lifeslurper

Lifeslurper in pain

Sometimes it is really hard to not feel like a totally useless waste of space.

 

Old, fat, infertile, not working, and now hardly walking.

Not sure if anyone has noticed, but this blog has been rather quiet lately. This is entirely due to my body virtually giving up the ghost and quickly deteriorating into a higher level of pain. I don’t want to be an invalid. I do not enjoy pain.

 

You see, a few weeks back all was mostly fine – well as fine as it ever gets with this old body. I was continuing on with my food plan in an effort to lose weight (had managed to lose 5kgs in around six weeks) but had still not launched back into any real exercise routine. Bitter experience has taught Lifeslurper that weight loss only happens when combined with ongoing exercise. Makes sense of course; less kilojoules going in; more kilojoules being worked off. I also need the activity to fire up my stodgy old endorphins that are vital to protect me from my friend the Big D, otherwise known as depression.

 

My gym regime had fallen by the wayside in the lead up to my last cycle, as I was too sore to continue. I had noticed the pattern at the start of the year, at the beginning of what was going to be many trips taken in the pursuit of IVF. It seemed my back was an unwilling participant in this endeavour and arced up immediately. At the time of our first cycle I had been dieting and exercising. My back was strong (well as strong as mine gets!) in the lead up to the business end of the cycle. That was not to last. A few extended trips and things were not good. A physiotherapist explained that the constant gynaecological changes and exploration was having a direct affect on my lower back.

 

I know what real back pain is like. Five years ago after a long period of back instability so bad that physiotherapists would no longer treat me, I ended up losing most feeling in my lower legs. It was not fun. I spent a week in hospital. The time since has been a constant battle to stay strong in the back and live a relatively normal life.

 

In the entire time I have known Wobbles I have had back problems. When I first moved in with him, he preferred to sleep in a half filled (half empty?) water bed. A new bed became an immediate necessity. It was bit of a shock to Wobbles, a fellow who slouches incessantly and rarely feels pain. My explanations of how a simple thing like extending my hand out to accept a glass of water from him can cause great pain seem confusing to him. I seem to spend my days lifting, passing, ironing as it seems simpler than trying to explain the difficulties such activity causes. The floors are another matter altogether. Wobbles doesn’t notice the filth in which we live. I can no longer lift the broom let alone the vacuum cleaner. When Wobbles gets the chance, he will sweep or vacuum just the one room. His Wobbles mind not understanding that floor filth shifts from room to room under foot very quickly, especially when it is built up as much as ours is.

 

I am past caring. Yet I almost cried this week when my physiotherapist said I would be eligible for home help. I don’t want anyone to see this. Bless his cotton (mismatched!) socks, but Wobbles is doing his best to understand. Recently he has taken to knocking at the bathroom door when I am delayed; “are you okay in there?” back pain at this level means a loss of bladder and bowel control. I know he wants to understand, but for the moment this is beyond him. Most of the time I am suffering in silence.

 

So months back when I had grown tired of the ongoing pattern with my back, and had wondered if I was truly doing the right things to help improve things, I happened across someone who new of a local back ‘expert.’ Immediately I was suspicious. I will not visit a chiropractor, and find the idea of having my back ‘crunched’ completely unsafe. I was given a phone number, and only had the information that this was some kind of “doctor.” I need not have feared; turned out there was a ridgey didgey musculoskeletal physician with a specialty in lower back disorders located right here in this backwater. Not surprisingly, it meant waiting months to get in for my first appointment. The almost immediate request to strip down to my undies and walk back and forth for him was almost enough to make me quickly consider if walking with a twisted sideways tilt was such a bad thing after all, but I soon got over my embarrassment. Besides, I have spent the best part of a year with my feet up in stirrups with people looking up into my nether regions. Parading around in my underwear seems absolutely modest in comparison!

 

There was a bit of bending, a bit of poking at my muscles, then came the mention of various things that have been directed at me before – but never all by the same practitioner at the one time. My disc problem does not have much reason to be lonely, as it is living in close quarters with a curvature of the spine or scoliosis, a pelvic lean and tilt, plus different length legs. In a word he said I was “unravelling”, that I have core problems that are continually being aggravated by exercise. I have no chance of improving my fitness while these issues exist.

 

While I don’t want to find I have even more physical conditions, it was in some ways a relief to hear this explanation. Now the continual re-injuring of my back doing the very thing I have been told will improve it makes sense. Doing serious exercise for a few weeks on then a few weeks off was depressing me, and adding to my constant feelings of failure. So now it is back to basics; I am restricted to doing breathing exercises for now. Both the physician and the physiotherapist agreeing that the ‘less is more’ approach is best for me. I need to have spinal x-rays (don’t laugh) but I am waiting until my current natural cycle is over, and I know for sure I am not pregnant before those x-rays are taken. Ah! The delusions of the eternal optimist!

 

In the days leading up to the initial appointment with the physician appointment, things began to deteriorate even worse. I returned to the physiotherapist for more treatment. Days after visiting the new doctor I was having trouble moving. By the weekend I was in quite reasonable pain. I turned to pain killers for the first time in years, and had several days of being in a dreamy state, but the pain seemed to grow. There was a chance I was delirious, but suddenly my mouth started to hurt. I felt pain in my jaw, my ears, and my back teeth. The pain appeared to localise in my teeth and I began to curse myself for the dental check up cancelled in the midst of an IVF cycle and back pain. It would be another four days before I could travel to that emergency dentist appointment. By that day my head felt it was going to explode, which is common for me and my ongoing problems with headache and migraine. I felt nauseous and was certain there would need to be a removal of a molar. The throbbing pain was unmistakable, mirroring the deterioration of a cyst (coming from my sinuses) affected tooth four years earlier. A thorough examination later, and the dentist announced there was not a thing wrong with my teeth, leaving only one likely culprit: my deformed sinuses!

 

“Lifeslurper….I think it is time you had that surgery!” he politely said.

 

My kindly dentist has been treating me for six years post the diagnosis of sinus problems. I had lived with ear aches and a throat sore from the constant cough for the entire decade prior. In the years before my sinus malformation was discovered my health concerns alternated in an endless cycle between my back, diseased thyroid, ulcers, eczema, repeated bouts of pleursey, and migraine to name a few. These all vying for attention, with depression usually pipping them at the post. There were a number of hospital stays, and a lot of time off work. Constantly sore ears and throat seemed like a minor concern.

 

In an instance I knew I would now move heaven and earth to get myself to my Ears, Nose and Throat specialist to have surgery to enlarge my right nostril which is “virtually non-existent” and help drain the areas that constantly fill with infection. I’ve seen the ultrasounds, and I had to shut my eyes on the camera vision when it looked down into areas that do not drain. Prior to IVF treatments I had been on antibiotics full time for six years. Before that, years of nasal spray use had stripped the lining of my nostrils and led to frequent nose bleeds. The constant cough to clear my throat and the nose blowing to pop my ears had in the past annoyed workmates and housemates to distraction. The near choking on my post-nasal drip has caused me to fear sleep. Still this has not been enough for me to focus on working to resolve this issue. Sure, there has been the occasional general practitioner who has claimed sinus surgery would not help me overcome these difficulties, that as long as I have allergies I would still have mucus build ups and worse. No amount of dairy avoidance changes this problem. My guess is as long as I have the faulty ‘plumbing’ this infection will always exist.

 

Suffice to say, I made an immediate appointment to see the specialist with a view to finally arranging the airway surgery. I am no longer content to live with a constantly sore back that has a spasm each time I clear my throat. No longer will I allow myself to endure sinus headaches that take my mind off the pain coming from my back. Too long have I been responsible for encouraging these conditions by not dealing thoroughly with them. Which ever one is the most acute, distracting my attention from the lesser concerns while I fail to really deal with any of them effectively.

 

Having a medical diagnosis can be a wonderful thing. It is nice to have a validation to the things that plague us. Yet I feel a certain anger with myself. Not sure if it is my upbringing, where illness was not allowed to slow us down at all, but I have a long history of trying to live these conditions down. I don’t want to become that woman who has the ‘bad’ back so I put up with it. When things are bad, I seek band aid solutions to help get me by. I do what is recommended to me, yet mostly try to cope and not get too tragic about it all. I keep it at arm’s length and never pursue these matters as thoroughly as perhaps I should.

 

I am struggling to see I have now made progress after a few weeks of uncertainty. Should the latest developments be celebrated as a move forward? Or have I just surrendered so many years of my living to restrictions aimed at avoiding pain?

 

There has also been the startling realisation that every segment of major episodes of depression has coincided with numerous serious and chronic illnesses that have under-pinned my adult life. Again, I fear the old family teachings of ‘keeping on’ while great for survival has led to the denial of many things. Endeavouring to sustain one’s own self during difficult times has nothing to do with nurturing the soul. If I were to acknowledge the amount of illness that has punctuated my adult life, my career, my financial situation, my relationships, and my hope there is a great chance I would fall apart and fail to get put myself together again. Physical illness was integral to my isolation, loneliness and my long-term single status. What right do I have to presume I could get this rather useless body to make a baby? Have I allowed myself to get caught up in emotion that manages to convince me that my body could withstand the rigours of pregnancy and parenthood? Would I want my pain to be the presence that my child later recalls first of time together?

 

In many ways IVF and its many difficulties distracts us from other things; the very things that could be useful in our pursuit of achieving fertility. Having a baby becomes our full time pre-occupation and we allow our bodies to be battered by the process.

 

These days, with these difficulties becoming more acute, I spend far too much time wondering if I have completely bypassed my late chances of parenthood made a quick detour into a direct into an old age decline.