Last night was a bad night. I had a little less than three hours of sleep and by 7am my pain levels were high. Not so high as to have me curled up whimpering and shaking as sometimes happens, or enough to make me cry out, but enough to ensure that I definitely couldn’t go back to sleep and found it hard to concentrate on anything else.
It’s my feet that hurt the most today. Specifically, the tops of my feet which are aching horribly, as are my fingers and the backs of my hands. My arms hurt too, with the aching seeming to branch out from my hands and shoulders into the arms. Strangely, my elbows don’t hurt. My legs feel like I’ve been beaten up or possibly run over, which is about normal for me but with some extra cramp and shooting pains in my calf muscles. The cramp occasionally stabs at the underside of my feet too. Now that I’m typing I realise that the muscles in my thumbs hurt quite a lot. My usual constant headache might be in the mix somewhere but it’s been masked by more pressing pain elsewhere. Over the last few minutes a familiar burning pain has overtaken the aching and started to spread through my body. It’s the burning that makes me curl up and wish to die, to scream in pain. I desperately hope that it stops before that point. Back in early 2011 I had the burning all the time and I had to take pregabalin (Lyrica) to control it. I didn’t enjoy either part of that experience.
I have had drugs to try and help, of course. At 7am I had 500mg Naproxen, 1g Paracetamol and 30mg codeine. It made no difference that I can tell. I could take more codeine but the result will be that I can’t think and get really drowsy but lie awake in a nauseous opiate haze without actually sleeping. I have distracted myself through the last hour by re-watching episodes of The IT Crowd but my concentration is slipping now and I’ve turned it off.
I get pain most days although not to this extent. The pain has always been put down to my diagnosis of M.E. with the more recent burning possibly being diabetic neuropathy but while it’s a name for it, it doesn’t actually explain what’s causing the pain. It’s just labelled and then ignored. Maybe if I knew why I was in pain it would be easier to accept. I know lots of other people who have similar experiences so I don’t really know why I’m writing this other than to have a moan. Maybe that’s enough of a reason.
I think knowing why something happens helps you accept it. If you know that x causes y and that it will ease if you wait z amount of time or treat it with a certain drug. You then feel more in control. You know that they say “knowledge is power” well I think that works for health as well as politics. I also think writing down what is happening to you is a useful tool when it comes to talking with medical professionals. You can explain how you felt and when you started feeling it. Normally we try and block out the bad stuff so it’s hard to be sure when you started experiencing symptoms and to what degree.
I’m sorry you are suffering so much at the moment. It’s hard to choose between pain and side effects. I hope writing it down helped.
Moaning always helps.
it could that your inactive lifstyle and combination of tablets is causing GOUT!
its worth havin a blood test to see if you have a build up of uric acid.
i have gout like symptems cused by my chronic pain condition and have reguller blood tests,
they havnt found any uric acid yet , they are clueless as to what is causing it.