I have had to change my attitude about what's possible for me in regard to being human. The pain I suffered from before I took the prescribed steroid Prednisone is slowly returning, but in different areas of my body than it was before. It's discouraging to read that this is an incurable dis-ease, and that I won't be able to get rid of this pain with steroids except occasionally, and even doing that is life-threatening. It's life-threatening because using the steroids reduces the ability of my immune system to fight off other diseases.
The other medicines my doctor at the VA Hospital prescribed have horrific side-effects, and they don't really help as much as I'd like because the standard for "help" is set by the steroids. Anybody who has used steroids for what ails them knows what I mean. Oddly enough, it's the aspirin in some of these pain-killers that really can do nasty things to my internal organs. I forget exactly which internal organs, but does it really make any difference? The other drugs I'm using, ibuprofen and naproxen also have side-effects, so I just switch them around so that they won't attack the sa-me internal organs at the same time. Mostly, I'm staying away from all of them as much as I can tolerate it. I'm pretty much of a wimp though, so eventually I'm gonna implode in some way from the inside out.
I've eaten breakfast occasionally with a man who has suffered from rheumatoid arthritis for over twenty years down to the cafe. He seems to have learned to tolerate the pain associated with it somehow. He uses a cane. His body is twisted, and it takes him a long time to get from his car to inside the restaurant. He moves at least enough to get up and come to breakfast. He even got married a year or so ago, so it's not like it's guaranteed that I'm gonna hafta lay down and die in excruciating pain in one fell swoop. The edge of excruciating can be numbed a little.
I know I pushed the envelop trying to type on my keyboards 6-8 hours a day and practicing playing the piano a couple of additional hours to boot. I've stopped doing that. I've cut back on my writing some, and put the piano practice to one side for a while. I did play the scales a little last night. I think it's the repetition that causes the pain to flare up, so not only do I have to do less, but not all at once.
My doctor told me not to eat these pills like they were candy. The label on the bottles basically say the maximum of how much I should take, but she said that if I can do without them I definitely should. So, now I'm playing around with how much pain I can tolerate.
I know it's kind of silly, but the way this dis-ease moves around throughout my body it reminds me of how kundalini does the sa-me thing. It moves. Maybe there is a pay off of so-me kind even though it's very distracting. It's a good thing I live alone. Sometimes when I make an ill-considered movement I screech in pain before I can stop myself. It seems to help.
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
