Category Archives: Chronic pain

Pain like a vise on my head…

A cartoon of a white woman with a headache. The headache is visualized by the presence of a vise on her head.

I am starting to despise the lovely, cool, pre-rainy days of my life. While they were once a cue for a day spent reading on a couch with my cat or wandering into the wilderness with my dog they are now CRUSHING my brain with the intensity of their barometric pressure.

Not only am I in a fairly intense and uncomfortable level of pain, non-stop until it actually does rain, I am also sitting here – or more accurately lying here – watching all the have-to’s and want-to’s pile up around me like last week’s laundry. (Which happens to actually be one of the have-to’s.)

It’s not as though I can just get up and do all these things feeling this way. Have you ever managed to go about your daily life with a rhinoceros on your head?

You can carry the weight of intense pain for a little while. Maybe you can make it through your morning commute, or school drop off, maybe you can do one meeting, but this heavy beast is just pressing down on you, making each step reverberate through your skull like the base of a bad EDM song. You are going to miss important things, like stop signs and questions, and time.

Eventually the weight becomes too much and you have to lie down. Close the curtains, turn out the lights, and give in to the pain. For me, these days are endless, difficult trials that I have to get through in order to -hopefully- have brighter ones tomorrow.

However, I have a chronic, deteriorating, poorly understood disease. So, tomorrow isn’t as bright as it could be. I roll the dice every time I go to sleep.

Will sleeping on my ridiculously sensitive scalp cause another high level migraine?

Will there be another impending doom storm system resting against the Rocky Mountains?

Or will it be sunny and I will have the ability to move, to clean, to create?

Whatever I roll, I usually get a relatively balanced mix of good days and bad but this summer is different. This summer is hard. The storms are angrier, more pressured, and they just hang around bullying me for days. My to-do’s are piling up, my want-to’s are looking like distant dreams, and I am beginning to feel a bit like an incompetent version of the Roadrunner.

The weight of pain and politics…

It’s been a horrible couple of months for those of us with pressure sensitive chronic pain issues. The daily pain levels I live with have been significantly higher than normal and while I am not making a plan or seeking end of life measures I do – at times – fantasize about Wile E. Coyote dropping an anvil on my head so I don’t have to do this shit anymore.

It doesn’t help that the world I live in is blithely regressing into 1930’s Germany. The Unites States Federal Government has dehumanized immigrants and is moving on to all people of color and the disabled. They have stripped women of significant rights, and just this week stopped allowing disabled kids who can’t complete highschool requirements from getting a certificate of completion when they finish their education. Not a diploma, a certificate.

Because why not make it harder for disabled kids to enter the workforce and provide for themselves? It’s not as if the government is stripping away the safety nets – pathetic as they were – that have been in place to protect these children in the event they cannot work.

To say I am terrified is an understatement.

To say I am furious is to call the Grand Canyon a small crack in the Earth.

But my fury is curtailed by the very body that will number me among those rounded up and herded into a concentration camp where the Trump led government will find a less than amusing way to put me out of my suffering.

Because I don’t see enough of us fighting and they are openly cheating to make sure we can’t wrest power out of those filthy tiny grasping fingers of his.

So I do what I can. I write, I call, I create art and post it. I talk to people. I scream into the void.

I have decided to stay and fight even though I am a target. I have people to fight for, people to love. To be completely honest, I just won’t let those bastards take my country from me. They will have to pry her out of my cold dead hands.

Lady Liberty leans against her pedestal, sad and worn out.