To the Pain

Today's blog post is dedicated to my physical therapist, Emily, who has not yet seen The Princess Bride.  I've been nagging her to watch it, and she has obtained a copy, but she has come up with questionable excuses the last 3 nights.  Maybe tonight.

Watch it now!

Today I want to talk about pain.  I've been experiencing a lot of it today, and it's starting to worry me a little.  Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any real way to know if it's the kind of pain that I can safely push through, or if it's the kind of pain that indicates I'm hurting myself.

There are three major sources of pain on my body right now.  Obviously, my back hurts where they cut a huge hole and screwed in a bunch of hardware.  My left hand also hurts right in the middle of the back of my hand.  We're not sure if there is a broken bone, but I'm starting to suspect so.  I also have 2 or 3 broken ribs.  I'm not really sure how many exactly, but I think I have them on both sides.

Earlier this week, I thought all three pain sources were improving, but yesterday and today have felt very much like a setback in every area.

That new wheelchair they put me in this week is torture on my back.  I don't know if it's doing damage, but my back hurts any time I sit in it.  Just sitting in that chair makes me want to cry after a couple hours.

Yesterday, Rahalay, my occupational therapist, suggested I push my wheelchair differently.  I had been pushing the chair for a couple days with relatively little pain, but when I tried her suggestion, something popped in my hand, and now I can barely push the chair at all.  It's also much more painful to do almost anything with my left hand.  Since 80% of my body is completely non-functional, I have to do a LOT with my left hand.  I'm concerned this one is going to significantly slow down my rehab.

Today, Emily made me roll onto my stomach on one of the beds in the gym (tummy-time).  That hurt me a lot.  Initially, I thought the pain was caused by stretching the fused part of my spine in a weird way, but then she made me do a sort of shoulder pushup on my elbows and that actually felt better.  My conclusion is that I was putting all my weight on my broken ribs.  I think the broken ribs are very close to the line where I can't feel anything, and I think they probably don't hurt as much as they might because of that, but it seems that if I aggravate them sufficiently, I get to feel the pain.  Since the tummy-time incident, I can feel something pop when I breathe deeply, and it hurts more to laugh or to lie on my side.  I have to do all of that stuff constantly, so I'm concerned about what that means for my upcoming rehab sessions.

This is what I look like when I'm in pain.  In this case, it's from stretching out muscles that somebody recently cut up and sewed back together.

To control the pain during therapy sessions, I mostly rely on powerful drugs.  I used to use regular Morphine.  That stuff works like gangbusters, but I can never remember anything that happens when I'm on it.  That makes it not much fun, and I haven't used it since I moved here from Charlotte.  I now use a slow-release Morphine that works for 12 hours.  I'm not sure how effective it is, but I think it helps take the edge off, and critically, I don't notice my head getting fuzzy when I take it.  The pain med that does most of the heavy lifting for me these days is Percocet.  It works pretty well, but I hate the way it makes my head feel fuzzy.  I guess some people like that feeling, but I can't think clearly when I feel like that, and I don't enjoy that feeling at all.

I'm allowed to have 2 Percocet pills every 4 hours, so the schedule I have come up with has the night nurse wake me up at 7:00 AM to give me 2 pills.  They take almost an hour to start working so I go back to sleep until breakfast at 8:00.  The idea is to get them working in time for my therapy sessions which usually last from 10:00 to 12:00 most mornings.  At 11:00, I will take one or two more pills depending on how much therapy I have scheduled for the afternoon.

Once therapy is over, I generally won't take any more Percocet for the rest of the day unless my wheelchair is really killing my back and I can't get in bed yet.

Whenever I do ask the nurse for a Percocet, she always asks me to rate my pain on a scale from one to 10.  I take this ranking very seriously even though studies have shown it is a completely useless way to rate pain.   My friend, Bert, sent me a link that explains the situation hilariously.

I'm in bed right now, and not experiencing too much pain, but Andrew sprained his ankle while running this morning, and has been icing it and hobbling around all day.  It's unfortunate that he can't have any of my pain meds because in spite of all the pain I was in today, it still bothers me to see him limping around like a war hero when I need him to push me to dinner.