I lived with my father as he slowly died in increasingly excruciating pain over years and years. When my mother was home, she forbid him to say, “I hurt,” and she withheld his pain medication “because it made him sleep all the time.”
He slept all the time anyway, because that was the only way he could reduce his pain level. He groaned in his sleep, though.
Unfortunately, I have inherited the disease that caused his pain: degenerative joint disease, with the added agony of degenerative disc disease.
For the past few weeks the combination of mental and physical pain has me close to the breaking point. I can’t take opiates because they make me itch, and my skin condition makes it impossible to scratch without tearing off pieces of myself, leaving a wound that takes a month to heal. In addition, the docs in this part of the country are so afraid of opiates that they refuse to prescribe. So I’m stuck with using mj, which is somewhat illegal here. But I have things to do, so I can’t use enough to really relieve the pain, because that would put me in bed. So I’m screwed.
The psychic pain–there are no words to describe.
Part of it is endogenous. Part is environmental–the part of the country I’m stuck in at the moment is grey and damp, two things I can’t stand. The sun came out for five minutes today and it was balm to my soul. I’m out of here just as soon as my task is done.
My task is to clean my stuff out of my father’s old studio, where I lived for the last four years of his life. It took me four days just to clear the spiders out. Now I’m sorting through things, making three piles: throw out, because of damage from humidity; give away, because I’m not going to use anymore; keep.
Just to to the situational depression off, Atina is not doing well. This week her labs were worse. Her kidneys are getting leakier. They’re no longer holding her blood proteins in her blood. They were leaking protein before, but her serum proteins were holding their own; now her kidneys are leaking more than her body can produce to keep up with the loss.
Today we took a short walk in the woods. It’s been raining for weeks, and since it had stopped this morning (but is back now) I thought it would do us both good to take a walk. But she wasn’t interested in playing in the creek, and although she carried her ball, she didn’t want to play with it. And she simply collapsed halfway through where I wanted to go, which is only half a mile on flat ground. I had to sit down and wait for her to recover.
Now she has fallen off the driver’s seat, which is where she normally sleeps, and is passed out on the floor where she landed. It looks like she’s nearing the end of her sweet life.
When will my misery end?
I want to stay alive until my son finishes his Ph.D in May. I want to see him off on the next part of his journey.
He and I have talked about what we lived through with his grandpa, and that I have the same illness, with the added fun of bipolar. We have had the talk about what will happen when I can’t stand the pain any longer.
It’s one thing to talk about it, and another thing to live it. I know he’ll survive. But losing one’s mother is a terrible thing. And living in agony is a terrible thing.
There will come a tipping point. I keep on living for others: for my son, for my dog…should I get another dog? Can I live that long?
In three years my income will be drastically reduced, to the point where I literally can’t live. I guess that will be the end of the line, if it doesn’t come sooner.
