So, while I was not sleeping last night…again…I found this on wikipedia.
It is widely believed that regular exposure to painful stimuli will increase pain tolerance – i.e. increase the ability of the individual to handle pain by becoming more conditioned to it. However, this is not true – the greater exposure to pain will result in more painful future exposures. Repeated exposure bombards pain synapses with repetitive input, increasing their responsiveness to later stimuli, through a process similar to learning. Therefore, although the individual may learn cognitive methods of coping with pain, these methods may not be sufficient to cope with the boosted response to future painful stimuli.[1] “An intense barrage of painful stimuli potentiates the cells responsive to pain so that they respond more vigorously to minor stimulation in the future.”[2]
Does this mean that I will forever be getting better / stronger / more powerful pain killers because I will forever be in more pain than I was the last time? :\ Sounds like fun doesn’t it…
About being in pain is when it doesn’t hurt enough. I have two kinds of medication I take for pain: one when it hurts and one when I sometimes wonder if I’m dying. The problem is, I can’t stack them, if I take both bad things happen. So this can cause problems, which one do I take? The one that just takes a little bit of pain away and hope it doesn’t get worse or do I take the ones that I feel almost addicted to after just taking one? Sometimes I wish it would just hurt more so I could take the good meds and go to sleep. There’s only one time I sleep better than with these meds, and that’s when I sleep next to Ana; nothing could ever beat that, ever. So for tonight I’m stuck awake, in not enough pain and I’m really fucking pissed off because the pain is annoying as hell. I just want to curl up in Ana’s arms and go to sleep, it’s the one thing that makes everything else okay. The one thing that never changes. The one thing in this whole world that matters the most, that I can’t live without. The one thing that will always make me smile. I want to go to sleep knowing that when I wake up, I can know that life doesn’t always suck and that I can smile.
Today was a great day, for the most part, but then my body had to decide that I was having too much fun. Maybe I don’t deserve to have “good” days anymore. There’s nobody I can or will blame for this. Unexplained medical conditions sometimes suck, big time.
I’ve had this…condition…for as long as I can remember, my parents said when I was really young it was worse. Their child of two or three lying down crying and not being able to explain where it hurt, and any contact making it all worse. Eventually I could sort of explain where it hurt, and learned when it was going too. I can be sleeping, eating ice cream, running, doing homework, watching a movie, driving…it doesn’t matter, there is no one *cause* for this, but my hands and feet hurt more than anything describable. Some activities seem to make it happen more often, odd things…sitting “indian style”, objects that vibrate (ie. lawn mowers, car steering wheels, etc) and semi-strenuous physical activities. Which means really anything I do can set it off and nothing will make it go away. The only things that…help…in any way are sitting in the shade (but not on something hard, lying down helps more) and drinking something cold.
Have you ever wondered what real pain is? Not the “ow I got a paper cut.” or “damn, I shut my hand in the door” kind of pain. I’m talking about true, pure pain, the pain that makes you honestly wish you would die right then. This is that kind of pain, and a few times I did wish I would die so it would go away. No words will ever be able to describe to you how it feels, suppose I’ll do my best though…don’t read the rest of this paragraph if you don’t want to. Don’t know how many people have accidentally cut themselves with an x-acto blade, but it feels a lot like a very bad paper cut. Now, imagine having hundreds of thousands of those, if not millions, slicing your skin away from your bones and into pieces…but from the inside out. At the same time your bones feel like they’re exploding, exactly the same as those migraine headaches that make your vision fade a little. Touching either hand or foot multiplies this pain by about 30 times. Best description I have ever come up with really, and it’s not even close to how it really feels. A few times I start shaking, like a full body seizure, sometimes it’s just my hands, a few times I’ve actually passed out from it just hurting too much.
Used to just take 800milligrams of Ibuprofen or 1000milligrams of Tylenol and everything would be okay. These days I have a prescription for Darvocet (650mg of Acetaminophen and 150mg of propoxyphene) which doesn’t really do anything for me anymore. Is it a drug addiction or have I taken so many that I’m “immune” to it? Probably the latter if anything, but I doubt it. Only part about this whole thing that truly bothers me, is not that I may be addicted to narcotic pain meds, but that nobody knows what causes it and there seems to be no cure or method to repress it.
Is being addicted to not being in pain the same thing as being addicted to pain medication? I would have to say no, but they can be very closely related. If you’re not careful one can turn into the other. Do I plan on being careful about not becoming addicted to my pain meds, especially if I get the stronger ones like I want to? When I’m not in pain, I’ll say yes, but when things start hurting that badly…I take what I have to and hope that it goes away.
But yea, the rest of my day was mildly productive. Got my room floor cleaned up some, my desk could use a little work still. >.> Also spend an hour or so talking to the most amazing person I know, made my day worth living 