Dreadful Nonsense

Day Three at Temp Job.

I’ve held off from posting at and about work until now because until now I’ve had enough things to do to keep me busy during the working hours, and enough pain killers and valium in my system to keep me off the computer during non-working hours. I was just remarking to my mother on the way in to work this morning – it’s a very odd thing to do, to willingly expose yourself to such a tremendous amount of pain, all in the name of normality.

You see, dear reader, things haven’t been going too swimmingly around Team Shazzle these last few days. Oh yes, Dave Eggers may well be on his way to becoming Husband Number One in a long line of husbands I’m fully intending to marry, but at the moment not even that is enough to keep me cheery long enough to give a crap. Work is fine, the people here in the office (where I’m typing this only because I’ve done all my other work already) are wonderfully friendly, the job is boring but with a variety of boring tasks to keep the boredom threshold just above suicide, and I’ve got the internet and that’s all that matters. But by the time 2pm rolls around – I’m only working half days – I’m in so much pain I can’t even think straight.

Yesterday when I got home I couldn’t sit or lie down for a full half hour, with the spasm of blinding pain that was running down my back. You’ve no idea how ridiculous or frightening that is. When your entire body is screaming at you to stop moving but you can’t because when you stop moving and try to stay stationary your body changes it’s mind and tells you to keep moving, forever, just keep moving, or else you’re going to freaking pass out and that would mean lying down and what would happen then? What then? Yesterday afternoon I couldn’t even cry it hurt so much. I couldn’t catch my breath it hurt so much. I couldn’t reach my fucking tablets it hurt so much, and when I did I was so tempted to take them all at once, just to make sure the fucking pain went away, but then a solo sane voice told me that if I took them all at once I’d probably throw up and the retching would kill me once and for all.

So I took the required amount and paced around the room for half an hour, keening like a banshee because I wasn’t able to cry properly, until everything relaxed just enough for me to curl up into a ball on the floor and stare at the Big Brother idiots practicing how to play football. This is how bad I felt: when BB Live stopped and the Efourum started, I wasn’t able to change the channel – Russell Brand was on my television and I was too far gone to do anything about it.

And then I end up feeling so sick with all the tablets currently swimming around my system, coupled with the flush of adrenaline that kicks in when the pain levels reach their record-breaking highs every day, and I can’t eat or drink anything. Which makes me feel sick. Which means I can’t eat. And so on. It’s not good for a lady to live on a diet of valium, ibuprofen, difene and paracetamol all day, but no one seems to be offering me an alternative. My mother wants me to phone my physio, but I don’t really see the point – the words of wisdom I’ve been offered while experiencing these “acute episodes” have included having a hot bath and doing some gentle exercise. The only gentle exercise I am able to take at this time is the bare suppression of hysteria, and I couldn’t even begin to think about reaching the taps to run the bath, let alone start to plan the feat of acrobatics that would enable me to get in to a bath once run. So I end up shouting at everyone who attempts to help or calm me because nobody in the world, no one ever in the history of the world has ever experienced pain like the pain I’m currently going through, so could you all just leave me alone so I can die in my own miserable peace.

Of course, after a few hours it all fades down to a bearable level and I have to apologise to everyone I know for not phoning them back or snapping their heads of or eschewing their generous offers of cups of tea. And then I have to lie on the floor with the dog who didn’t understand why I wouldn’t let her in out of the garden when I came home, and try to make it up to the cat for screaming at her when all she wanted to do was say hello.

There is a small glimmer of light at the end of this long tunnel – I’m getting another epidural on Wednesday, 7th July. I’m quite pleased about that, you understand, even though the thought of going back in to the creepy operating theatre freaks the living life out of me. The pain of the epidural can at worst match the pain I’m currently experiencing on a daily basis, so that no longer scares me at all. The effects aren’t immediate, but it’s all fairly quick acting, and I can’t wait to be able to do things like sit down for longer than half an hour again without the screaming agony of it all making me want to choke myself to death with my own eager hands.

This entry was posted on 16 June 2004 at 10:08 am. 0 comments

Dreadful Nonsense

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