I’ve been struggling with this post a really long time.

The reason for the conflict is simple: I’ve presented a fairly consistent  image of successful pain management techniques here. And for the most part, that’s been true. Heck, it’s been completely true – until fairly recently.

What happened was this: I found myself in a hellish situation — staying with some friends (now former friends) who … wow, how to put this? Let’s say “had some issues.” They, and their kids, systematically worked over the course of several months to make life harder than it had to be. And it all ended in a fabricated explosion designed to push us out — myself and my child, that is.

Well, you don’t have to tell me twice. Despite the massive amounts of stress and pain I was dealing with, I managed to pack us up and get out within a day. We drove two hours late at night, ending up at a hotel in Raleigh, NC, where I slept for the first time in over six months on a real bed. The next day, we met my brother for lunch, then took off yet again in the poorly-air-conditioned car – this time for Savannah, a good six hours away.

That’s where I am now — my daughter is spending a few days with her dad in South Carolina — staying with a true friend who needed some help and had an extra bedroom.

The truth is: I am quite literally homeless. Without a place to call home – at least, of my own.

That’s what chronic pain has done to me. I am unemployable, I have lost the law license I worked so hard for, and I have no home and no regular income — all because I have chronic pain.

The reality of this has made me even sicker, much as the insane additional amounts of emotional stress have contributed to it as well. The practicalities are that I have had to steel my body to do things it just is not capable of doing in the past weeks. And it is screaming at me right now.

“Do you get it yet? Has it soaked in through your incredibly thick skull yet? You are DISABLED, you moron.”

I hate it when my body yells at me. It’s so … rude.

I have no idea what’s going to happen. For the first time, I’m scared. Truly, bone-crunching-ly, soul-shaking-ly scared. This arrangement won’t last much longer — it can’t, because I won’t let my friend take on one more thing she has to fix at the expense of herself, and because … well, I just won’t let it. And what happens then feels like one huge question mark.

All I can do now is cry, while my daughter isn’t here to see me, and lie here on this bed, because I can’t sit up without wanting to scream. And while I know this current level of pain will not last — it never does — it will ease, and I will rise again — the enormity of the other problems makes it all seem like one great big giant taffy ball of evil trying to trap me in a box.

Perspective is hard to come by these days, in other words. So if you’ve come here looking for “thriving!” tips (gaaah, I want to rip that word from the English language right about now), you might want to go elsewhere for awhile. Or look through the happy/healthy archives. Stay away from current posts for awhile. Because I’m fresh out of thriving. Because the truth, quite literally, hurts like hell.

Funny story, there.

Short version: I’m now going by the diminutive of my middle name, for the first time in my life.

Shorter version: It’s me. The blogger formerly known as Sherrie (or Sheryl in some places).

For the longer version, check out this post at my personal blog (ironically hosted at sherriesisk.com — and yep, that’s about to change, too).

Reassurance: I’ll still be here, blogging away. All the snarky humor — just attached to a much easier to pronounce name.

Harsh words in that headline, and I mean every single one of them.

Here’s what happened: Last week, my housing plans fell through. I’d been staying with an acquaintance, which was always a temporary solution and the plan was that my daughter and I would be moving in with another friend and her family, to share expenses. Then friend’s house had a temper tantrum, losing both its air conditioning and the downstairs plumbing in the space of 48 hours.

So I had to scramble to find something else. I’d had a back-up plan but in the comedy of errors that is my life, that also imploded hilariously, leaving me with about one week in which to find a place to live.

So, with the aid of a friend and Craigslist, I set about scrambling for Plan C. Thankfully, I now have Plans C AND D, and that’s pretty awesome to have options — nothing firm yet, but we’ll know tomorrow, almost surely by Tuesday at the latest.

OK, crisis averted. But the thing that struck me like a ton of bricks late Friday night, after five full days of escalating efforts and exponentially skyrocketing stress levels, was summed up in this Facebook status update:

Something Alice Cooper can’t cure? That’s new …

In all seriousness, this feeling — as if someone tilted me over and let everything run right out into the ground — was totally new to me, despite ten-plus years of living with fibromyalgia and degenerative disk disease.

See, I’ve always been a very optimistic person. And the best thing about that kind of optimism, the kind that’s bred into your bones, is that it provides its own energy source. Even in the worst of times, the certain conviction that things will get better keeps me going.

But not this time. I hit the wall. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t even write, which has always been my best form of therapy.

I didn’t know what to do. So I went to bed. (And then promptly stayed awake for four more hours while the current housemates sang Venetian folk songs and argued about who was “right from the beginning.” Sigh.)

The next day, I felt much better. So we can assume fairly safely that if you hit this stress-induced wall, sleep helps.

What else makes it better? I honestly don’t know. I’ve never felt that way before so it’s a completely new experience.  So I’m asking you all — have you ever experienced The Wall? What helped, if anything? What doesn’t work? Let’s share our collective wisdom!

It’s no secret I’m a fan of tramadol. Hell, it’s the name of my site. Those little white pills saved my life. So it should be no surprise that I’m all for prescription pain medication when it’s used appropriately.

And it should be no surprise that one of my pet peeves is the fear-mongering that runs rampant and unchecked in the medical community that stops professionals from  prescribing pain meds to treat chronic pain assertively.

What’s behind this insane aversion to the pills? I think there are a couple of things at work here. One is that somehow, we’ve abdicated responsibility for medical decisions to law enforcement officials. That’s messed up.

Another is this ineffective, wasteful “war on drugs” with its screwball insistence on locking up as criminals those who merely use, alongside the devils that push the crappy stuff on them. It’s swept up legitimate uses of pain medication along with the highly-publicized legitimate cases of prescription pain med addiction and the street-drug abusers.

And finally, I think there’s a fundamental misunderstanding that fuels this mess: too many folks are confusing dependence and addiction.  Need proof? Here’s a page on drug dependence from the University of Maryland Medical Center — and look at the very first sentence:

Definition of Drug dependence:

Drug addiction, or dependence, is the compulsive use of a substance, despite its negative or dangerous effects.

Right there, in the very first sentence. A medical university gets it wrong. Now, true, in the next few paragraphs, it hedges the bet a bit:

However, a physical dependence on a substance (needing the drug to function) is not always part of the definition of addiction. Some drugs (for example, certain blood pressure medications) do not cause addiction but they can cause physical dependence. Other drugs cause addiction without leading to physical dependence. Cocaine is an example.

But it’s too late. The damage has been done. The first sentence makes it clear — “drug dependence = drug addiction.” The subsequent qualifications are too little, too late.

What’s the Difference Between Dependence and Addiction?

So what exactly is the difference between being dependent on a drug and being addicted to it?

• Dependence is a normal physical condition, while addiction is an abnormal psychological condition.
• Dependence simply means your body has grown “used” to the drug; addiction means you psychologically crave it, usually in higher and higher doses.
• Dependence does not in and of itself interfere with your daily functions and life; addiction devastates.

We, as the fibromyalgia and chronic pain community, simply must do a better job of educating the world about this distinction. We need to speak out when our friends get it wrong. We need to write to editors of newspapers whose journalists get it wrong. We need to — yes! — correct our own doctors if need be.

The reluctance to speak up is completely understandable. None of us wants to be labelled an addict or drug-seeking (the medical profession’s cute little label for anyone whose pain they don’t quite understand — basically, a less emotionally charged way of calling someone an addict).

There’s so much stigma in this society against pain medication that when we speak up for any aspect of it as a treatment option, we’re automatically aware that somewhere, in some file, there’s a giant red asterisk being placed beside our names.

But we have to get over that if things are to change. The actual risk of addiction has been proven to be quite low, and when no conservative measures are working, why on earth should we be required to hurt like hell — often becoming nonfunctioning and disabled in the process, thereby putting an unnecessary drain on government resources — when we don’t have to be?

I do believe that lifestyle changes can hold chronic pain at bay in many instances — but not all. Why should we be forced to hurt like hell while we make those changes? All because some people don’t understand that dependence does not mean addiction.

I realize others may disagree with me strongly. If you’ve ever had a family member addicted to any substance, as I have, you may well be experiencing a strong emotional reaction to what I’m writing here. That’s fine.

Please understand: I’m not saying addiction to legal prescription pain medication does not exist. I’m saying it’s not a foregone conclusion, and it’s not a sufficient reason for chronic pain patients being forced to rely on ineffective conservative treatments, when there are legitimate medications that make them feel better and give them their lives back — which is exactly what tramadol did for me.

What is this?

Every so often, interspersed with the “how to” tips and advice on handling chronic pain and the posts where I shamelessly try to feed my kid via affiliate marketing (and for the love of God, please, people, go buy something, will ya? She’s already growing out of the three pairs of school pants I could afford back in January), I’ll share an excerpt from my work-in-progress titled, shockingly enough, The Tramadol Diaries.

Unless specifically stated otherwise, I advocate trying NOTHING in these posts as a means of dealing with your own chronic pain (especially without talking to your doctor first). Except the humor. That works. Also? Self-delusion and self-imposed exile to Egypt — you know, the Land of Denial … well, at least it works for awhile …

“Does It Hurt This Bad For All Preggos?”

For nine solid months, and beyond, I hurt. Friends would ask, concern in their voices and eyes, “What exactly does it feel like?” The first time I was asked this fairly simple question, I was floored. How to describe this hellish sensation that made walking, sitting, lying down, doing anything pure torture?

I thought for a minute, and then said, “Imagine it’s late spring and you’re in college. You’re wearing shorts. Short shorts, you know, the kind that barely cover the subject. Now imagine you’re sitting on top of a brick wall. OK? Now, say this really cute guy clear across the quad sees you. His eyes light up and he calls out to you, waving you over. You happily hop off the wall … and in the process, scrape the shit out of the backs of your legs. Got that?”

Their eyes would go wide, and they’d nod. But I wasn’t finished.

“OK, now, while you’re in shock from that experience, the insane torture killer who just escaped from the local nuthouse comes careening around the corner and sees you in pain. You look just like his abusive mom, so he takes the fireplace poker he carries with him for just such a purpose out of his duffel bag with one hand, pulls out the flame thrower with the other, heats up the poker until it glows red and white at the tip, and then jabs that poker smack dab in the center of your butt cheek, then pulls it straight down your leg to your heel.”

At this point in the description, I’d get some strange looks.

So I’d shrug. “It’s like that.”

Colorful though the description may have been, it wasn’t overstatement or hyperbole. That’s exactly what it felt like. Most of the time, I’d be the girl who merely scraped the crap out of her legs on the brick wall. But at least once a day, I’d become the serial killer’s victim.

The worst part was I couldn’t predict when that transformation would take place. I tried, God knows. I kept logs — detailed logs of all my activities, my food and drink intake, my stress levels, my sleep — anything I could think of that might possibly be related to this awful pain. There were absolutely no commonalities. No pattern I could discern.

I was simply at the whims of some sadistic supernatural force that had decreed I’d be spending what should have been the most blissful time of my life — my first pregnancy — in screamingly debilitating pain.

And to make it even more deliciously sadistic? I was pregnant so I couldn’t take any good drugs.  Nor could I even take any diagnostic tests to figure out what the hell was going on with me.

What I could do was research. So I researched myself blind. I read every book on pregnancy I could find, assuming the pain was somehow connected to my burgeoning blessed state. Made sense, right? They both struck at the same time.

And in fact, in one of those god-awful pregnancy tomes — you know, with the paintings of the long-haired earth mothers, rocking a baby with some intricately knitted shawl delicately draped around her shoulders? — what I found was that this devilish pain had a name — sciatica — and it was in fact commonly experienced in pregnancy. Bingo, I thought smugly.

Then I read the next paragraph, and my smugness vanished, to be replaced by utter confusion and dismay: sciatica was commonly experienced in pregnancy — in the last weeks of the third trimester, as it was related to the pressure of all that extra weight pressing against your spine. But I’d been feeling like this since right after the little blue line popped up on the white stick.

Well. Damn.

So I know what it is, but not why I have it, I thought. Crap.

In a master stroke of irony, I experienced absolutely no other negative pregnancy side effects. No fatigue. No morning sickness. Well, I was hot as hell, perpetually. I cranked down the house thermostat to the point that my husband swore he saw penguins leaving in the middle of the night, shivering, muttering “Damn, it’s too cold in there.”

“Ha. Ha. I’m growing a person in here,” I snapped back. “It’s hot work.”

The worst time was nighttime. I’d lie there on one side then the other, a long body pillow stuffed between my knees and clutched over my bursting belly, desperate for one moment of … not feeling good since that was clearly impossible, but at least of sufficiently reduced pain that I could finally reach that blissfully unaware state of sleep.

Predictably, as I grew bigger the pain got worse. But sometime around the sixth month, I discovered that I had superpowers.

Specifically, I had the power of auto-suggestion. I could convince myself of anything, it seemed. Even that my pain was fading. Even that it was gone. All I had to do was lie there, quietly, and repeat to myself over and over “I feel good, I feel great, my legs feel great, I can sleep, I feel good, I feel great …” Within five minutes, the pain subsided long enough to let me drift off.

Excited at this epiphany, I started playing this game during the day. I was devastated to find out it only lasted a few minutes at a time, and required serious mental effort — more effort than I could give, since I was still working.  So I suffered through the days.

But at night? I was Pregnant Sleeping Cleopatra, Queen of Denial.

Hey ya’ll – can you help a sister out?

I want to make this site as helpful and positive for all my readers as possible. To that end, I’ve created a very short survey (just seven questions – should take you less than ten minutes to fill out) about who you guys are and what you’d like to see more of here on The Tramadol Diaries.

Do me a solid and go fill it out por favor? Gracias!

Today, I’m proud and pleased as punch to announce that The Tramadol Diaries has a page on Facebook all its very own!

Check it out and would you please, please consider becoming a fan? I’ll be posting unique content to it on a regular basis, so if you wanna be “in the know” on all things TTD-related, as well as see some cool stuff you can’t find anywhere else, click here and become a fan of The Tramadol Diaries on Facebook today.

I’ve already posted about my other resolutions over at my other site, but this one’s deeply personal to me, so I wanted to share this list with the group that knows the most about the peculiar challenges I face living with fibromyalgia and degenerative disk disease: TTD readers.

When I started this site it was with the openly-stated intention of building a platform for a nonfiction book I’ve wanted to write for the past ten years, ever since I was diagnosed with these two conditions. That’s still the plan, but over the last few months, TTD has become so much more to me than just a platform.

The people I’ve had the unique pleasure of connecting with here and because of this site have lit up my life in profound and joyous ways. You guys have made me laugh, cry, and rage with anger over your deeply personal stories and the proud, honest, deeply meaningful way you share them.

So, here are my resolutions for the Tramadol Diaries in 2010, and I offer them to you as a gift, of sorts — a way to reconnect with you all and give back just a little of what you’ve given me in 2009.

Here we go!

1. Share more of my personal story about chronic pain.

I don’t know why but I’ve always found it easier to write about other people’s pain experiences than my own. I start to feel a little twitchy when I dive into my own story, and I think that’s a pretty significant sign that it’s something I need to do more of, to explore my own relationship and experience with pain in more depth. I’ve gotten a lot of really lovely compliments on the few posts I have shared in this vein, so I’m going to choose to believe those folks and open up more on this subject in 2010.

2. Write more often here.

I’ve no excuse, really, except that this site doesn’t pay the bills, another one does, and the bills were a BIG problem for me in 2009. I had to focus on what helped, but the honest truth is that I could have done more here, and done it more consistently. I resolve to post at least twice a week here in 2010. (I almost wrote “every day!” but, c’mon, the last thing we need is another reason to punish ourselves.)

3. Do more features like the ones coming up on chronic pain at work and talking to kids about chronic pain.

I have had such an amazing experience working on these two upcoming series and I’m so excited to share them with you in January! Connecting with experts, learning from them, crafting their advice into a solid sequence of posts … it’s all been incredible, and I really, really hope you all get as much from those series as I have gotten from writing them so far. I want to do more topics like that, maybe every other month or so.

4. Add some video and podcasts to the blog.

I’d love to jazz this place up with some video and podcasts, too! I can’t promise this will arrive in any particular timeframe as I have a lot to learn about this technology before I dive into it, but I’m looking forward to it. If you guys have any ideas about what topics might make particularly compelling video/podcasts, please let me know in the comments! I’m all ears.

5. Get over myself and put my picture on the site.

Again, no excuse. Just major issues with my looks. I’m dropping that here in 2009 and refusing to carry it with me into the New Year. So, I will get a nice picture done and post it here and on Twitter to replace that god-awful “Dark Shadows” thing I’ve got going on there currently.

6. Explore adding forums to the site.

I’ve resisted this one for awhile — there really didn’t seem to be a need for this, as there are already a number of good message boards out there for folks with specific conditions. But a number of you have  suggested this and I’m willing to explore it. So I’m not promising they’ll magically appear in 2010, but I will commit to looking into it, seeing what’s required, how hard it would be, how much time it would take, and how much y’all want it.

7. Work a bit harder to spread the TTD “message” — that you can thrive, not just survive, with chronic pain.

There’s so much more to building a platform than just blogging, although I think this is my first and biggest piece of the foundation and I’d like to continue focusing on it. There’s also Twitter, Facebook, and other sites, as well as journalists and freelance writers publishing about chronic pain-related topics,  though, and I’m going to do my best to get more active in this area in 2010.

8. Connect with more chronic pain “thrivers” on Twitter and Facebook.

Likewise, there are a lot of tweeps and Facebook’ers out there who are sort of drifting with the social mediasphere, and not connecting with any one site. I’m on a mission to bring them here, as at least one of their stops on the information superhighway, and see if TTD is the place for them.  I want to hear more stories, talk to an even more diverse group of chronic pain thrivers, and find out from as many people as possible about their concerns, their dreams, their problems, their unique solutions.

So that’s it! My gift to you in 2010 is a more active and actively-engaged site. I hope you’ll join me. I think it’s gonna kick ass, if you’ll pardon the salt.

I love comments. I really do.

But just in the last few days I’ve gotten two really sketchy comments spouting questionable science and unsupported claims, contrary to most accepted and reliable sources.

It didn’t take me long to delete them, but it kind of pisses me off, to be truthful.

The Internet is great for allowing all kinds of viewpoints to be put out there. The problem is that all kinds of viewpoints are out there, and it’s hard for most of us to sort out the quacks from the truth-speakers.  It’s equally hard for a blogger writing about medical issues from the perspective of a patient. I’m keenly aware that what I write might be the basis for someone else’s course of action.

That’s why I will ALWAYS urge readers to talk to their doctors before taking a particular course of action. It’s also why I only use resources I believe to be reputable and reliable in my posts.

And it’s why I’m going to delete comments without any further discussion if those comments make wild, unsupported claims that run completely contrary to what those reliable sources present as a consensus, especially when those comments don’t even provide a single supporting reference.

I’m all for debate and discussion, and if I’ve missed something I truly hope someone will point it out to me. Feel free to submit a comment pointing out a contrary view, or your own experience. But don’t write a comment that flies in the face of the most basic research and expect me to approve it without a single reliable reference or cite.

It’s just not going to happen. This is too important a subject.

My only other “rules” for comments are pretty much based on common sense:

1. No spam.
2. No rudeness, name-calling, defamation, or copyright infringement.
3. Absolutely NO racism, sexism, or any other kind of -ism.
4. And, just because it’s my site and this kind of person really ticks me off, no “naysayers” who think chronic pain is “all in our heads.” Go elsewhere. I’m sure there’s a site out there that will welcome your ignorance. Go find it, with my blessings.

I reserve the right to make more such rules as the need arises, but I hope and believe that won’t be necessary.

Every so often, interspersed with the “how to” tips and advice on handling chronic pain and the posts where I shamelessly try to feed my kid via affiliate marketing (and for the love of God, please people, go buy something, will ya? She’s getting skinny), I’ll share an excerpt from my work-in-progress titled, shockingly enough, The Tramadol Diaries.  Unless specifically stated otherwise, I advocate trying NOTHING in these posts as a means of dealing with your own chronic pain (especially without talking to your doctor first). Except the humor. That definitely works. Hey, it’s either laugh at yourself or cry, right? And crying makes me look ugly…

The Breakfast Incident

It started the weekend after I learned I was pregnant with The Princess. November, 1998. I remember sitting in a tony country club, having breakfast with my mother, brother, and husband, and shifting uncomfortably in my seat, painfully aware of the searing burning sensation running down the back of my left leg.

My brother, Tom, was being his usual sarcastically funny self. I honestly don’t remember what he said that set me off — something benign, because he’s never mean, and I usually take it and dish it right back with affection.

This time, however, something snapped. “Don’t do that,” I said. Something in my face or my tone conveyed the seriousness I felt, because the look on his face said volumes. Surprise, alarm, confusion, tinged with a slight hint of fear — he was obviously thinking, “Oh shit. What did I say?”

He recovered enough to say, “Come on kiddo. I’m only teasing.”

“Don’t,” I warned him. And then — God, I hate this about me — the tears started to well up. Every damn time I get angry, I start to cry. And I never cry pretty. Oh, no. My crying face is red, splotchy, puffy, and just really, really fugly.

Now he was truly alarmed. “Sherrie,” he began (and he almost never uses my name — the name he and our other brother Jim gave me at birth) … but I cut him off.

“I’m not kidding. I hurt, I don’t feel good, and I’m a little scared about it all, so just DON’T,” I sniveled.

To his credit, he backed off immediately. But the incident is forever burned in my memory because it was the first time I admitted to myself that something was terribly, terribly wrong with me.

I was a month pregnant, at the age of 33. It should have been the happiest time in my life. I had no morning sickness at all (never did), and this baby was very much wanted by both my husband and me — to say nothing at all of my mother, who had always craved a grandchild but had all but given up hope of any of her ungrateful weirdo kids ever giving her one.

And yet, I had just acknowledged that I was in pain — a pain that had come on strong and fast, with no warning or apparent cause, and had not let up once in days. The mystery of it frightened me greatly because of the pregnancy. All I could think was, “Is something wrong with Princess?” (I knew even then it was a girl. I swear I did.)

Those days would turn into months, and then a full year, before I ever found out what was causing this debilitating pain, which never once ceased its perpetual torment.