@chronic pain

One Step Forward and Two Steps Back

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 2 Comments

Sometimes I think that it would be good if life were simpler. For me, it’s anything but simple. Maybe my expectations are too high. Maybe I’m not being realistic. Maybe if I relaxed a little, all would be better. Maybe. Yet, the complexity just seems to expand, to encompass everything, no matter what I do, or don’t do. 

I’ve been off chemo meds for about five weeks, and I have until the end of March before I go back on them. At least that’s the current plan. There was never a plan for long-term withdrawal from my chemo meds. I haven’t had my blood tested for a few weeks, and it will be another three weeks before I get tested again. I’m of two minds about that. It’s quite possible that the bloodwork will show that myeloma has again taken up full-blown residence in my blood and bone marrow. It may also be that it shows that I’m still okay. It’s always a crap shoot and somewhat tense for that reason. 

More concerning for me is the fact that since my withdrawal from hydromorphone I’ve been in a lot of pain. It hasn’t attenuated much at all. I’ve been able to walk a bit two or three times a week, but any walking I’ve done has been painful. I generally walk around two kilometres, and that takes me half an hour. Not a blistering pace. 

Because of the incessant pain I’m in I’ve had to backtrack and reconsider my decision to cease taking opioids. I took a slow release capsule this morning as a test and I have felt some relief. It may be that I’m dreaming in technicolour if I think that I can manage without pain meds. 

Speaking with my GP/oncologist last week was enlightening. He doesn’t think that the pain I’m having has anything to do with my B12 deficiency, opioid withdrawal or myeloma. He thinks it’s attributable to chronic pain, something I’ve experienced for decades. (I’m not sure I completely agree with him on that.) Thinking back over the past thirty years and it’s clear to me that I’ve had periods before I was diagnosed with myeloma or pernicious anemia when I’ve experienced extreme pain and other very strange symptoms like having a yeasty odour and having my skin welt up after drawing a dull object over it with not a lot of pressure.* In the mid-nineties I had a period of debilitating fatigue to the point where I could barely function. I was also depressed at that time, with good reason to be. 

The chronic pain that I’ve experienced throughout most of my life is associated as much as I can tell, with the consequences of surgeries I’ve had. The two main ones are a laminectomy (disc removal) and a nephrectomy (kidney removal). As well, I’ve had the odd accident on my bike and some running-related injuries. My neck has been a source of a lot of pain over the years brought on mainly by years of hunching over a computer terminal. I envy people who go through life with very little or no pain. There aren’t many of those in my family. I have siblings with MS and fibromyalgia. I have quite a few relatives with autoimmune diseases. It seems to run in the family. We’re also a long-lived bunch. That might be good, but it might not be so good too: all the more time to suffer from debilitating pain. 

The biggest and most distressing challenge I face right now is the weakness in my legs but I may get control over that with a low dose of hydromorphone and gabapentin. I need to move around. That’s a prerequisite for continuing to be able to move around. Being sedentary breeds inactivity and makes it harder and harder to get any exercise. Exercise hurts! Walking two kilometres brings on a lot of pain. Damn! 

And with the price of gas now, I think driving may be an even bigger pain in the ass than I’m feeling now in my ‘lower’ back. I feel that driving into Courtenay for a walk on the River Walkway is a bit frivolous when gas is $2 a litre. I can always walk around Cumberland for free. 

Tomorrow should be better for me in terms of pain. I expect I’ll walk a couple of kilometres tomorrow morning. The weather is supposed to be good. From Thursday on for at least a week it’s supposed to be rainy and cold. No reason not to walk, but it is less pleasant and I like pleasant these days. 

If you didn’t notice, and to end today’s musings, the title of this post works for some things, but not for life itself. Life never goes backwards, no matter how much we wish that it were so, no matter how many anti-ageing creams we use. 

My next post will be on why the penis and clitoris are such wondrous things and why they have so much in common. 

_______________________________________________________

*This is the strangest phenomenon. I would drag the handle of a kitchen knife over my arm and it would welt up for maybe three hours afterwards along the path of the draw. Has that ever happened to you? I’d like to know if you’ve ever experienced this. 

And the beat goes on…

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 2 Comments

Yes, it does. Sonny and Cher knew what they were singing about what seems like a lifetime ago now. I don’t know why, but the fact that Sonny died slammed up against a tree on a ski slope in Lake Tahoe the day after my birthday (January 5th) 1998 has my current attention. I guess it’s because his is a good example of a quick, unpredictable, death. Sonny had no time to sweat it. Death just happened to Sonny. No time to ruminate about it. Go Sonny go! I must confess that in some ways I envy Sonny his quick release.

Moving on, in my last post I told you that there was no longer any trace of multiple myeloma in my blood. I’m happy about that, but I must attach a disclaimer to that fact. The multiple myeloma will return. As I’ve repeated over and over, multiple myeloma is incurable although it is treatable. My oncologists have suggested to me that myeloma is a lot like type 2 diabetes in the way that it is treated by the medical profession. 

So, I can reasonably expect to make it to my eightieth birthday, although, frankly, longevity is not the holy grail here. And, of course, the six years from now until my eightieth year are not years owed to me. They are purely hypothetical time, years I might live, and years I might not. Moreover, as far as I know, after I’m dead, I won’t be able to regret anything about my life, how I lived it and for how long. “I” will not be so it’s ridiculous to speculate on what “I” might do after “I” am no longer. After I’m dead, “I” enter my immortality stage. 

I was not going to explore the whole business of mortality in this post, but I changed my mind. Bear with me. I just want to introduce here some ideas that I’ll come back to it in an upcoming post. These are not simple concepts to grasp, but, if you make the effort, it may help you understand life and death as I see them. So, here we go:

Humans are mortal, but only as long as we’re alive. To be blunt about it, it’s only when we are alive that we can die. Once we die, we are no longer mortal, we now become immortal, that is, we no longer change, and we consist only of what others remember of us. Our lives are complete. Simply put, immortal means not mortal. Well, once we’re dead, we are no longer mortal, by definition. We’ve arrived! We’ve become immortal! That doesn’t mean that we will live on forever in some form or other as defined by most of the religions that exist on this planet. No. “We” exist, after our deaths, only in the minds of others. 

My definition of immortality is clearly not the one espoused by most religions. The Abrahamic religions, for example, get around the problem of death by coming up with the idea of the soul. According to Christianity, the soul is the immortal aspect of human existence and is continuous before and after death. The body may return to the planetary store of compounds, atoms, and molecules, but the soul, well, the soul lives on in some kind of ill-defined relationship with a deity, “God” in the case of Christianity.  My definition of immortality does not acknowledge the bicameral nature of the person as consisting of body and soul. I see no evidence for the existence of a soul. Therefore, it does not ‘fit’ into any explanatory scheme I concoct. 

I could go on and on about death and dying as most of you well know, and as I promised I’ll get back to it in a subsequent post, but for now I’ll drop the philosophizing about immortality, death and dying and take up an issue that I’m currently faced with given the fact that we’ve tamed my myeloma. 

A few months ago, while I was still struggling with active myeloma, the pain in my bones was severe, and it was compounded by peripheral neuropathic pain. At that time a priority for me was pain relief. It still is to a large extent, but now, my priority is to see how far I can go in weaning myself off pain medications that were crucial for me for the time I was under the full effect of myeloma.  Now, I’m on two prescription pain medications and I take acetaminophen when I think of it. I was on three prescription pain meds until just recently, but I quit one of the medications cold turkey. Along with several annoying side effects, one of the more insidious side effects of that medication is dry mouth. My sense of taste was affected. I could barely taste some of my favourite foods and some I could not taste at all. I was anxious to try life without this med and as it turns out I’m quite confident that I’ll be fine without it. 

That leaves me with two pain meds. Gabapentin is a med I take for neuropathic pain. I’m currently cutting back on it to see how it goes. I’m not going cold turkey on Gabapentin, but I am determined to eliminate it from my pantheon of drugs. Hydromorphone is the drug that is the backbone of my pain treatment. I take it in slow-release form twice a day to deal with the daily predictable pain I get from myeloma’s excavations of my femurs as well as from sciatica and degenerative disk disease. I can also take hydromorphone in what’s called a pain breakthrough mode. That is, if the slow-release form of hydromorphone isn’t doing the job, I can take a more fast-acting form of the drug in any amount I feel is needed. I have taken breakthrough hydromorphone, but only sporadically, and as a last resort. I take as little of this drug that I feel will do the job. Taking more than a few milligrams of breakthrough hydromorphone leaves me hallucinating, not something I enjoy.  

The problem is that I’m seventy-four and at my age, the degenerative process is well under way. There’s no stopping it, and it’s not satisfied until it’s done. At my age, just about everybody has back pain and sciatica. These are conditions endemic to the species. It serves us right to have evolved from an arboreal species to one that is bipedal and an upright walker. Monkeys don’t have back problems. 

So, my challenge at the moment is to reduce my intake of pain meds to the point where I get pain relief without experiencing all the negative side effects of the various meds involved. So far so good. We’ll see how it goes.

__________________________________________________________________________

I’m writing this post on one of the hottest days of the year so far with tomorrow promising to be even hotter yet. Thankfully we have air conditioning, so the house is staying at a very acceptable 24.5˚C. Outside today, according to our weather station, the temperature has topped out at around 40˚C. Tomorrow, the prognosticators have promised us temperatures of 40˚C at mid-afternoon, so the beat goes on. 

I’m not complaining about the weather. The weather is what it is. It doesn’t respond to our needs, but instead requires that we respond to it if we’re not happy with it. Good luck with that. On to the next post now. Maybe I’ll take less time to get it out than it took me to get this one out. No promises. 

Check out this article Carolyn found for me. It’s a great discussion of chronic pain:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/jun/28/sufferers-of-chronic-pain-have-long-been-told-its-all-in-their-head-we-now-know-thats-wrong?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other