Pain is temporary...when the hydrocodone is near.

I just realized something. My body hurts and I am surprised and a little disappointed. Now that may, and should, sound a little stupid. Feeling the pain pill I just took kick in as I write helps me understand why I feel the way I do. The difference in how many body feels when I don’t take the pain medication and when I do is stark.

For the first week after my surgery I took the pain medication every 4 hours, even after I came home. For the last few days I’ve been trying to figure out the balance between the therapeutic effects of letting my body heal with reduced pain and using pain medication unnecessarily. Thinking it was time I started to reduce my use of them, I started taking them only when the pain really bothered me. That has translated into taking the meds maybe once a day. It has also translated into me feeling more pain and getting tired and cranky more easily…and me drinking more coffee to compensate for feeling tired and crappy.  It has also had an emotional impact. I am not very happy. I don’t know that I am depressed, but I am kind of ticked off.

I guess after a bunch of days taking the pain meds and feeling no pain I started believing that I was recovering from the surgery with little pain. I starting to think that I could and should start to do more things for work and around the house because I felt pretty good. Now after two days of taking fewer pain meds and trying to do more I am tired and wrung out. I am tired in my bones and discouraged because I feel as weak and as sore as…well, as I probably should given that my surgery happened just 12 days ago. Because I felt pretty good, it was easy to forget that I have a broken bone that is healing—not just any bone but the keystone of my upper body. And it is easy to forget that I have a whole bunch of muscles that did all sorts of things they weren’t supposed to because my chest was split apart and spread wide.

So now I sit here tired, unable to bring myself to work on that grant proposal, knowing I should take a nap instead of have a cup of coffee. And I know that the way I feel isn’t helping me get better and it isn’t going to make me any more helpful to my family.

So I say hello nap, hello pain meds, hello reality check.

Once again I prove that my desire to do is not tempered by any sense of what I can or should do. Maybe, just maybe, someday I’ll learn. Unfortunately I am starting to slip into that old dog, new trick territory.