I think, that underneath it all, I knew that stopping drinking thirteen years ago was more than telling myself that taking a drink, simply so I wouldn't smell the booze on his breath. Now, today, as I'm screaming for a place, a way, to run away from a life I'm finding intolerable, I think I'd gladly drink myself senseless just to avoid feeling what I'm feeling now.
They say you should never "run away," but rather you should "run toward." That's all very nice, but what do you do when there is no place to run to, and no way to get there if it did exist? The ubiquitous "they" have never had an answer to that question, at least not one I've found.
So here I sit, having to grab a damn pill bottle to try to keep my throat open enough to breathe, my mind marginally functional. If it were just I, it would be me in bed with the covers over my head and to hell with the rest of the world. But it isn't just me. It's two dogs, and a son who has never finished growing up no matter how hard he tries. So the dogs have to be taken out for walks, the bread has to be baked, and a way must be found to pay for rent, utilities, insurance, food, and the other necessities like toilet paper and detergent. The cost of everything keeps going up, but my income doesn't.
I have dreams, ever so often. But usually someone or something happens to slam the door on them. Most of the time my fingers or toes seem to be in the door when it smashes shut, so I hurt twice... once for the dream destroyed, once for the actual physical pain.
If you are able to live a drug-free life, I envy you tremendously. I have ten medications I must take every day, plus the one I take when things reach the point where I'm ready to run away completely and all the doors are closed. One medication is to keep me alive, one is to fight anemia, and the rest are to control pain. Living with chronic pain can be done, and the life can be pretty decent when you live within your known limits.
What can cut you down is the periodic pain that stabs or crushes or burns into you, a pain that need not be if only things were different. You see, with some pain environmental conditions can be the causative agents. For me it is the cold. More than twenty years ago, when I routinely froze my hands and feet getting to and from the 121 EVAC hospital where I worked, I thought nothing of it. Numbness, pins and needles, then thawed and holding me up just fine for my shift. It was just part of being in a very cold place in winter, and I thought little of it until about five years ago. It was then that my feet started turning into blood blisters during the winter, and my hands seemed to go from "just fine" to "hurt like hell" from simple things like scraping ice off the car windows. I didn't know what it was, or even that the two things were related. It was a PBS show on climbers of Mt Everest that gave me my first hint of what was actually wrong with my hands and feet.
Much to my shock, there was not a single doctor at the VA Medical Center who knew anything about residual damage from cold injury. Now, three years later, there isn't much change ... but the Neurology team is working very hard to come up with something, with anything, that can help control the pain of what is called "peripheral neuropathy." It's difficult, having to balance drug ineractions, and my system's reaction to certain dosages of medications, and deciding whether the side effects are worth the decrease in pain that might occur. Yes, I said "might"; it's a fact that pain caused by nerve damage, like pain caused by neural problems in the brain, is very hard to control. There is no diagnostics program you can plug onto my right big toe and read where the short circuits or pain loop resides, no way to do a pain scan and remove the causative agents, no way to reboot my brain in safe mode so I can be reloaded without the processor flaws.
The pain got bad last night, after I took the dogs out. It was so bad I wanted to scream, but close neighbors would have called the cops. So I dumped the pain on a fellow female Army veteran, filling a long email message with the feel of crushing bones, the agony of someone driving a table knife between the knuckles on the back of my hand, twisting it until the agony burns clear to the backs of my eyeballs. I knew she'd understand and that last night she was stronger than I was. She understands because Desert Storm has left her with chronic pain, among other things. She understands, because she has fought the VA system trying to get the bureau-rats to admit what is wrong with us is as a direct consequence of us volunteering to serve our country. Ask any veteran who has dealt with the VA, and they'll tell you the Army/Navy/Marines/Air Force are good training for VA, especially the "Hurry up and wait!" aspect; it also was good training for the battles we have to go through. The only problem we have is that with the "enemy at home" we're not allowed to raid their HQ and take them captive, nor shoot them on sight. I truly doubt those people who specialize in saying "No!" are aware of how lucky they are, lucky that we their victims don't actually come after them.
The pain is more or less under control now, the pill bottle I climbed into seems to have helped the mental agony somewhat. But the idea of Thanksgiving and the holidays to come is unpaletable ...
