I then have to mentally remind myself to breathe, slowly and calmly. Somewhere around 3AM or so I dozed off. I woke up a few times due to pain and spasms but managed to go back to sleep until 4:30AM. I've been awake since then (it is now 9AM). I have been alternating between applying heat and ice to the affected areas (alternating; 20 minutes on/20 minutes off/switch to the other/repeat). Neither helps tremendously but when it is like this I'll take what I can get. I am having to shift position every 3 to 5 minutes (instead of my normal 8 to 10 minutes) to try and stave off another episode of spasming. This is not very effective since I still get the spasms and sciatica, it just isn't as intense. I am currently sitting at an 8 on the pain scale of 0 to 10. I took my morning medications at 7AM. Right now I am watching vlogs on youtube.

To get breakfast I had to think of something to eat that would require minimal movement and preparation as standing and walking are very painful for me. With the sciatica going on it is also dangerous as my legs can give out without warning and falling to the floor is not a good thing. I decided to make toast because it required the least amount of standing, bending, and reaching for things.

It is now 11AM and I am still in bed shifting position and alternating heat and ice every 20 minutes. I've also done some very gentle stretching to ease muscle stiffness. I am having to shift between sitting and laying down every 5 to 10 minutes. I can go 10 minutes laying on my right side, but only 5 minutes sitting up. Every 5 minutes sitting up I have to shift around and change which way I am leaning (left, right, forward, back against pillows). My left side is the worst and I can't lay on it at all. This is very annoying shifting around all the time. I'm still at a level 8 on the pain scale but am grateful that it is not getting stronger and am hoping it stays this way (I don't think it will as I have to pick my husband up from work this afternoon). I keep thinking of my mother telling me, as a child, when I was restless "Do you have ants in your pants?" and it makes me giggle.

It is now 6PM. I slept from 11:30AM or so until 2:15PM. Was a restless sleep and I woke up a few times with the muscle spasms. Back to alternating heat and ice. At 4:30 or so I went and picked my husband up from work, which hurt a lot, but it felt nice to get out of the house and into the sunshine. Came home and ate dinner which my daughter had cooked. Now, while alternating heat and ice I am going to do a stitching hangout to chat with friends and stitch for distraction. Sometimes it helps distract from the pain but even if that doesn't happen, it always lifts my mood to be chatting with friends.

It is now 9:47PM and just got off the stitching hangout. Made good progress on my project which can be seen on my stitching blog. I continued to alternate heat and ice during the hangout, shifting positions as needed as well as getting up to walk around and stretch my muscles out. My pain has been pretty steady at an 8 all day, but I am grateful that it didn't go higher or hit a pain crisis (level 10). I really didn't want to be curled up in bed and crying from the pain.

Now I will continue with the heat and ice while I watch some stuff on Youtube or Netflix/Hulu until I am sleepy, then I will try to sleep. I don't know how much sleep I will get but am hoping I get more than a couple hours. Lack of adequate sleep does not do good things for my pain, it also makes it harder to mentally deal with the pain.

That's pretty much my day today. My hope in sharing this is to help people understand what it is like during a bad day. As well as to show that being home a lot due to pain is not the fun, relaxing day off that people think it is.

Taking Stock In Attempt To Change

For the last 18 months, and probably longer, my pain has been in control of my life not the other way around. When my pain got worse a few years ago I adapted and still managed to function. When it got worse in April 2011, I could not figure out ways to adapt as nothing seemed to work. As time went on, depression increased, mobility decreased and pain took control. My old methods for dealing with and living despite my pain are no longer effective with this new level of pain and symptoms (no standing/walking more than 5 minutes). So I decided to try and get some help. I can't locate a behavioral therapist who deals with chronic pain in my area, so I ordered some books.

I am currently working through "The Chronic Pain Care Workbook" by Michael J. Lewandowski, PH.D. I already knew that my coping mechanisms are not good and in the case that I've been using dissociation to deal with my pain, they have degenerated into very unhealthy mechanisms. I bought the books back in early February I believe. Since then I've read a few pages in each one (I bought 4), then did what has always worked for me. I allowed my mind to analyze and think about the ideas these books represented.

It is very hard for me to admit that my actions and thoughts are contributing to my pain. It is difficult to admit that I lost some of my ability to manage my pain effectively a while ago, and lost the rest of it in the last 18 months or so. It is hard to admit that I gave up. I wanted so much to believe that I was doing everything I could. That I was trying to function with the pain, but the truth is I gave up. The pain got so much worse, with new symptoms and the inability to stand for more than 5 minutes, no real help from my doctor, and I gave up. Now I am sitting here crying because this is the first time that I have faced head on and admitted clearly that I gave up. Instead of saying something like "yeah I've given in BUT <insert any but here>", the truth is I was kidding myself, there has been no actual "but" for a long time. I do occasionally fight back and try to do things like some laundry or housework or cooking, which increase my pain and when that happens, I give up again for a while before trying again. But those attempts are few and far between.

Why am I sharing something that to me is emotionally painful, humiliating, terrifying, and so intensely personal? I'm not really sure what all my reasons are, but the one that comes to mind immediately upon asking myself that question is that I want others who may be in my position to see they are not alone. In addition I am hoping that by sharing the truth about my own mental, emotional, and physical ability to fight/live with my pain, that those who are in the same boat as me, can see that there is still hope. I have reached a point where I am sick of this. I want my life back. The only way to achieve that is to work at it and learn new ways of coping, since obviously my old ways aren't working. Sitting around waiting for something outside of myself to give me back my life obviously doesn't work. So I guess it's time to get off my ass again.

In the book I mentioned above there are lots of exercises. These are designed to help you see where you are now in dealing with your pain. What is working well, what is not working at all, and what could use some improvement to work better. The beginning of the book, like any other self-help book or even therapy with a therapist, starts out with taking stock of where you are right now. Identifying what works, what doesn't etc. Also identifying your readiness to change, your motivations. I understand all of this having gone through it before with and without a therapist when I was dealing with healing after abuse. I've done these things in conjunction with a therapist in order to help my daughter heal from abuse. Many of these first steps are the same.

What surprised me was the fear reaction. Having the fear of facing old abuses in your past, acknowledging the damage it has done and the negative effects it has on your present all made sense to me. Who wants to face such painful memories, accept them, work through them and all that. The fear made sense.

But now, accepting this fear of dealing with my own pain means accepting that I have failed. For some reason I am finding it much harder to accept that I am afraid of trying anything. My biggest fear is increased pain and decreased mobility, followed by fear of failure. For some reason this isn't making sense to me. I keep asking myself "Why am I afraid of my own pain?, heck I've lived with it for 30 years (varying over that time from mild, to bad to worse to now [horrible]). I know I will live with pain the rest of my life. Why am I afraid? Is it really that simple as fear of change?". It isn't making sense to me why I am so scared.

And with so very little for me to look at as things I can do well (in the sense of a job or productive activities), the idea of having failed in dealing with my chronic pain in my daily life is terrifying and painful. I am feeling very vulnerable and very sacred to look at all these things, to see exactly where I have failed. What if admitting all this makes people around me decide I'm no good? What if it makes me decide I'm no good (seeing myself as no good is worse to me than others having that opinion)? What if I fail at trying to change? Heck since I've already failed, what are the chances I can succeed now? I've tried to fight over the past 18 months, but failed time and time again.

But I don't have a choice, I have to try. So I will take my anger and fear and try to harness it as a motivation to get the changes I want. To get my life back.

One of the exercises was to draw a pie chart that represents how I view the way my pain problems affect my life. Included are the pain issues themselves, then social issues and psychological issues. Here is a picture of the pie chart I drew. It clearly shows that the pain issues have overtaken everything else in my own mind; I have allowed the pain issues to overshadow everything, to take over. This ticked me off and scared me and I want to change it. So here's hoping I can do that. I will try simply because I want a life, my life, back.

The book then goes over the Stages Of Change and I am in the "Open to thinking about change, but...". I know Doc's can't fix me. I know that I will have pain for the rest of my life. I know that what I've been doing isn't working. I know my fear of trying to change and failing, isn't going to help. I want to change this pie chart, I want my life back. So now comes working through the fear and getting rid of it so I can take the steps necessary to manage my pain better.

Knowing how I tend to work, when it comes to having to fix things mentally/emotionally/behaviorally, I will probably revisit these topics a few times. Hopefully on this blog so my journey can help others, but it is possible that not all of it will show up here, depending on how personal it is or if the thoughts etc affect someone else, not just me. So most likely I will have to revisit this topic of my fears until I understand them well enough that I can counteract them with more reality based thinking.

Here's hoping that I can get my life back.

Struggling To Be Normal

Most people sleep at night, get up at a certain time each day then go about doing their daily activities, be it work, school, play etc. For me, my days and nights are all mixed up. Due to pain I have a difficult time sleeping at night. By the time I manage to do so, it is usually early morning (4 to 6 AM). I may sleep 4 to 6 hours, sometimes less. This goes on for a few days until my body reaches pure exhaustion from lack of sleep and I end up sleeping 12 to 16 hours which means I wake up somewhere around 4PM to 8PM. Now I'm wide awake and there is no way I will sleep at night. This cycle of sleep disturbances can be triggered very easily. One single night awake due to pain, can take me 2 to 3 weeks to get back to sleeping at night. Each additional day/night of inability to sleep or stay asleep only makes it take longer to get back to normal, hence the 2 to 3 weeks.

Right now, I am struggling with trying to get back to sleeping at night since my pain is in good control. I am not doing very well because my body is used to being awake at night (from the weeks spent in bed watching netflix) and only sleeping when exhaustion hits. This means that I have a difficult time sleeping.

I started meditating before bed. Using breathing and visualization to help my body relax and feel sleepy. It helped a bit, but not perfectly. I still didn't sleep until 3 or 4AM, and woke between 10 am and 1 pm. But that at least gave me some daylight hours. Then came the last two nights when I just couldn't sleep until 6AM. (Today was 8AM). Yesterday my alarm clock woke me at 11AM like I had asked it to, and I did not take a nap. I was very tired when I went to bed at 10:30pm. I really thought I would sleep all night. No such luck. I was still awake at 6AM, and then at 7 and 8. Somewhere around 9AM I finally fell asleep. My alarm was set for 12:30 in the hopes it would be just a nap, so I could sleep tonight. No luck, I apparently turned it off in my sleep (when it went off) and did not wake up until 4:30PM. ARRRGGGHHHH!!

This is so frustrating because now I am wide awake and I KNOW that there is no way I will sleep tonight. I've tried forcing myself to stay awake until the next night, but it doesn't work. I end up falling alseep where ever I happen to be sitting (my lay-z-boy, my computer chair etc).  So I end up going to bed trying to take a short nap of 2 to 3 hours. Nope, when someone comes to wake me up I just can not wake up and then I'm out for 8 hours or more and wake up that night or late evening.

I just want to be normal. Like I was before the additional break to my SI joint, back in 2000 through 2003. I want to be awake during the day, sleep at night, and do things. But no such luck, not for me.

Now comes probably being awake tonight and struggling to stay awake all day Friday, so I can maybe sleep Friday night like a normal person. Here's hoping I can do it!

Insomnia Returns

I'm a bit frustrated right now. It is 5:23 A.M. and I am still awake. I probably shouldn't complain about it too much because this is the first night of insomnia since I started Pristiq, but I can't help being frustrated and annoyed by it. I know part of it is due to my pain leve being up, mostly in my lower back. This is a major sign that the radio frequency has worn off or is very close to wearing off. The pain is shooting down my left leg. I also have muscle spasms (strong enough to cause my leg to jerk, twitch, and jump), tingling, and numb spots on the left leg. This is what is keeping me awake. It is very hard to relax enough to sleep when my leg starts doing the cha-cha all by itself. LOL

Since I am awake I figured I would come read some blogs and write a post on this blog. This at least gives me something to do.

Today was a fairly busy day. I balanced the checkbook, worked on our taxes, moved a load of laundry, emptied the trash can in my bedroom, did some light picking up, caught up on blog reading (though google reader now shows 11 new posts for me to read), caught up on email lists and facebook. After all that was done I watched a bit of tv and then sat in bed and stitched for about 3 hours or so. Exciting huh?

I have been invited to my step-son's next wrestling show. He loves wrestling and performs in a local show. He is pretty good at wrestling as well as the acting that goes with it. He makes his own costumes to fit the personna he creates and does a marvelous job. He is a very creative person and loves doing lots of creative things from drawing and painting to creative decorations to costumes to writing comics and more. He plays to the audience when he wrestles and gets them involved and they respond very well to him. The show is next Saturday and I will try to remember to bring my camera and get some pictures. It should be a lot of fun!

Well that's it for me today. I hope everyone has a good weekend!

The Wonders of Medication

I am very glad that I gave Pristiq a full two weeks before deciding whether or not to continue taking it. The headaches stopped after 5 days, which is great. I have now been taking this medication for about 3 weeks and I have noticed improvement in how I feel already. Emotionally I feel more awake, alive, and happier than I have in a very very long time. I did not realize just how bad the depression had become until I started to feel better. I had gotten so used to feeling sad, blah, and just emotionally and mentally exhausted all the time that I had not realized when it got worse.

I am sleeping better than I was also. I have fewer nights where I just can't sleep no matter how physically tired I feel. I take the Pristiq before bed because it said it could make me drowsy. To be on the safe side I took the first dose at night and it did make me drowsy, so I stayed on the before bedtime schedule. Being able to sleep more regularly has helped me in so many ways. I have more energy during the day. With the increase in mental and emotional energy I am better able to deal with the pain. Sleeping more regularly has also made it easier to deal with the pain.

I am keeping an eye on how my feelings change because I know that I won't get the full effect of the medication for 6 to 8 weeks. Part of me is excited because I've already noticed improvement and how it seems to get a little better every day.

It really is nice to feel alive again!

Insomnia and Birthday

Wednesday was my 41st birthday. I got many birthday wishes through facebook and a cross stitch mailing list I am on. These well wishes touched me and made me feel good. I had a good day. My DH let me choose a couple of cross stitch books and patterns as birthday gifts. I will post about them in my stitching blog. I was very happy that everyone in the house remembered my birthday and wished me well. I'm not one for having birthday parties and stuff. A sincere "Happy Birthday" is enough for me. I got a chocolate cake, frosted with chocolate fudge frosting and shaved chocolate to decorate it. DH said that, as a chocoholic, he thought that cake was perfect! It was delicious!

I was really hoping my pain would give me a break on my birthday but no such luck. It wasn't a pain crisis, but I did stay at an 8 or 9 most of the day, even with my medications. Insomnia has returned the last few nights because I just can't get comfortable. When I do fall asleep, I wake up after only 30 minutes. It can then take between 30 and 60 minutes for me to get back to sleep. Apparently my pain wanted to celebrate my birthday with me. LOL

I'm going to try to get some sleep now. Who knows, maybe it will work and I'll get 3 or 4 hours of sleep without waking up every 15 to 30 minutes. That would be wonderful!

Up All Night

Earlier tonight Ron (my DH) gave me a backrub. When it was done and I tried to get up, my back went nuts. I'm not sure why either. It wasn't hurting any more than usual while he massaged it, nor did anything he did cause shooting pains or something like that. I'm guessing it was because I was lying on my stomach (with a pillow to support my lower back). Laying on my stomach or my back always causes me to hurt, but usually not as quickly and severely as it did tonight. Due to the pain, I've been awake all night. I did take my meds, which did help a little bit, but nowhere near enough for me to sleep. When I layed down to go to sleep the muscles in my buttocks, pelvis, and my left leg all decided they wanted to cha-cha and tango, which of course kept me awake.

Since I am awake anyway I decided to come out to the living room and catch up on my blog reading. I am behind because we were gone for 10 days, so now I have 355 unread blog entries in my google reader thing. This will probably take me 3 or 4 days to catch up on, but I will catch up. Since we do not have another trip planned anytime soon, I expect to be able to read other people's blogs, comment, and post to my own blogs more regularly. Before we went to Indiana, I was all caught up and staying that way but boy do blog entries and email groups fill up fast. I'd rather play catch up though, than just skip the entries.

On my stitching blog I have posted information for a give-away (A Pay It Forward [PIF] giveaway). It is open to anyone who wishes to enter, not just stitchers. Though due to the nature of the PIF being a crafty one, it would probably help if those who sign up do a craft of some sort, or they can send gift certificates instead of a finished craft item when it is their turn to do a PIF and thus continue to Pay It Forward. Anyway, if you are interested you can find the post here http://raven-stitches.blogspot.com/2009/12/pif.html To enter the drawing all you have to do is post a comment on that entry and please be sure to include an email address so that I can contact you if you win. Thank you!

Well as usual..sign up for something..back/pain screws me up

I did not manage to sleep until 9AM yesterday my time. Total time awake, just over 4 days. I woke up at 3PM yesterday afternoon, in a bit less pain but still hurting pretty badly. I managed to stay awake all day today, which should help me return to a normal sleeping schedule in less than the week it usually takes.

I don't understand this. I hurt like hell, it keeps me awake and next thing I know I am stuck in a cycle that can last for 3 to 6 days or more before I can finally sleep. Though if I sit in my bed and read I fall asleep and end up face planting into whatever book I am reading. Within a few minutes I wake up and as far as I can tell, I did not sleep at all. I don't understand it!!!! Then after all that, I spend hours laying in the dark trying to sleep and just can't do it. This usually is accompanied by my left leg twitching, shooting pains down my leg, and massive pain just holding me prisoner and that is exactly how I feel. A Prisoner! Held against my will by an enemy I can't see or fight because it is my own body,. Somewhere along the lines my body decided to betray me, to fall apart and torture me for hours on end with no real relief. Do I take medication? yes I do. Does it control the pain as well as pain management doctors say it should? NO it doesn't. Which really sucks.

Ok I'm rambling and not making much sense.

My neice chose to cuddle with me for over 30 minutes today. She just snuggled right in beside me while I was sitting in my la-z-boy recliner. Ohman that felt so good! To hold a little wiggly one again, it just melts my heart and breaks it at the same time. Having a little one love me as much as Bridgette does me just feels so marvelous, but knowing that my pain prevents me from doing everything I want to do for her just rips me apart.

Oh well..maybe I'll be in a better mood tomorrow. I am tired from forcing myself to stay awake all day in the hopes I will sleep tonight. The way I feel right now, I should succeed.

NaBloMoPo; Still Sleepless In Florida

The month of November is NaBloMoPo Basically it requires that you post in your blog every day for the month of November. I wanted to give it a try as it should be interesting. I signed up on the NaBloMoPo site but since I have two blogs I put the url to one of them in my description, so this blog may not she up as part of it. That's okay though, I don't mind.

With this blog I think posting every day will do a couple different things:

1. 
   
   Give a good idea of how chronic pain and depression vary from day to day which is one of my goals for this blog
   
   
   
2. 
   
   Give me a daily outlet for thoughts/emotions/frustrations/whatever crops up
   
   
   
3. 
   
   It sounds like fun
   
   
   
4. 
   
   Will force me to find things to post about every day which will result in me paying closer attention to my days and probably seeing things I did right or enjoyed rather than just the negative pain and depression stuff
   
   
   
5. 
   
   It will also give me practice at writing and that may help me regain my enjoyment in writing and result in me writing essays, poems, or stories like I used to.
   
   
   

Well it is 3AM here and I am awake. I'm headed in to being awake for 48 hours. I tried to sleep during the day Tuesday and just couldn't do it. My pain level has been high since Monday evening but my meds have kept me out of a pain crisis. I tried laying down for over an hour, no lights on, but it just hurt too much so I got up. I just want it to stop! It is mentally exhausting to endure high levels of pain without taking it out on other people by snapping at them or losing my cool. It takes a lot of mental and emotional energy to deal with the pain and not fall apart, specially since falling apart makes the pain worse.

I know that some of this pain is muscular. My muscles are weak due to my staying off my feet to control my pain while waiting a couple of months for the radio frequency procedure. So now, when I do things, my regular pain goes up and I get the added pain from using those weakened muscles.

Knowing that my muscles won't strengthen themselves if I don't use them, I chose to take my niece for a very short walk (not even half a block and we have short blocks where I live). This did increase my regular pain and the muscular pain, but I also know that by working those muscles just a little bit every day I will eventually strengthen them and my pain will go down. Right now my entire pelvis is throbbing, I have sciatica symptoms in both legs (numbness, tingling, occasional shooting pain) and the muscles in my legs, hips, buttocks and abdomen are real sore. We hadn't gone even 2 yards when my muscles started to ache a little. This shocked me! I knew my muscles were weak but I did not realize they were that bad. If I don't do something to strengthen my muscles up again, I am going to quickly reach a point where I won't be able to walk because of excrutiating pain and lack of strength. So I am determined to do a little bit of exercise every day.

Tomorrow (well later today technically) I will take Bridgette (my niece) for that same short walk and when I can do that walk without increased pain, then I will make the walk longer; slowly increasing it until I can once again walk 1 mile without increasing my pain like I used to be able to do 8 years ago. I also know that with stronger muscles my spine and pelvis will have better support and that should result in a lowering of my chronic pain symptoms. Stronger muscles will also result in my being able to do more things before my pain level goes up. I would love to be able to run the errands and go grocery shopping like I used to. For 2 years now Ron has to do those things and I feel bad because he works all day then has to run to the store and do grocery shopping on weekends. That puts alot of stress on him and I feel like I don't fulfill my job and that I am useless and broken. I want to be able to do more than I can do now.

I also hope that Ron (My husband) will join Bridgette and I on these walks. He walked with us today and I really enjoyed having those few minutes with him. It felt good to be out of the house, even for a few moments and to be with him at the same time. We had a lot of fun on the walk pointing out trees and such to Bridgette and hearing her repeat the words. She got all excited about everyone's shoes that she stopped walking, picked up her left foot and said "Shoes..shoes", then we had to show her our shoes. She had a huge grin on her face. Ron and I told her we love her and for some reason she pointed out her ears to us then her nose and then her mouth, smiling and giggling between each one. It was just adorable! Having those few moments alone (sort of alone) with Ron just felt so good. I got warm fuzzies and my mood improved also.

I am behind on the stitching blogs I read because I've been reading some very interesting blogs by people who live with illness and/or chronic pain or both. Reading their blogs (from the first post to the latest post)  is what sparked the idea for this blog as a way to help me fight the depression. So I set up another folder in google reader (which is how I read the blogs) and added those blogs to my list. I will be trying to find a couple more blogs of people who suffer from chronic pain and reach out to them.

Okay time to catch up on stitching blogs then I'll try to sleep again and if that fails I'll pull out the square I am stitching and work on that. Most likely I won't be able to sleep until around noon which is when my body will hit the point of exhaustion. I hope it hits that point sooner rather than later. I had 4 hours sleep Sunday night, was up all night Monday and now I'm up for the night again. This is not good. Lack of sleep lowers the ability to deal with the pain, it also lowers my pain tolerance which results in my pain feeling worse than it actually is because I just don't have the mental/emotional strength to deal with it. Sometimes exhaustion is the only way I can get past the pain when it is high like it is now and sleep. It really sucks because it can take me a week or more to get back to sleeping at night once I have slept during the day, which interferes with homeschooling my son and everything else.

Sleepless in Florida

Yeah I know that is a dumb title, silly and all that but right now I need something to distract me. I have not slept yet and this time it is not because I was reading blogs and lost track of time. This time it is because I hurt and have been hurting all night. I took my meds but they did not help enough that I could actually lay down and fall asleep. When I did lay down my left leg had the tingles and shooting pains in it, then it started to kick out on its own (this is due to nerve damage) and both SI joints just hurt with that real deep intense throbbing pain they give me. After a few minutes laying down was making the pain rise, so I'd sit up. At first this helped but after a little while (about 5 to 10 mins) it was hurting too much and I had to lay down. Back and forth all night long. Finally at 6:45AM I gave up and came out to the living room and booted my computer so I could read email and blogs to distract myself. It isn't helping as much as I had hoped, but every little bit helps and I'll take it.

When it gets like this the only way I can actually sleep is to hit exhaustion. This can take anywhere from being awake for 24 hours straight to 72 hours. I think today will be one of those 24 hour days to exhaustion in part because I only got about 4 hours sleep yesterday and had been awake last night as well.

I managed to cook dinner last night, take a shower and shave (not always easy due to having to bend over) by using the shower chair thing, did some laundry (2 loads), changed sheets on my bed, and did some straightening up in my bedroom. That's not a lot but now I'm dealing with a lvl 9 in pain. When I said it doesn't take much to make my pain level go through the roof, this is exactly what I mean. None of what I did was difficult or took very long, and I rested every 15 minutes to guage my pain level, and I stopped when I hit a 6. But even with meds that 6 would not go down, instead it went up and by the time I went to bed last night I was at an 8. I find this so very f***ing frustrating!

Well I'm going to go and try to lay down and get some sleep.Wish me luck!