The state of my health

I’ll be lying awake in pain from osteoarthritis, syringomyelia, chondromalacia, a Baker’s Cyst, and an aching back, but I’ll be high at the same time because I will have taken a few Percocets or a couple of Demerols. Anyway, I’ll be lying there unable to sleep—partly because of the pain, and partly because being high makes my mind bounce all over the place—and I’ll think to myself: “Snow, you really could put yourself to sleep, you know. All you would have to do would be to take a maximum dose of one narcotic or another and a maximum dose of one sleeping pill or another plus three Neurontins, two Tofranils, and one Requip, and wash it all down with a shot of vodka… Okay, forget the vodka, at least until I build up such a tolerance to the pills that they stop working.” Well, it’s tempting sometimes because I’ve been lying awake most nights for years. Of course, the downside would be that I might die, or the house might burn down around me without me waking up until the roof fell on my chest.

I take a fair amount of scary drugs, and sometimes I enjoy them, but I never take more than I need, and rarely as much as I need. I sometimes wonder which would actually be worse for my body, taking enough pills to make me sleep, or the exhaustion I experience from never getting enough sleep. I just know that I take more pills than I ever imagined I would, and, as a consequence of the pills and the pain, I never feel really good anymore, and I never feel really intelligent anymore either. In fact, I worry about how much more I can handle before my organs start to fail.

I got another referral to a neurologist (the same neurologist who did my vertebral biopsy when my C5 turned up osteonecrotic—aka dead), but she won’t see me until I get another MRI, but I can’t get another MRI until insurance okays it, but insurance can’t okay it until my orthopedist submits the proper form. Insurance denied the Synvisc injections, so I have that on appeal, only I have no idea how speedily the orthopedist’s staff is moving on it. I just know that medical staff people tend to thwart a patient at every turn if he becomes impatient. I think this is because overpaid doctors, who are mostly male, treat underpaid staff people, who are mostly female, disrespectfully, so staff people take it out on the only people who are lower on the totem pole than they are, the patients—especially the male patients, although I am not too sure about this part of my theory. But anyway…

The steroid shot I got earlier this month has already stopped working, so I’m positively screwed, pain-wise, until I either get the Synvisc, or the surgical neurologist cuts me open again, or the orthopedist cuts me open again. I’ve been waiting for one thing or another to happen for years, and the glacial slowness of the process really makes me envy people who are so rich that they can get on their Lear Jets, fly to the top specialists, and plop a hundred thousand dollars on the counter and not miss it. They can no doubt get themselves moved to the head of every line too, but I wouldn’t do that, and I wouldn’t mind even a little bit shooting any rich person who did. Of course, that's a politically incorrect thing to say just as saying that I sometimes enjoy being high on narcotics is a politically incorrect thing to say. But, you know, my fondest dream is that I would never need another pill for as long as I live. As for shooting rich people, I think we could do with a few less of those bloodsuckers.

A chewer of pinesap

Last week for no known reason, the pain in my shoulders went away for the first time in four years, and the fire in my shinbones eased up too. How sweet it was to sleep without being continually awakened by pain. “Oh, boy,” I exulted, “I can finally get caught up with my work.”

To that end, I built a 24-foot (7.3 meter) ladder out of 2x4s, and got three people to help me raise it to the first limb of my Ponderosa Pine. I then spent part of two days in the top of the Ponderosa removing limbs that overhung the house. I would first tie them to the trunk, and, after they were severed, move down the trunk cutting them into small sections that I then dropped to the ground. I went to bed each night happier than I’ve been in years as I anticipated continuing my work the next day despite that fact that my muscles are so atropied that the job was far harder than when I last did it.

I wasn’t through with my work on the third day, but Peggy wanted to wash the outside of the house—another long neglected job—with rags and brushes, and I felt obligated to help. This job occupied part of three days, and we finished it yesterday. Last night, the fire returned to my shinbones, and my shoulders hurt so much that sleep was impossible even with ice and narcotics. We still have a fence and a storage shed to wash, plus I left my ropes and tools high in the tree so I wouldn’t have to hoist them up again. I’m hoping the pain will ease up enough that I can at least retrieve them before it rains on Sunday.

You might point out that I took on too much too fast, and I won’t argue with that, but I’m as hungry for work as a man who hasn’t eaten in weeks is hungry for food. Work gave me purpose, and enabled me to feel that I earned the food I put in my mouth. During my years in pain, I could still attend to business and was eventually able to do light housework. More recently, I’ve even been able to do yard work, but hard and challenging labor was what I most loved and craved, and it is also what Peggy is the least able to do. She often urged me to hire various jobs done so that they would at least have gotten done, but that would have represented so great a failure that I would have been hard pressed to bear it.

While I was in the tree, I chewed pinesap, and its sweetness and the joy I took in my work are still fresh in my memory. I can but hope that I’m able to return to them soon.