You know the scene at the beginning of Men in Black, when Edgar walks outside to see that his truck has been destroyed, and he just looks at it and says "Figures"? That's kind of what I feel like right now.
For a little while, I've had this new pain going on. I don't really know if it just started in the last couple of weeks, or if I just didn't notice it so much at first because of the normal surgery pain. Either way, I've been noticing it a lot lately. Whenever it comes back (which is almost always about two hours after I take the pain killers, when they start wearing off) my upper body gets really stiff, and if I move just the tiniest little bit I get this unbelievable pain shooting down from my neck, through my shoulders, into my upper arms (on both sides.) Now, I've never actually had someone take a knife and slice me open right there, but I'm pretty sure it would feel a lot like this does. And I do mean tiniest little movement. Like breathing, or swallowing. I have to grit my teeth just to keep from screaming, and that doesn't even always work. It's intense.
I kept telling myself that this was just part of recovery, 'cause, you know, it's bound to be painful. But the longer it goes on, the less normal it feels. And I've kind of started to be concerned that something has gone wrong. I went to the pain clinic on Tuesday, and told them what's been going on. I was hoping with all my might that they would tell me this is completely normal, and nothing to worry about. But it's me we're talking about, so that wasn't really going to happen.
Of course, they had never heard of anything like this happening after this type of surgery, and didn't really know what might be causing it. (One of them theorized possibly an infection, and ordered blood work, but the look on her face suggested that she was kind of just grasping at straws.) The best that she could be confident about was that it sounds like "some sort of complication," so she suggested that I go back to the surgeon, to see if he might have any idea what's causing it.
All I could think was "Figures." If anything weird is going to go wrong with someone's body, it will go wrong with mine. It kind of sounds like I'm exaggerating there... and maybe I am, just a little. But not by much. (I've joked before that when the gods were putting me together, they just kind of looked at each other, shrugged, and said "Eh, close enough.")
If you know me at all, you know that I have a lot of things wrong with me. And the better you know me, the more you know just how crazy some of those things are. And they aren't the every day, run of the mill things that lots of people have wrong with them. Oh, no. They're the things that nobody has ever heard of. The kinds of things that, when I would describe the symptoms to the doctors (when trying to find a diagnosis) the most common reaction I got was something to the effect of "Hmm. That's weird."
So now, I'm just doing my best to stay positive. Since I'm past the point of hoping that this is just a normal part of recovery, I've moved on to hoping that it is at least something that the surgeon will recognize, and that we'll be able to fix it without too much trouble. I just hope I'm not asking for too much there.
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