Pain

It creeps under my skin, crawling, burning, at times searing. And I’m not doing anything. Just sitting. Ibuprofen doesn’t help. Acetaminophen doesn’t help. Aspirin doesn’t help. Percocet and Vicodin don’t help. It’s nerve pain.

The ONE thing I didn’t want to have happen when my foot was operated on, other than getting a massive infection necessitating amputation, was nerve damage.  A few years ago, I blew out my back and experienced months of sciatic nerve pain that took me to the brink of sanity.

At my last doctor visit, my doc checked out her work on my foot, and how it’s healing, by bending my foot this way and that. She pressed below the scabbing wound, asking, “Does this hurt?” Pressing here and there, she kept asking if things hurt. Much to my amazement, just about nothing hurt. But if pressing here and there didn’t hurt, and bending this way and that didn’t hurt, what was the creeping, burning that would come out of the blue? As I described what was going on, she started talking about nerve pain.

That’s it! I told her that without a shadow of a doubt, what’s been plaguing me is nerve pain. What happens, is the electrical signal short circuits. As the signal travels down the path, when it gets to my foot where the nerve’s been cut, it freaks out and shoots a whopping spark of pain back to my brain. This sort of thing laughs at narcotics, except perhaps at a morphine drip.

The next words out of my doctor’s mouth were my only vestige of hope: there is a medicine that they have found works very well on nerve pain particularly. It’s not an addictive narcotic and won’t damage your liver the way drugs like acetaminophen can. Yes! Get me this stuff!! The kicker is it takes a week to reach peak effectiveness. And after a week, if one capsule isn’t doing it, I take two for another week.

A week!!?? Seriously? I have to deal with this crap for another week or two? Really? Got the meds a few days ago, and now the wait goes on. The wait for relief.