Chronic Pain

What do you say to someone who doesn't appear to have a disability? Why do people have the need to 'diagnose" disability based only on what they see? If I can't see someone look sick, then what should I believe? Never mind all the medical maladies that can't actually be seen. 

Like nerve pain. Severe nerve pain.

NON-DIABETIC neuropathy. The kind you get bestowed upon you when your B-12 levels drop out from under you. Not from eating garbage and having high glucose. The kind you get when you still eat plenty of red meat, oodles of greens, and supplement your diet with oral and injectable B vitamins and folic acid. You know, the kind you get when your own body just gives up on you in your mid twenties. 

Have you ever ran your hands under super hot water by accident? Definitely in a "not what I was expecting temperature-wise" kind of situation? Remember that sensation creeping into your soul for a moment and shitting on your spirit? Yes? Now imagine that as a constant feeling. Working it's way up from the tips of your toes and making its way in the only direction it has to go. If the water analogy is too wet for you, try this. Remember getting a blistering sunburn? Remember getting a horribly painful and dry one? Now imagine the dry sunburn on top of the blistering one. So there's that. It's been active and consistent from the tips of my toes to my middle thigh. And new to the game is the neuropathy developing in my upper extremities as well.

And it's difficult to walk most days. Like I have to will myself to let my feet touch the floor first thing in the morning. I stare at the floor while my feet hover above it and I have to count to three and then it's roll out autobots. Once my feet hit the floor I have to be in constant motion until I can mentally wrap my brain around the pain. No amount of pain meds or compression stockings or anything else I've been doing seems to help. 

Every day lately seems like one of the worst days of my life pain-wise. Sometimes I have to sit in my car for several minutes when I get home because I need to psych myself up to walk the 30 feet from the car to the door. Then drop everything and take old girl out to potty. Then I have to accomplish everything I absolutely can in a short period of time, because once I sit down, THAT'S IT. 

So this is what life is sometimes. Constant pain, depression, loneliness, and books.