Three years since my first public cancer complaint
I've come to learn a lot about pain, in all its horendous flavours, these past years.
There was the stabbing, burning intensity of whatever the tumor in my pre-treatment naval was doing. A feeling so intense it could block visition. I had a lot of traveling to do that summer, and an exam to write, the pain pulled me off the road at least a half dozen times, and had it struck during my exam I might never have been able to call myself an electrician for those brief days.
There is the strange knotted numbness I felt with the surgical incision. As the hydromorphone hit and began to work, it was as though someone with the gentleist, most skilled touch was gently untying knots in the nerves, the sensation starting slow in the very pit of pain (where the naval used to be). The result didn't even register as a pain/no pain feeling, more the sort of relief feeling your body gives you whenever you've done something right (like when you stop holding your bladder too long, but to a much greater extent).
Recently, after the total bowel obstruction and the begginning of my stay in hospice, the pain registered as an extremely intense heartburn. It had a component in it of real heart burn, because over the counter medications helped briefly, sometimes enough to fall asleep (when combined with well timed sleep aids), but often it as just too painful to sleep. The solution to this was less painkiller based and more based on modifying how my digestive system works, but the cancer pain still manifested differently and in a way I wouldn't expect.
Cancer pain has dominated most of the last three years of my life. Only though accepting my fate and accepting a pain pump (truly a miricle machine to those in need) have I been able to break free of it. Or, at least, dramatically losten the strength of the teather. And I am happy for the freedom.
The following was originally posted September 9, 2023
I really wish I better understood why this is a symptom, probably something to do with the pain.
Anyways, we didn't know it, but I've now been talking cancer for two years. I have no idea what to think of that.
The following was originally posted September 9, 2021
Super glad my body has decided that hunger is boring and unhelpful and instead goes all in on confusion and irritability