Pain Again

I had a really rough night last night. An awful combination of intensified pain in my left shoulder and nausea woke me at 4:30 AM and simply would not let me get back to sleep. The nausea may or may not have arisen from the pain. The pain arose all on its own, defeating all attempts at self-calming and all attempts at chemical pain management. It was bad enough that the muscles in my neck cramped up completely. I could feel the pain all the way from my left eye socket down to the fingers in my left hand.

Eventually I managed to get back to sleep, sometime around 6:00 AM only to awaken again at a little past 8:00 AM. The pain is still here although slightly lessened. Moving is a painful experience but so is lying here, so what the hell, I might as well get moving for the day. If I am going to be in pain, I might as well be up and about while I am at it. Maybe the distraction will help.

I have never had a pain problem like this. While I have had painful events in my life, such as the year I spent with a broken scaphoid bone in my right wrist before it was properly diagnosed, this level of pain and this persistence is a whole new experience. It has been a month now, a month with a constant, nagging and regularly stabbing pain, a pain that limits movement, makes a good night's sleep more a dream than my dreams themselves. It is an ever-present, hulking, drooling, slobbering, slathering monster pleasuring itself in my discomfort and distress.

Drugs have helped but not all that much; they call it pain management, not pain elimination, and it's very poorly managed right now. I have had x-rays and ultra-sound scans to no avail. I am going to get a bone scan in September if this keeps up. Immobilization is pointless as the pain seems to care little about whether I move my arm or not. I just hurts, all the time.

One thing I will say for ALS. It doesn't have this kind of pain, at least not for me so far. Some have trouble with cramping pain, others have lung pain. For me that has not happened yet. When I think of the immense pain caused by cancer or arthritis, when I think of those who suffer persistent back pain, I suppose I am lucky in that regard. Still, this sucker hurts something fierce.