| "Bad Day at Black Rock" yesterday. For those of you who are not sure why I capitalized & quoted the first 5 words, it's because despite it being true for me, it is also the title of a WONDERFUL film with Spencer Tracy. Check it out of your local DVD and Video store and watch it some time...and Amazon had the VHS version, but the DVD is yet to be released. As usual I digress. Yesterday was a "breakthrough pain" day. I had to take my Stadol...and I was crying to Gordy because I really didn't want to take it, it meant pure and utter failure to me. It symbolized my weakness and inability to pull myself up by my bootstraps (courtesy of my Father) or keep my chins up (courtesy of my Great Aunt Anna) and could not tough it out, and wait to see if I tossed my proverbial cookies and ended up at WGH for pain meds or not. Dr Waite says when I talk about my abdomnial mess, that I use "capital letters" referring to "The Pain". I was horribly hurt when he said that, I assumed that he was negatively judging me, and at that moment I went into defense mode, and was inarticulate to the nth degree. Well, I think he's right in retrospect. I do capitalize it, it is what I'm afraid of. The Medical folk have yet been able to label what's wrong, after extensive poking, prodding, MRI's and x-rays, and tests that watched me swallow nasty stuff, or prep before a test swallowing a different set of nasty stuff, and get IV's, and heart EKG's, and different Rx du jour, and NG tubes (for the uninitiated, [close your eyes if you're squeamish, and come back to the next bunch of elipses and paragraph to continue reading] that's a plastic tube that they feed down your nose and throat into your stomach to suck out bile, air, or whatever is there)... ...and ultra sound, and of course, surgery taking out my gall bladder, and endoscopy and colonoscopy, and more x-rays ad infinitum. I've been to multiple MDs, and ERs and GI specialists, and gone through psyche testing (tells you where they were looking) been called an addict, and treated with zero dignity, been to a pain clinic and still they have yet to name what disease I have. So, yes, until they come up with a moniker, it will be "the Pain" that frightens me. A solid 8 months of pain with no name earns me the right to be fearful ot "the Pain". Therefore, when yesterday forced me back to a place in my memory about the pain and all the medical abuse that goes along with it, I was scared shi**less to fall back into that cycle again. Eventually I took the Rx, and not long after, I woke up with a killer pain in my arm, and noticed that I had dropped off to sleep on the laptop LOL and I didn't even look to see if the laptop also made deep impressions in my face and forehead. That stadol can be powerful stuff -- it doesn't really touch the pain per se, but it makes you (I should qualify that this is how it affect ME) sleep and become dizzy and walk unsteadily, and be foggy and not concentrate on the abdominal pain, but on this weird feeling the medicine gives me. The pain started out left of center, but later that night, it recurred right of center. This AM, I'm not totally without pain, and my fibro lower back pain is yelling at me, but I can handle it again. Definitely "Bad Day at Black Rock" yesterday! 
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