It's a learning experience

Maybe I will never have a good attitude about what my life is like again, but right now, at this moment in time,  I am both medicated for pain and bundled with a hot pack that I think only distracts me by being hot but whatever, it's not constant stabbing pain.

18 months ago I started working on learning to express pain. The discovery that as a child I had been so unable to complain that I ran 5-10 miles routinely on a broken ankle from 2 days after breaking it until it caused me to damage another joint was very enlightening, especially when I was also hearing that I had very badly injured that same ankle again and proceeded to complain of "it's ok.  It hurts but it's ok" which in turn led to the injury not being treated correctly and also prevented me from having surgery to repair it immediately which would have been ideal.

13 months ago I learned a harsh lesson in how much I needed to develop honesty with Dr. Body about pain.  We had a long conversation about my past and my inability to talk about pain honestly and that he needed to know I would often understate or lie and that I needed help to describe and talk about it.  Since then he has talked me through it a number of times and has even told me things like "your throat HAS to hurt" during the whooping cough mess.  He was the first to suggest endometriosis back when I first complained of the sx because he pointed out I may only now be able to acknowledge pain I've had a long time.

I still struggle to complain about pain to most doctors, but I do ok with him.  This week has included several conversations about pain, Dr. Body finding another pain med for me that I haven't gotten the script yet (please God tomorrow's mail) and after I had a really hard time calling my (wonderfully kind and understanding) gynecologist to let her know how much worse the pain is now and as I realized that if the pain intensifies too much I will not make it through these last few days of working.  So today I had called her.  I also had asked Dr. Body about what levels of pain are reasonable reasons to miss work (I can assume he thinks I'm there as he pretty much offered as many work excuses and pain med scripts as I want/need to get me through this.  He's always taken a proactive approach to pain with me; since I can't take normal pain meds he has made sure I had what I can take available, even though it is narcotics.)  I think I want to hear that I am justified in just feeling this hurts and there are limits to what I can do because of the pain.  So I have a response.  Except his server is down and so I can't get into the clinic's web page to access the answer.  So even more than I already was, I am getting a nice lesson in patience.

Now I believe I have been patient enough........