Chronic pain

I've spent the evening commenting on other people's blogs and really should pack it in, but this will be brief.

A lot of my descriptions of Wife make her sound like a hard-boiled bitch. Partly that's because I mostly write when I have something to complain about. Partly it's because that's a role she aspires to, often enjoys, and carries off with considerable success.

But there is another side to her -- one which may actually go some way toward explaining the bitchiness as well as the irrationality and much of the rest of it.

Wife is always in pain.

Some days are better than others, of course. Some days the pain is just a dull annoyance, and she can more or less ignore it. Some days it is crippling. And there's a wide range in between.

But Wife has suffered some form of chronic pain for ... well, really I have no idea how long. Different kinds of pain, over the years. Often it is headache -- she suffers from migraines (not infrequently) but seems to have non-migrainous headaches in the background just as a sort of business-as-usual. Sometimes it is backaches or muscle aches, exacerbated by one or more of her medical conditions. Back when she weighed over 300 lbs, it was pretty much every joint all at once: even walking across the room hurt her knees and her feet. She has suffered from trismus in her jaw, and hammer-toe on both feet. Many years ago it was carpal tunnel syndrome. The first year we were married she suffered from a diseased gall bladder that was ready to burst at any moment; for 9 months if she ate the slightest bit of fat or oil, she had crippling stomach pain for hours afterwards. (She went into surgery to have the gall bladder removed one day after the "pre-existing condition" clause in our medical insurance expired.)

There is non-physical pain, too; severe cyclical depression is no picnic. But sometimes I think I put too much emphasis on her psychological pain and not enough on the fact that her body simply hurts. All the time. That can be plenty depressing by itself.

She has been in pretty serious pain more or less continuously now for the past month. For a while she thought it was just a migraine brought on by her menstrual cycle ... but it didn't go away. After a few weeks (during which she kept holding off) I finally took her into the hospital to have it broken. Her neurologist has concocted a cocktail of medications which he phones into the hospital when she just can't take it any more (usually no more than once or twice a year): then she sits there for a few hours with a tube in her arm while the drugs drip slowly into her system. And the next morning she felt great. The headache had finally been broken.

It was back the next day.

At this point she has no idea what is causing the pain. But it is wearing her down. Every afternoon she has a low-grade fever. Every day she is sluggish and lethargic. This evening she told me she thinks her November depression is coming on her early this year because she did nothing all day long. I frankly don't care about her being "productive" every single day, because I think she might feel happier if she weren't so driven. But the thought of her depression coming early scares the shit out of me. On the other hand, maybe it is just the pain. That's a little scary too, because nothing seems to address it.

In all this, I don't want you to get the idea that her doctors are ignoring her. They have prescribed all the normal stuff for pain management, as well as some special drugs just for migraine control. Add those into the maintenance medications she takes for her other conditions, and you have somewhere around 15 different medicines that she has to take every single day. It's quite a collection.

And this evening after the boys went to bed, she sat on our bed taking her vitamin supplements, then her normal evening medicines, and last her sleeping pills; and then she lay down for over an hour trying to coax herself to sleep, while I held her hand and cuddled her. Because after all, once she's asleep she doesn't hurt.

Until tomorrow, of course. And then it all starts over.