Hhhh..okay.

Had to drive this morning so NO drugs for me last night. 
Faaaarrrkkk.  No drugs = No sleep.  None, nada, nil, zip, zilch… so get fucked Borys no sleep for you!!

Sleep?  Sleep?  We don’t need no stinking sleep!  I woke up countless times last night.  Though I’m reluctant to write that sentence as it implies I recall actually being asleep in order to be waking up repeatedly throughout the night.

I recall dreaming that I was struggling to open a plastic packet of some sort and being sufficiently awake enough to notice that my hands and forearms were all tensed up in midair and I was in fact wrestling with some invisible package while half asleep.  On another occasion I awoke thinking that I was losing my balance trying to put on my jeans and my leg was in the air and I was flailing my arms about trying to ‘steady’ myself whilst actually still recumbent in bed semi asleep.  This sort of shit happened several times… I was dreaming about something and I was ‘doing’ whatever I was dreaming about.  Weird.

I guess this is the sort of nonsense you can expect when you suddenly allow your body to dream again.  Stuff like this and massive weird arse nightmares that is.  I know the drug induced stupor that I’ve been passing off as sleep for the last 12 months seriously inhibits deep REM sleep… which means less dreaming and signicantly less movement at night than is normal which I think is why I am usually ridiculously stiff and pained on waking…. along with dopey as all hell from the medication.

So today….  Toss and turn all night.  Climb out of bed feeling really tense and sore.  Take Small Child to school.  Go to Carindale to try and finish Christmas shopping that feels like it’s hanging over my head.  Wander around banks, shops etc… have better luck getting what I need today compared to last week’s shopping disaster which means I didn’t reduce any customer service staff to tears for a change.  Still spent most of the day walking around with my neck going crunch, crunch, crunch every step, sipping on a bottle of water to stop the gagging/nausea caused by the crunching, holding my breath against the pain if i got stuck standing still for more than two mins together and generally being in tons of pain and out at the shops much longer than I had planned.  Pick up Small Child after school, come home and collapse in useless heap in front of recently aquired DVD copy of Paris, J’taime with heat pack and tea.

Worst of all… can’t take any drugs again tonight either…. here’s hoping I don’t crack any teeth this week    🙁
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Borys:  Hello my name is Borys.

All:  Hi Borys

Borys:  It has been 17 years, 2 months, 1 week and 7 days since my last pain free day….

November 19th.  This day 12 months ago, BigSal and Surly opened their Pizza Capers store and some dumb bint in a Mazda RX8 ran up the arse of my car on my way home from work.  Massive flare up of previous pain ensues and hasn’t receded to date.  It seems to have been the straw that has broken the camels back if you’ll pardon the expression.  One year….  12 Months…. 52 weeks… 365 days of going to bed in pain every night and waking up in pain every morning.  It’s pervasive and unrelenting and  I AM EXHAUSTED.. 

Exhausted from not sleeping.  Exhausted from trying to ignore it.  Exhausted from the aggravation caused by doing  stupid little everyday things.  Exhausted from trying to keep it to myself.  Exhausted with the amount of concentration needed to be social and interested in other people.  Exhausted from the effort required to keep going… forcing myself to get out of bed in the morning and just keep on putting one foot in front of the other. 

Stupid little every day things are sooo hard.  I’ll be driving and go to shift into second gear causing a momentary sharp pain in my left shoulder blade.  Or I’ll shoulder check to merge lanes and sharp pain will shoot through my neck muscles.  Or I’ll be standing at the kitchen bench and by the tiime I have diced an onion I’m feeling severe pain in my lower back and getting physically flustered because I’ve been inadvertently holding my breath against the pain.  Or I’ll go for a walk up a flight of stairs causing my neck to go ‘crunch’ which makes me feel nauseous.  Or I’ll be outside to pull some weeds in the backyard and be at it for barely 15 minutes when I have to stop because my back hurst so much it”s literally making my hands shake.  Or I’ll reach up to press the garage door button or reach down to pick something up off the ground and my neck or upper back will go into massive painful spasms for no apparent reason.  Or maybe I’ll do something really stupid like try and lift up my sewing machine onto the table and then have so much back pain I can’t sit and sew for more then 10 minutes.  Or I’ll be doing something totally outside my control like standing in the queue at the bank or the checkouts at the supermaket and my lower back pain becomes so bad that I find I’m holding my breath, getting literally twitchy, uncomfortable, hot and bothered with the effort required to just stand still for 5 mins..

Nothing seems to make a dent in the pain.  The drugs don’t alleviate it at all… though I am grateful for the Valium for without those four or five hour a night of unconsciouness (I’m reluctant to call it sleep) I don’t think I’d be fuctioning enough to make it through the day.  It’s exhausting and very, very depressing.  I try so hard (with varying degrees of success) not to let on how shit I feel and I constantly find myself thinking that I don’t know how much more of this constant pain I can take….  but none of the so called experts know what to do so what fucking options do I have?

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We went out for dinner last night and even though we had phoned ahead to book a table we found ourself sitting at one of those shiity high bar type tables.  Which means that we were given bar stools to sit on. 

Why is this a problem?  Because I’m only five feet and one half an inch tall and have a bad back!  They were so busy that if we hadn’t accepted the high table (that sounds weird) they wouldn’t have been able to seat us at all.  Bar stools really suck if you’re as short as I am.  Fristly they’re like way above your bum height so you have to pull of some gravity defying ass jump to get your butt on the seat.  Secondly there is usually a foot rail for you to put your feet on to make you comfortable but they’re usually way too low for short arses like me so you either end up perched on the edge of your fucking stool in order to use the foot rail or you sit back on the chair properly and you end up sitting there swinging your feet like a five year old all night…. which incidentally sends your feet painfully numb after 20 mins or so.  ‘And of course the other extraordinary shitty thing about bar stools…. they have no back support and this means that you tend to sit with very poor posture for the duration. 

So while dinner was nice, I came out of there with mega stirred up back pain and painfully numb feet  🙁
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I’ve been working hard to try and stop blathering about back pain in this journal.  As I no doubt have mentioned earlier – I’m sick of thinking about it so no doubt everyone else is sick of hearing about it.  Which means I’ve basically not had anything of import or consequence to report for a number of weeks (other than bitching about my sister of course which I think was totally warranted).

I’ve managed to keep the pain bullshit to a minimum by cleverly not writing anything too early in the morning (because I won’t remember having written it) or too late at night (when I’m at my worst and unable to think of anything else) and definitely not after consuming alcohol… because some of those entries are really kinda special when I read back over them.

If only not thinking or seeing or doing something would cease it’s ability to exist.

PS – my back hurts

still

🙁