Body Fuel

I was lying in bed last night, thinking about the surgery and all that, and after I had read another blog, something kind of clicked that may help me to explain things better to other people.

Of course, I won't ever be able to explain the amount of pain that I deal with on a daily basis, but maybe I can explain what kind of toll it takes on my body and my psyche.

In the mornings, when I wake up...I feel stiff and sore, and I push myself out of bed each morning with both arms, and sit up on the side of the bed and wait to catch my balance. I cannot just pop out of bed like a Poptart and start the day. So I get up, and start to move around. As I am moving around, its like the old machine gets a little oiled up, and I can move a little better...and the body fuel guage is full.

As the day wears on, the body fuel starts to deplete. At a pretty fast rate too. Depending on how much I do during a day, but still, even if I try and take things easy, depletion is inevitable. Pain is there all day. Towards the end of the day though, I am starting to run on empty, and the pain is getting worse. And then, all of a sudden, its as if my fuel tank is completely dry and I am in excruciating pain. Usually this happens around a couple of hours before bedtime, and those last couple of hours that I have before bed, I have to just take it easy. But of course, my kids need to be tucked in and things like that. So I get them to bed, and I finally get to lay down.

I take my medicine, and when I first lay down, I have to lay there and just kind of take deep breaths for a few minutes. My entire back is throbbing. I have the right side of my back, in between my ribcage and my hipbone, that feels as if there is a knife there, and its being twisted, slowly. Then I get my book and start to read. (Reading, to me, is almost as good as any drug ) Lying on my right side starts to hurt, so I lay on my back. I can only lay on my back for a few minutes before it starts to hurt. So then I turn over to get on my left side. When I lay on my left side, my hipbone touches the bottom of my ribcage. Weird, but, every single time I lay in that position and I can feel the hipbone touching the ribcage, I think to myself, "What if I get stuck like this, with my hipbone and ribcage touching, and I can't walk?" Pretty freaky. So far nothing like that has happened.

Finally, I roll back over to my right side, because by then, my pain medication is starting to set in and lying on my right side isn't that bad anymore. So I read, and then the meds hit full force and I am knocked out.

What's sad is that I absolutely love to read, and I could read for hours if I had the chance. But because I have to take medicine to control the pain, I can't read like I want to. Scoliosis interferes with everything in my life.

All night long, I continue the pattern of adjusting positions. I cannot sleep on my back though, so that position is replaced with sleeping on my stomach. If I sleep on my stomach for too long, when I go to move, my lower back pain shoots through my entire body and I can't hardly get myself back to my side. Some nights, I sleep mostly on my right side, and when I wake up the next morning, I want to cry from the pain.

But I get up anyways, and my young, but OLD FEELING machine, gets a little oiled up and I can move a little...and the fuel system fills up again, only to start depleting at a very fast rate.

I can't wait until this is over.