The Day After

I'm here, in another attempt to escape, at least for a few moments. It is always the same, yet every time, I set my hope on a different outcome. My head knows it's time is limited, a brief moment in the long days of my life, but for that moment, this hated day, time feels as if it is stretching into forever.

"It" is just pain. The clinic NP calls it an "Injection Flare." In my personal experience, that's like calling a tsunami "just a wave." It won't kill me, but it leaves it's ugly mark on my spirit each & every time it visits me. It embraces me with especially great fervor on this day. Like a long-lost love, it holds me as if to never let me go again. I struggle uselessly in it's embrace; it's strength is far beyond mine. Just beyond the horizon of this day, I know there lay many days where my enemy, my lover, will be in chains. His power over me will be so lessened that I may again live my life with the freedom others daily take for granted. Everyday, simple things will be mine once more - cooking supper for my husband, feeding my horses, checking the mail, going to the grocery store, taking a shower. I'll want to talk to people, re-connect with friends, at least until the descent begins anew. My ability to walk freely will lessen, more nights will be without sleep, until pain is constantly overshadowing the me that I really am. Then I will live for another month or so until the time for my next "day after."

But this day, this special day, is marked off my calendar. It is the day after "shot day," a very personal day for me. I choose these shots; I choose to endure this pain for the freedom it gives afterward. I feel guilty for complaining, since this is essentially my own doing. Yet each time I dance this dance, when I'm right in the gory thick of it, when the minutes are measured in seconds the whole of the day & night, I wonder if I made the right choice. What if it doesn't end this time, but goes on and on at this level? A person would go mad; I nearly go mad in just the one day it usually takes to clear the injection from my joints. The end has to justify the means in this case. I hold to it like a person drowning.

This day of mine is but a tiny piece of America's "health care crisis" that many of my friends insanely believe is some sort of communist/socialist ploy to take over our country's many freedoms. I see no such threat, but perhaps I'm biased. I have no health insurance. I can't get health insurance because of "pre-existing conditions." Unless I receive employer offered health insurance, which would require me to become employed. Which I cannot in my current state of health. Which will not change unless I receive proper treatment. Which I cannot afford due to lack of employment. So I go to a "nearly free" clinic, where I receive 3 hip injections a year, that lower my pain levels to about 50% for about 60 days. It does not treat my other involved joints, only these two. I do not receive any pain medication to relieve the nearly unbearable pain following the procedure, nor for the daily pain that afterward still affects my ability to walk, stand, sit or sleep. Taking Advil, at this point, is like throwing a cup of water on a burning building.

I would like to study the nature of pain, I think. It is so intimate, so personal, so horrible in it's strength. So tenacious. Yet when I'm in the midst of it, as now, I cannot sit long enough, nor think deeply enough, to do it much justice. And when it's over, when I awake & the world is once again nearly bright, I realize I've given far too much time to pain already to spend another second in it's spell, and I hobble away from the worst as quickly as my dissolving joints allow.

I can't write any more; the few moments of peace have given way once again to my lover's call. I cannot refuse or ignore him any longer. Perhaps tomorrow will come to rescue me.