I am not broken. I have been annihilated: destroyed, hammered, pounded, torn apart, completely near death many times, and yet somehow still here.
What is 'here?' Who am I? What has really happened?
So much and yet so little...so many worlds, pieces, complications that continue to be an endless, forever mystery.
Chronic pain and continuous physical trauma has a different way of breaking someone.
For most of my life I have dealt with severe mental illness and emotional and mental trauma, then severe sleep deprivation for several years and some major physical health trauma. Now within the last two years, severe and debilitating physical pain and allergic reactions. I have never been this debilitated by pain and allergic reactions before, that continue to be unexplainable or let alone helped with any medication, and it has been terrifying.
I am barely surviving. I often feel like I am not here. I guess due to everything, continued sleep loss now also due to severe pain, more anxiety about the future, and then the fact that literally my body is constantly not circulating enough oxygen.
Not being able to move for hours to nights at a time, feeling hit by a truck, every part burning, aching, throbbing, heavy.
Eyes on fire, body parts on fire, itching, burning, stinging, hives.
It has been so constant and so awful that at the lowest points I have been suicidal, desperate for anything to get relief.
I have not been able to take care of myself, take care of or do anything with my dog, to clean or do almost anything, and have missed special times with family laying in bed in severe pain, wondering if anything would ever end or change.
I still have holes in my sense of being...tiny flickering moments between sharp pain, dulled senses, and utter exhaustion...
Holes of tiny spaces that are trying to hold hope, hope in anything I am trying to stay alive for, to do, to share.
Then it goes back to crying, laying in suffering, trying to manage multiple types of pain with the deepest, darkest aching no one can begin to know unless they have been there.
I love my family and a couple faithful friends who are there for me as much as they can be. Yet still, countless hours of the night and sometimes day, I am in it alone. I try to cope and take it moment by moment, try to take the one or two medicines I can yet still without knowing for sure if I react or not, and often with it still not bringing relief. I do every single thing I can to try to help myself regularly. I make endless phone calls, emails, appointments, tests, and show up to every single one no matter if I can hardly walk or talk, and cry, continuing to be bowled over with gaslighting and either horrific or outstanding medical care, and have nothing 'show' on tests.
A long time provider with experience is sure I have MCAS, yet that seems impossible to get diagnosed, treated, confirmed...and if it is, has completely taken away my life.
I am barely making it. Yet somehow I am trusting that is okay. I will keep trying: try to keep resting whenever I can, try to take pressure off myself, try to tune into what I really need and make the decisions that are best for me, as much as possible at all right now.
- RKD
02-11-24