Frustration

Do you ever get that feeling like everything in your life isn't necessarily going wrong but most certainty isn't working in your favour? I feel like that's how everything has been as of late: from my glasses, to understanding organic chemistry, to catching the bus, to doing laundry and then there is trying to get a date for my surgery. When will it be? Nobody knows.

Oh, and I must not forget pain thing; the never ending pain which is currently very, very poorly controlled and I am having immense difficulty concentrating and sleeping.  I just want to cry sometimes. I know this is the worst question somebody can ask, but why me?

Something to remember

I feel as though this verse applies to everybody, even if you are not a Christian, or if you don't follow any particular religion.

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always preserves. Love never fails. -1 Corinthians 13: 4-8

That my friends is what true love is like. As a Christian I believe that true pure love is reserved for Him, but that doesn't mean that I don't think it applies to everything.

Last attempt

On Friday, I went to see my usual pain doctor who combines a interesting and useful mix of traditional and western pain management techniques. What he did on Friday was actually injections into the scars around my right knee with 5% procaine. It actually relieved the pain...but 16 hours later it was back like it never went anywhere at all.

What does that mean? It means I'm out of treatment options, it means that I will be off to surgery in April. It also means that I will not be getting any pain relief between now and April...and then once April comes and I have the surgery I am going to be in a lot more pain for a while. So for the foreseeable future, I will be in pain.

As a side note, this is my 100th post!!!!!!

30 Day challenges

I thought about doing a 30 day challenge starting in February, a semester challenge was just a bit too much of a commitment. But I don't know what I should do...

My 30 day challenge right now should probably be to study o-chem everyday...but right now I have some serious pain and I can't even think about studying. The injections of procaine that my pain doctor did yesterday helped for about 16 hours...and now the pain that feels like it is in my femur is back with vengeance.

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.