Pain and Pot

I wrote a month ago about some digging I was doing, and how well I seemed to be tolerating it. Well, that came to an end, and as a result of that work, I’m in constant pain, especially in my right shoulder which grinds with every movement and often feels as if it’s about to slip out of joint. I was prepared for the pain, but I wasn’t prepared for the noises and the loss of motion that makes everyday activities (opening blinds, making beds, lifting a coffee cup) angst-laden and downright scary.

Marijuana is the only drug that helps much (both with my pain and my attitude), and it’s the only drug that doesn’t put me in fear for my life (the chart only lists a smattering of the side-effects of my current narcotic), so I’ve been high pretty much all day everyday for weeks. The pot relaxes me, although it also makes my mind leave the vicinity of my body rather easily. For example, I took my first hit of some new bud while making breakfast yesterday, and immediately wanted to listen to music. There I was in the kitchen recalling that the iPod was in Peggy’s room when, voila!, I was holding the remote to her iPod player. Unless thought alone moved that remote, I had gone to her room and gotten it, yet I had no memory of doing so, and it wasn’t even what I wanted. “Oh, well,” I said to myself (it’s good to stay relaxed at such times because the other option is to feel as if a malevolent force had yanked your brain right out of your head and buried it) as I poured honey on Peggy’s oats, forgetting that Peggy doesn’t like honey on her oats. 

These are extreme examples, but they point to the nature of marijuana-induced forgetfulness. What I usually find is that when I want to concentrate, I can (sometimes better than normal), but when I’m doing mindless chores, my thoughts are more likely to be somewhere other than on the task at hand. This is good in that it makes boring work agreeable, but it also means that I can’t hold myself to quite so high a performance standard because I’m really not “all there.” As for work that requires concentration, I can conduct business, balance the checkbook, use power tools, and figure out how to get back into my Blog when Google locks me out. I’m high as I write this blogpost, so you can see that the drug doesn’t make me altogether stupid. In fact, it can make me smarter, at least in understanding my own perceptions, thoughts, and feelings. Sometimes, I won’t even know I’m mentally or emotionally stuck until I use marijuana, and I feel as if I’m standing in a room dimly-lit by the setting sun on a gray day, when suddenly a huge bank of fluorescent lights come on. 

Being high on a relatively innocuous drug is hardly the worst of the possibilities when my desperation to do real work (meaning physical work) has resulted in my inability to do so much as drink coffee without pain. If the choice is between being high versus being in more pain than need be and despondent to-boot, I’ll choose being high. It’s a strange way to live, but with luck, my shoulders will recover somewhat, and I can become active again. If not, I’ll probably become active again anyway because I don’t do well with sitting around.

Back to work

I’ve spent weeks preparing for two plumbing jobs under the house. In olden times, I would have taken measurements, bought my materials, and set to work, all on the same day. Now that I’m in pain and out of shape, I’ve been planning every detail with the goal of making the jobs as easy as possible, mostly through breaking them down into manageable portions, and trying to minimize how much I will have to crawl around under the house on any given occasion. 

I’m now through with my planning, purchasing, and pipe preparation, and I’m just waiting for good weather to crawl under there, lie on my back in dripping sewage, and remove three 1 ½ ” galvanized drain pipes with a circular saw that will be running inches from my face and burning my scalp with sparks. Oh, the joy! I love hard and dirty projects as much as I love going camping with Peggy. They make me feel like a man. They give me a chance to use my skill and my intelligence to accomplish something that I can stand back and look at with pride for as long as I live in this house, which might very well be until I die.

Peggy has pleaded with me repeatedly to hire a plumber, but the job might suck either way. If I hire someone, I’ll feel that much worse about myself; I’ll miss out on work I enjoy; and we’ll be out hundreds of dollars. If I don’t hire someone, I risk causing myself weeks of pain. Peggy doesn’t understand how important such work is to me because to her it just looks like something hard and filthy that's best left to someone else, no matter what shape one is in. To me, it's what I need if I’m to find value in being alive.

I wrote the above a few days ago, and did one of the jobs yesterday. I spent five hours straight under the house because I had the clothes washer and kitchen sink disconnected (during my next project, the whole house will be disconnected), making it necessary to see the job through. I could have crawled out to take breaks, of course, but I wanted to spare my joints, and I could best do that by not by crawling anymore than necessary. I’m excited to report that I had a good night last night. I was awfully sore, but my joints were no worse for wear. I’ve been slowly getting better for a couple of months now, and the work I did yesterday far exceeds anything I’ve taken on for years, joint-wise. I am becoming guardedly hopeful.

Both photos are from yesterday. I'm not through hanging pipe in the top picture, but I am through replacing it. Peggy took the second picture when the job was done.

Hopalong and me

Now that Peggy’s gone. I get up between 10:00 and 11:00, eat oats or Grape Nuts for breakfast, work all day while I listen to Western audiobooks, watch a Western movie at night as I eat sardines and tidy-up, down 8mgs of Dilaudid, take a hit of bud (despite what my pain specialist says, pot and Dilaudid makes for one hell of a delightful combination), and read a Western novel until the words start floating off into space—this doesn’t take long. Then I lie in a warm glow until sleep overtakes me within anywhere from two minutes to two hours depending upon whether the drugs keep me so entertained that I can’t sleep. It’s a good life, this working everyday and getting loaded every night, although I do hate being repeatedly awakened by the pain.

Taking on what is to me a hard physical project makes me feel like a man again. Only people who have been there can understand the extent to which pain and disability can take away a person’s pride, especially if his entire adult life was devoted to physical hobbies and occupations. I’m happier than I’ve been in years because I know that if I can survive this job, I can survive other jobs too. It’s just a matter of keeping a good supply of drugs. I had rather die than to go back to being unable to work.

I wrote most of the following paragraphs in the comment section, but am going to add them as an appendum.

It’s not that I have suddenly decided to take on hard projects despite the pain, but that I have improved enough that, with narcotics, I can now bear what pain there is when I take on what is for me a hard project--this project being my test of that. There was a time when movement hurt so much that I had to grasp my shoulders with my hands in order to walk, and I couldn’t even dust furniture for the pain. For an entire year, not a night went by that I didn't sleep in a recliner while taking narcotics every few hours and using ice packs continually, and I would still hurt too bad to sleep for more than brief periods. If I were in such pain now, I would be screaming in agony were I been silly enough to attempt my current project. It would be like fire to my body.



I don’t know what to attribute this recent improvement to. I went back to physical therapy with yet another new therapist a month ago, and he is the first therapist who has been able to devise exercises that I can bear. I’m also taking Sam-E and Cymbalta, so maybe all three of these things or none of these things are responsible for my improvement.

Although I long since stopped trusting that good times will last, these last few weeks have been the best period I’ve had since the pain got really bad four years ago, so it is tempting to be hopeful. However, both the pain specialist I saw last week and my physical therapist have told me that I will always be in pain (the longer a person is in pain, the less chance there is that he will recover). In fact, the therapist asked me whether I'm more interested in building strength or in reducing pain, and I told him unhesitatingly that I value strength above reduced pain. Being strong helps me to want to live. Some people seem able to slide into invalidism with little angst, but I can’t imagine ever reconciling myself to such a life.

I take great comfort in knowing that, whatever is causing my pain, at least it can’t be as bad as syringomyelia or chronic regional pain disorder, two of the diagnoses I’ve had that turned out to be wrong.


The painting is by Frank Earle Schooner (1877-1972), and is entitled “Hopalong Takes Command.” It's owned by the Delaware Art Museum

Things that go bump in the night

I’m going to betray a tree that has provided me with beauty and shade for the 21 years I’ve been in this house. The tree is a Ponderosa Pine that stands ten feet from my back bedroom. Fifteen years ago, an ice storm sent limbs crashing from that tree like artillery shells. For three days, I slept at the other end of the house while Peggy remained in the very bedroom that was most likely to be hit (this is the same woman who worries that airplanes will fall on her). After the ice melted, I told her that there was no way I was going to pass another winter wondering if an evergreen limb four inches in diameter was going to impale us in our bed. She objected strenuously to my pruning proposal, but I used her old mountain climbing gear to get myself to the top of that 80-foot tree, and I pruned it anyway (I’m a woos about crossing Peggy, so this constituted a rare act of defiance). I thought the tree might die from such a severe pruning, but it didn’t even slow down, so last summer, I had to do the same thing again. The tree still looks healthy, but it’s none too pretty, what with most of one side and twenty feet of its top gone—and even after all that, there’s still the possibility that it might heave our foundation.

So, I’m going to have an arborist give me one estimate for cutting the whole thing down and another estimate based upon me cutting the limbs and him cutting the trunk. Ten years ago, I would have rented a chainsaw with a long bar and done the job myself, but given how bad a shape I’m in anymore, even the limbs—which will have to be cut into sections and lowered with ropes—are more than prudence dictates that I tackle, although I probably will.

I’m not doing well with my ever-worsening health situation, but I must say that I’ve gotten enormous comfort over the years by reflecting upon other people’s misery. Based upon my own experiences and what I’ve read, I’ve learned two things about chronic pain: there’s often very little that doctors can do to alleviate it; and the only limit to how much pain a person can experience is determined by the point at which he passes out, and even then he has to wake up again. I’ve read about people whom, if I were them, and had I been able to use a gun on myself, I would have run to that gun. I draw two conclusions from such somber reflections. One is that I’m lucky compared to how bad off I could be. The second is that to truly allow the knowledge of such pain into my heart has made life seem a lot more serious. When I was young, I pretended that life was simply a game that I would someday tire of, and then go back to my real existence; but, no, our lives are as real—and sometimes as horrific—as when a leopard crushes the windpipe of an impala.

One of the things I miss most is the ability to believe that I will ever again be strong and healthy. Life just seems too damn sad most of the time, and what joy I find comes in little pieces, and most of them when I’m writing (I write far more than I share) or spending time with Peggy. I figure that as long as I have her, I can put up with almost anything. I’m 62, and I’ve never been alone or even wanted to be alone. In three months, she and I will have been married forty years—we met in August and were married that December. Scores of people have passed through my life since I met Peggy, but somehow she has remained.

Just as I finished this, a blogger who is surely a lot tougher than I posted her own update (http://black-horse-design.blogspot.com/). It will give you a taste of the kind of cold comfort that I get from other people’s suffering. Bloggers like Carmon almost make me ashamed to complain at all. Yet, I can’t find the strength to bear my lot in silence, and besides, my greatest supporters have often been those who were worse off than I.