The Floor

Today I spent a long time on the floor of an emergency room. You know those pictures you see of sub-par Canadian hospitals in American media propaganda about how bad universal healthcare is? Well, today I flat out was lying on the floor of the emergency room, creating one of those pictures

I have a spinal headache from the procedure that I talked about here. If you have ever had a spinal headache, you will know it to be one of the worst headaches of your life, when you are sitting or standing up that is. When you lie down though, it is gone completely - hence the floor.

You know what? I actually don't even mind that I had to lie on the floor. There was a chair I could have sat on, but it wasn't quite as horizontal as the floor. I am not unhappy with the care I received. I ended up being seen by my own doctor (a specialist) to set up a follow up appointment for Thursday and a team of anesthetists who offered me the choice of doing a blood patch today, or later in the week if my headaches cannot be managed with the pain meds they gave me. I am happy with that. They gave me choices. I chose the conservative route of trying pain medication and then going back directly to anesthesia for a blood patch (skipping the emerg line up) if I feel like I can't take the headache anymore. I think that is awesome. I am not above lying on the floor. I don't have a life threatening emergency, just a painful complication, other patients who are sicker need the bed more than I do.

Even though I am Canadian, and I believe I have the right to healthcare, I also believe in equitable healthcare. I think, despite the lying on the floor thing, that I received equitable and quality care today. I have the right to healthcare, but not the right to take it away from others.

Is this just the inbred Canadian niceness coming through, or do I have point here? I am willing to sacrifice my own comfort and not complain about it because I know that resources are being used to help the people who need it most.

Being in a hallway doesn't mean they aren't receiving the best care possible.

Still Concussed

My last Medical Monday's post was back in August, and it was about the "little" crash I had at a local bike race.

I still have symptoms of an "acute concussion." I don't quite understand how it can be considered "acute" when it is over 2 months past the date of injury. But I'm not a doctor (yet). I can't ride a bike, or do any form of exercise, and school is more challenging than it should be. (Although, I think I did pretty well on my anatomy peripatetic today.) This is a really bad way to be starting off my final year of undergrad, with applications to finish, scholarships to apply for, 4.0s to maintain, a conference to plan and oh yeah, this thing called an Honour's Thesis.

Its going to be a long semester of headaches, concussion physio (I didn't even know that was a thing, and you think with this being my 6th concussion, somebody would have told me about this by now) and trips to the sport medicine clinic. I have a referral to "complex concussion physiatrist," I didn't even know that was a specialty. (Look all the things I am learning about medicine by having a concussion!!) The not exercising part is the worst because exercises is how I deal with pain, no exercise, worse pain, worse pain, worse grades. Apparently physiatrists have solutions for these kinds of dilemmas? I'm not sure if I will ever race a bike again...but I have other plans if I can't.

I hope you are all having a bettter Medical Monday than I am, one not filled with headaches and cadavers with pins in them and pages of anatomy questions. Now back to studying for the written portion of my anatomy exam which is on Wednesday (don't y'all just miss school??).

This is almost exactly what my concussion looked like (but with a helmet), conveniently thanks to Anatomy class I can identify all the structures in this diagram. Yipee!

The Crash and the Road Rash

I went to a local criterium race last Tuesday, like I do every Tuesday, only this time, things went horribly wrong. I was working late in the lab trying to finish up nerve conduction on my mice and didn't finish until about 6:30. I debated whether or not to go to the race because it started at 7:30, and I didn't have much time.I ended up deciding to go, because I have been feeling pretty down lately and trying to internally work things through as they relate to cycling. I ran home, scarfed down a bowl of cereal, changed into my kit, and jumped on my bike.

Well, folks, on the second lap of the race, I crashed. And it wasn't just a little crash. I don't really remember what happened, but I know my wheels just went out from underneath me, I don't know why, or how, but they did. I hit my head pretty hard and smashed the front of my helmet in. All I remember is that sickening feeling when your bike starts to move out from underneath you, sliding along the pavement, and then sitting up to check my helmet. Then somehow was lying on the grass with all of these people looking around me. I don't know if I just can't remember how I got to the grass, or if I lost consciousness...either way, I ended up being surrounded by about 10 people lying on the grass at the side of the road.

Some nice guy drove me to the hospital, which was less than 5 minutes from the race, and the race organizer called my room-mate to come meet me. (We conveniently live directly across the street from the largest trauma centre in Alberta.) I spent 7 hours in emerg, 5.5 of which I was waiting to be seen by a doctor. I just sat there, shivering, bleeding and trying not to throw up on the person next to me. Eventually, when I was seen, I was declared to have concussion (duh) and severe road rash (double duh). They gave me a Percoset, referred me to the burn clinic and sent me home. They didn't even attempt to clean my road rash or put any sort of dressing on it. Normally I am a big advocate of Canadian Healthcare, but I'm seriously a bit pissed off right now.

I am super thankful that the ER doc had the sense to refer me to the burn clinic, otherwise I would be in so much pain. When I went to the burn clinic on Wednesday, and the nurse saw that I didn't have any dressings on any of the road rash (which is covering 10% of my body) and that it hadn't been cleaned she went ape sh**t.  The two worst burns that I have are on my upper right arm and right hip/pelvic bone. Because they didn't clean anything, or really look at the burns, nobody noticed that I had bone exposed on my right hip. (Yes folks, I spent 20 hours with a bone exposed from road rash without it being cleaned or bandaged.)Lets just say that the cleaning of the burns definitely makes my top 10 list of most painful experiences (and I have chronic pain...).

Canadian healthcare has both failed me and saved me since my injuries on Tuesday. I am grateful that I get to wear $200 worth of silver bandages, and that I get to have them changed and cleaned everyday other day without paying a dime. But also super pissed off that the ER doc didn't do the job that I waited 7 hours for him to do.I get that they were busy, but come on, you still have to provide necessary care.

I also feel really awful about the fact that I caused the crash, and the the woman behind me who is an amazing bike racer broke her wrist and can't race this weekend. She didn't seem up set about the fact that I was the reason she broke her wrist, which is good, but I still feel awful about it. Crashing is an unfortunate part of cycling. 

For a long while I have been thinking about giving up cycling for good. It is insanely hard to try and train and race at the level I need to be at without having a functioning lower right leg. It is like I am riding on jello. I might be eligible for para-cycling, but I have essentially been waiting about 9 months to get medical documentation and a proper neuro assessment. I still want to ride my bike because I love it, (well, not at this moment) but racing is not something that I can do right now. (The Tuesday night criterium series doesn't count as racing because it's just for fun.) I am getting super depressed about not going to Canada Games (which are going on right now), as it has been my goal for the past few years, and that goal has essentially been crushed. I am not at the level I need to be to competitive at Canada Games, and I am fully aware of that, it just sucks that it is all because of a medically unnecessary surgery when I was 15. In a way the concussion makes me feel a bit better that I am not going to Canada Games, because even if I was set to fly to Quebec next Saturday, I wouldn't be able to compete with a concussion.

I guess all this time I am spending sleeping and not exercising will give me more time to reflect on what I want to do with cycling, and also time to finish up my application for UBC's School of Medicine. It's just unfortunate that somebody had to break their wrist, and I had to lose a lot of skin and smash my head into the pavement to take this time to reflect.

(This is also concussion number 6 for me, so I should probably get off this computer.)

Shadowing

I had a pretty impressive morning of shadowing last Wednesday, followed by a somewhat less exciting afternoon of looking at mice in square boxes, cleaning up their excretions and testing their grip strength. But I am sure, you don't want to hear about what I do with mice...back to shadowing.

I shadowed my PI in the neuromuscular clinic, and it was needless to say a really great learning experience. I wasn't too sure how good of a teacher he would be, but he turned out to be pretty great. He explained all the cases to me, what each part of the neuro-exam looks for, the EMG results, and patient histories (some which were more complicated than mine). The first patient we saw was a younger women (early 40's) who had massive file and extensive history. I empathized with her because it seemed like she had been through a similar experience as me when I first got sick. She has seen pretty much every specialist in the city (a neuroimmunologist? I didn't even know that existed), has had extensive testing, has been "combative" towards doctors demanding tests/medications, and at one point wanted to go to the Mayo clinic. Her story seems kinda like mine (I was never combative though, but definitely frustrated). I almost wanted to just give her a hug, and I really wanted to tell her that I truly understood what she was going through, but alas, I was but a mere shadow.

The last patient we saw was a woman in her 50s who had an ethanol induced neuropathy. She doesn't take the vitamins that she needs (B1) which can reverse the neuropathy, she continues to consume alcohol, won't go to physiotherapy and doesn't have a family doctor. She had so much muscle wasting that she looked like a person with muscular dystrophy, and she can no longer straighten her legs so she is wheelchair bound. Non-compliance has committed her to a death sentence from a curable disease. Because of her, I witnessed for the first time what it is like to tell somebody that they will die, and soon, from a condition that is in fact reversible.

It is going to be interesting when I finally become a doctor, I think I am going to see myself reflected back to me in the experience of patients. In almost every patient we saw, I recognized something of my own story in the story of the patients. I empathized with the frustrations of one, the research tenacity of another, the ability of one patient to push through the pain, and realization of a grim future of another. I hope I never lose this empathy. At the same time though, I would give anything for my condition to just disappear by taking some vitamins, most people would, so I don't know how I am going to react when I encounter non-compliant patients. I see non-compliance as selfish, and I feel it makes the role of a doctor almost meaningless.


Needless to say, shadowing was an enlightening experience, which motivated me to submit my AMCAS application on Friday (even though I am still waiting for one transcript to arrive at AMCAS). I also started my application for UBC and the rest of the Canadian applications open up in a couple of weeks. The ball is rolling, and I have started to have nightmares since I submitted my AMCAS application. Looks like it is going to be a long wait until May 15, 2014....


PS Happy Canada Day!!!

I will change things, I promise

I just made a pretty big promise over twitter, to a fellow canadian who suffers from chronic pain and lack of access to doctors willing to help her. I promised, that if I get into medical school (and graduate) that I would change things in health care.

I don't know how yet, but it needs to be fixed. Health care (in my humble Canadian Socialist opinion) is a right. It is not a business, it is not a luxury, but it is a basic human right that we are entitled to all over the world. Your medical diagnosis, your medical history, your financial status, your sexual orientation, your religion and your race should not dictate whether or not you receive medical care. Sadly, this is not the case, and it makes me angry, especially when I hear about Canadians who are denied access to a supposedly universal system.

I will change things, I don't know how, or when, but I will. When I make a promise, I keep a promise. 

Pain and Sleep

I am a very high functioning young adult with chronic pain. Seriously, how many people do you know with straight A's, who volunteer 10 hours per week, and ride a bike 16 hours a week who have chronic neurological pain? (If you do actually know somebody, please let me know, I would like to meet a this person.) I somehow manage to do things that most normal people, let alone people with chronic pain, can't do. To be honest, I have no idea how I can ride a bike, but somehow I do.

When you have chronic pain, you struggle to sleep, some people struggle to fall asleep, and some struggle to stay asleep. I am a member of the later group, I usually fall asleep within seconds of hitting the pillow, but I wake up about 4 hours later. My pain gets worse when my leg is still, so when I am awake my leg is in constant motion, but when I am in a deep sleep I don't move (like a normal human) and then my pain gets worse and I wake up in a grip of pain. On occasion, I actually sleep through the night, which means I get 9 hours of sleep. I usually go to bed around 10:30 and get up around 6:30-7:30 in order to maximize the potential amount of time I might be able to sleep. This tactic works pretty well because usually out of the 9 hours I spend in bed, I am asleep for 7 of them, meaning on average I get more sleep than my peers. So, strangely, chronic pain probably makes it so I actually sleep more....weird, huh?

My idea to write this post came from this article: "Extended Sleep Reduces Pain Sensitivity" And, as the title suggests, sleeping more means less pain. So, maybe the reason I am able to do all this stuff is that I actually experience less pain than my fellow nerve pain suffers because I sleep more? It is a possibility.  And, even if you don't have chronic pain, sleeping more may help you recover faster from that flu shot, dental procedure or surgery pending in your life. In the world of cycling, those who train hard and sleep a lot are generally the fastest. So if you don't have chronic pain, and are not predicting pain, sleeping might in the very least make you a faster cyclist.

On another note, I crashed riding in the ice/snow yesterday on a corner and sprained my thumb pretty badly. It isn't broken, but I think there is some ligament damage, hopefully the doctor will give me the verdict tomorrow. The worst part is that exams start next week, and it is my dominant hand. Maybe sleep will make it hurt less?

I learned how to tape it via youTube...it worked!

Advantage of Being a Woman in Science

I went to an amazing lecture yesterday given by Dr. Jeffrey Mogil, a pain scientist from McGill. He lecture was titled "Mice are People too: Social Modulation of and by Pain in Rodents and Humans."

As you can imagine, the lecture was about mice, and how they perceive pain. Turns out that they actually have similar facial expressions that infants do (eye narrowing and cheek bulge) and then of course things like wiggling their whiskers and ears which we has tiny humans either do not have or cannot do. He then went to on to divulge the social interactions of pain, when we are in pain with the presence of somebody we do not know, we experience an analgesic effect, or the stranger effect. This hold true for both mice and humans apparently. Conversely  when we experience pain with the presence of a friend, there is increase in the amount of pain we experience, which is known as the empathy effect. This was all pretty interesting, and actually made sense for me. I definitely feel less pain when I am in socially new or uncomfortable environments  which I suppose goes back evolutionary to the feeling that this new person might try to eat you, and you do not want to show any weakness in front of them. 

The most interesting part of that lecture though was the fact that Dr. Mogil's group found that men, or the smell of males (any species other than mice) also exerted a analgesic effect. This means that the presence of a man, or a man's T-shirt in the room will cause mice to become stressed out of fear of predation. This effect only lasts for about 30 mins, but during that 30 minutes these mice show lower amounts of pain, and then after 30 minutes they apparently realize that the male is not a threat and the effect wears off. It hasn't been proven in humans yet, but the effect was shown stronger in female mice than in male mice, and there is a good likelihood that it is also true in humans.

So how does this relate to the title of my post? Well, if the presence of a male stresses out the mice, then it actually throws off the accuracy of a lot of our experiments. Even when we euthanize a mouse to harvest its DRG neurons for analysis, if there is a male doing the euthanasia or in the room at the time, it could skew our results. This is even more pertinent when we do behaviour testing, especially for sensitivity and pain perception testing. Basically, in this one circumstance  it is better to be female scientist than a male scientist. 

If Dr. Mogil's theories also hold true for humans, this gives us a unique perspective for medicine. Perhaps, women truly do make better doctors or more perform more accurate patient assessment because the patient's pain would not be skewed by the examiner ..unless of course the doctor has never met the patient before and then you would have the stranger effect take place. 

"Do not let the pain make you hate"

I wish I had the strength to follow these simple rules.

"Do not let the pain make you hate." This is a really hard thing to do, for me, its more a physical pain that makes me hate, but I know that is not the case for everybody. I hate that I have to deal with things that everybody else deals with, and deal with the pain. My life would be so much easier if I could just sleep through the night, not spend most of the day feeling nauseous from the pain and not spend huge amounts of time faking to the world that nothing is wrong. I hate that I can't do anything about these things, and I hate that the pain makes me hate things.

I don't know why I have this idea in my head, but I feel like if I ever get into med school that my worries will just disappear. I have no idea why I think this will happen, because likely my worries will triple once in med school. Maybe its because my goal of trying to get into medical school has been the only thing that makes me keep on going despite the pain. What will happen if I don't get in? Well, I think my pain will make me hate the world even more than I already do.

I need to go see my family doctor about sleeping pills....I hate asking for drugs (and there we go again with my pain making me hate things).

Great ideas that aren't mine

I constantly have these ideas about how nerves grow or about how to best manipulate them to grow. My latest one involves exercise. There has to be a reason why my nerves won't stop growing, and there is one thing that I do a lot of that most people with nerve damage do not: exercise. Then last week I read an article about how getting rats with nerve damage to exercise significantly reduced their pain levels. The researchers thought that it was likely do to a reduction in inflammatory mediators as a result of exercise. And I was all like, OMG! Maybe I am on to something, maybe the reduction in inflammatory mediators not only reduces pain but improves axon out growth!!

So then this week, I decided to pub med "exercise and nerve regeneration." As it turns out, I am not the first person to think of this, and there are a lot of journal articles published surrounding this idea. Granted, I did think of this entirely on my own, which I guess is a good start, but the world of neuroscientists has already beat me to it.

I would love to be able to in someway come up a novel idea on my own, to be the first one to think of something, to be the one that figures out how to make nerves grow. If I can do that, then maybe all this pain hasn't been for nothing. I don't believe everything happens for a reason, because there is no reason a two year old needs to get cancer or that I need to have chronic pain. I do believe that you can take any situation, even awful ones, and make something good out of it.

I'll keep thinking, and maybe someday I will figure it out.

Never the answer?

I always here people say to or about a friend, a loved one or somebody that they don't even know that "Suicide is never the answer." (Before you get your spandex shorts in a knot, this post isn't going to be about me contemplating suicide...in fact it is not about me at all.) When people say things like this I find that it makes me almost irate, not because I think suicide is a good option, but because people who say that is not an answer to your problem clearly have no idea what that person is going through.

Today's post is about how a boy, living in my city, thought it was the only option. This boy's story can be read here and his name is Dom. Dom had chronic pain that started when he was 14, and it progressed to the point where it was so badly controlled, that by the time he was 18 he decided that his only option to end the pain was suicide. And now I bet you are thinking that: "No, there must have been a better option, there must have been treatments....there must have been something other than suicide that would ease his pain!" Well, my friends, as somebody who has chronic pain, you are eventually told that there is nothing more that can be done to help you, other than physical and emotional therapy. See, Dom was a teenager, and chronic pain is something that people, let alone other teenagers, can rarely comprehend. They don't understand why you can't just get out of bed and go to that party on Friday night or why you can't go shopping after school. Unless you have chronic pain, you cannot understand what it is like (even if you are a doctor, or a medical student or a personally know somebody with the disease).

Dom made the decision to end the pain because our medical and social system failed him. The only thing that kept me out of the depths of isolation and depression when it all first started for me was that I had teachers who had chronic pain, the fact I was at a boarding school where I was constantly surrounded by people making isolation impossible, I had a doctor who tried absolutely everything to help me and I had my bike. I was lucky to be where I was at the time...luck, pure luck, and without it, I don't know where I would be. Dom was completely imprisoned by pain, without doctors to fight for him or friends to pull him out of the depths of blinding pain. If you where him, would you be okay with having your mom spoon feed you for the rest of your life? Would you be okay with asking you sister to help you put on your socks at 18 years old? I wouldn't.

So don't judge somebody when they decide that taking their own life is the only solution, because for them it just might be. For me, I had decided to find my own solution, to spend my life in the lab trying to fix this problem. I still have hope, Dom didn't. I can tell you that even if you believe people who commit suicide go to hell (which I absolutely don't), hell might just be better than having every inch of your body be on fire all the time.

Just think about it for a moment, what would you honestly do in Dom's situation?

Training

I pretty much completely stopped training August and then September wasn't so great either, but now that I am part of the High Performance program at the Olympic Oval, I'm back into 100% full bore training plan. I can see what my coach is trying to do, build up the endurance side of things before it snows, then do some testing and then jump into a winter of interval training. But my legs hurt for real after riding 3.5hrs on Saturday and 3 hrs on Sunday. Today is a rest day, and then tomorrow we are back on the bike with another 3 hr ride.

I did actually manage to finish that health and society paper that I wrote about last Friday, and I did learn a few things about myself.  I am one of those people who don't employ any method of coping strategy to deal with the pain, which likely means that I have accepted that it will always be there and that there is no point fighting. I just live my life like I don't have pain, even though I'm pretty sure if somebody was actually using a scalpel to cut open my leg right I wouldn't be able to tell.

Wiriting About Pain

I had to chose a topic for my Health and Society unit research paper. I thought about the whole shabang of health related issues (okay, I didn't think about all of them because that would take FOREVER), and I ended up settling on what I know best, Chronic Pain. I started off wanting to focus on the young adult population, but there is far more research on the adolescent population. And lets face it people, there is no point making an assignment harder than it should be, sometimes you just have to start writing and go where the sea of journal articles takes you.

It is interesting writing on a topic focused on a population that only two short years ago I belonged to. I didn't have chronic pain until my last year of high school, and it was brutal. As I wind my way through the research articles, there is one idea that keeps on coming up, adaptation to pain. People who have lower perceived quality of life and higher scores on depression scales are focusing their lives around ending the pain, rather than living with it. I can attest that focusing completely on the pain and finding new ways to get rid of it consumes your every thought. The pain starts to literally rule your life, and that's how it was when it first started for me. For the first two months, I avoided wearing shoes (I wore flips flops in December and January, and yes, I live in Canada) I rarely went out for our team group rides and I was less involved with my school life. Then one day I woke up and decided that enough was enough, that no matter how much it hurt I wasn't going to stop doing something. Even though my pain levels increased, I was happier.

They call this adaptive behavior. Rather than avoiding the pain, you adapt your life and actions to include the pain. Its like your annoying little brother that follows you around all day, you can't get rid of him, so you have to do things that also include him.

I always wondered why the pain doesn't seem to get under my skin (that often), and it's because I somehow learned to adapt to the pain. I will probably never give up on new ways to try and get rid of the pain, but in the mean time, I know how to live with it.

I found this book conveniently on display in the library today, so naturally I signed it out. Its odd holding a textbook about yourself...

Gone? Never?

I don't think I have CRPS...at least I hope I don't, but my pain never really seems to go away. I had one month of relief the first month after the surgery...but while my nerve pain is less (but slowly creeping back) it has been replaced by this deep awful throbbing pain.

Does pain for people like us really ever go away, or is it just something that is going to be a part of my life until I die? I know nobody can answer this question, but I wish they could. I really wish they could.

On a happy note, this is my first post from my new Dell XPS 14! Yeah, I know what you are thinking...why didn't I  buy a Mac? Well, you see consumers of the world, Apple has one of the worst CSR policies on earth. Not too long ago there was a fire at one of their factories in China and people literally burned to death because there were bars on the windows and they couldn't get out. My concious won't let me buy an Apple product...they may be cool, but so is my new Dell...which also happen to come in enviro-friendly bamboo packaging. Way to go Dell!!

Peace like a river.

Shhhh! You might jinx it!

I haven't used a crutch in 2 days and I haven't taken a pain killer in over 24 hours (I'm still taking my usual Lamotrigine) and....I am not any pain! It aches a bit, kind of like a tired muscle pain, but nothing that I would even consider taking a Tylenol for. And when I say 'no pain' I mean no pain, like my right and left foot feels the same...except my right foot has a giant bandage, is still dyed red and is significantly larger.

In a way, I am scared to believe it is true, because everything I have tried in the past has only been temporary and then its devastating when the pain returns. I'm finding it hard to trust that something may have finally worked.

On another note, I have my interview tomorrow with Dr. Z at the Uof C. I will have the house to myself to skype with him, so at least the interview will be somewhat private on my end. I am scared of what he might ask though, I have been trying to read as many of his paper as I can, but so much of them just go straight over my head. I understand it until he starts talking about the immunochemistry and Westernimmuno blots...I actually can't understand a thing in those sections. Hopefully he doesn't ask me detailed questions like that!

I made Gluten -free cookies today

Pre- Med?

I want to be doctor, more than I can actually articulate with words (or actions for that matter), at the very bottom of my heart it is all I can think about. Its stressful though, my grades are not quite high enough to be competitive (I need another 2.6%), and I feel like I am constantly searching for things that will boost my resume. I wish sometimes that I didn't want to be doctor, my life would be much less stressful, I could take a course I actually liked instead of biochem and organic chemistry. I really want to be in the Human Kinetics program instead of Bio-med because their courses actually interest me...but I need the prerequisites to get into UBC's School of Medicine and I can't do that with the HK program (the courses are at the same time).

Its also really frustrating knowing that I will be competing against 2,500 other applicant's for a spot and none of them were dealing with chronic pain for their entire university careers. My mind feels like its in a deep freeze from the combination of pain, lack of sleep and stress. For most university students lack of sleep = studying late, for me its all the time. I don't study late because by 10pm I am so exhausted that getting ready for bed feels like the hardest task on earth. Nobody ever told me that chronic pain might crush my dreams.

I work my but off, and I get okay grades (good by most people's standards...but not by med school standards). I try to be involved in as many things as I can, but appointments get in the way or the fact that it takes me twice as long to do homework than other people means I have half the amount of free time. I'm tired, tired of having to fight so hard for something that I want so badly when others don't even seem to struggle. I'm afraid of applying to med-school because I know I won't get in, and I know that I will be crushed.

Fantastic!

There is somebody else like me! Somebody else who is in chronic pain and loves to ride bikes. Check it out!
http://limpingcyclist.wordpress.com/

Which reminds me...I should post more about cycling because it makes me happy.

"I've Been Fighting Things I can't See"

I have been listening to a lot of Switchfoot lately, specifically their new album Vice Verses (if you haven't listened to it you should check it out because its wicked). Its helped me think things through a little bit, sometimes music does that.

I have come to the realization that I am depressed because I am tired of trying to pretend to the world and to my self that my pain doesn't exist. It does exist. If you are somebody who has chronic pain that is reading my blog then you are likely 100% familiar with this. See, for me, sometimes I think to myself that there is noway that this pain can be real, how can something that science can't explain, something that you can't see or understand hurt so much? It must not be real, if imagine that its not then it won't be, and if I hide the pain from people around me then they won't know that it exists, which will give me more reason to believe it isn't real right? Wrong.

Before Dec. 19th, before I saw the surgeon in Vancouver I thought I had CRPS II, which is essentially something that you can't every really get rid of, if you are lucky you might get 2 years where you go into remission.To me, this type of disease seems like something that cannot possibly exist. No origin, no defined treatment, not certainty of a cure...seems like something that shouldn't exist right (it is real thing, just nobody can really explain how it happens quite yet)? Well, it does, but now that I have been diagnosed with a "Persistent Neuroma Syndrome" it made it real. A neuroma is something that is tangible, it has an origin, therefore the pain has an origin, therefore I can't pretend like it doesn't exist anymore because my logic is no longer an escape route.

Basically I have been hit the face with the truth, that my pain is 110% real. (Please don't get the impression that CRPS pain is not real, it is, very, very, very much so, it is just hard to grasp where the pain comes from using logic, I guess that is why they call it Complex Region Pain Syndrome...cuz its too complex for the most intelligent among us.) The diagnosis of a persistent neuroma syndrome is very much a blessing because it means that surgery is a treatment option for me, it also means that I could wake up from surgery completely pain free (well, obviously surgery is painful, but I mean after all that heals). At the same time, I have been forced to admit that my pain is not a figment of my imagination.

I've been fighting things I can't see. Thrive, by Switchfoot.

I Failed

Yup, that's right, I'm admitting to failing (I do it more than you think!). My semester in pictures is clearly not going to work out, so I might as well just come right out and say it: The picture blog is done.

Now don't go jumping to conclusions thinking that I am done blogging...I will try and do my very best to actually update this blog frequently.

As of late, I have been struggling to keep my head above water, I have this feeling of drowning on the inside. Everything lately has just seemed so overwhelming. I think that I might be struggling with a bit of depression right now. My pain has been pretty bad lately, a consistent 7/10 with the occasional spike. I have come up with a new way of describing one of the types of pain I feel though. Sometimes I get pain in my foot that starts at the top near the ankle joint and then spreads out like rain down to the sole of my foot. Its like I poured a glass of acid on my foot and is running off the side....

Sorry for that depressing imagery....not as cheerful as the idea of a semester in pictures, I know. But, that is how my life works. I wake up with pain, I go through my day with pain, I go to bed with pain and I often even dream in pain. (Do you know how many ways that your leg can be mutilated? A lot...and every night there seems to be a new method.)

I decided to book an appointment with a counselor on campus. I'm clearly depressed (I'm not going to kill my self, I have worked to hard for that), but thing is, I don't think anybody around me knows. Maybe I'm just good at hiding it, or they just can't tell, I really have no idea...I haven't exactly been making an effort to hide it or anything.