A choice over morphine

The year is only 9 days old and I have already reached the point where I wouldn’t mind sleeping the rest of it through. Until today I have been doing fine and was managing to stay up to 9 pm each evening and sleeping a bit less than 2 hour each afternoon, but this morning I woke with an instant desire to go back to sleep and it hasn’t left me at all. I hate it when I am so tired that just the very idea of keeping my eyes open, is a trial I would be happy to loose. I know that at this second I should be in the shower washing my hair and so on, but just sitting here regardless of how grubby I feel, is the only option open to me right now. Days like this where every action seems to be made as though I am moving through thick treacle, not only making things harder but also meaning that each action drains twice the energy that it should, I’m living in an ever decreasing circle that will only have one outcome, sleep. My choices are limited but I know that fighting it for as long as I can is actually the one I have to take, giving in would just cause more problems. Ill or not we all have days a bit like this, I know that, I’m not claiming it as just the preserve of the ill, but when you are fit and healthy, it doesn’t have the shattering ongoing consequences, you sleep and it is over, one, maybe two days of correcting your sleep pattern and life just goes on. The consequences for me and many others, can be weeks of trying to bring back that even keel where life ticks over in comfort.

When I went to bed last night I didn’t go to sleep quickly as I normally do, I found myself unable to reach sleep as the entire right side of my body had turned into a frozen painful lump and even turning on my electric blanket for a while, I was unable to thaw myself out. I don’t remember ever having such a clear line drawn down my body with one side feeling so different from the other. From my head to my toes there was a line extending from either end of my spine, a line that was incredibly sharply drawn in itself. I remember the split starting the second that I lay on the bed and instantly one side of my face froze, I had to bring my head under the covers to breath as the cold was so intense around my eye, nose and lip, that I desperately needed the warmer air to defrost myself. I so wish there was a quick way of switching off, or at least of correcting the madness that nerves seem to be able to create. I haven’t tried it yet but I have been tempted several times recently with my nerves being so off centre of trying to fix it by taking a booster morphine tablet. I know that the morphine dampens the pain and I can’t help wondering if it would also dampen other reactions, like this stupid temperature issues. I guess I wouldn’t have anything to loose by trying it, but somehow, it just seems so wrong, but if it works I would right now not be sitting here tired and cold due to the fact I lost an hour and half sleep last night.

It can be really hard to know what is right to do and what isn’t, I go through so many times the possibilities of getting things under control but by doing it in totally the wrong way. I know that the medication that I have to hand these days is incredibly strong and it has a danger of my becoming used to it and therefore having to keep upping the dose. I know that I have spent a huge amount of my illness trying not to do thing, like not having a wheelchair, which was actually needed, but I fought against it as I didn’t want it before I had absolutely no other choice. I was a long way past that when I gave in and I remember wishing I hadn’t been so stupid. So I find myself sitting wondering if I am doing the same thing when it comes to taking the medication that would help me, simply out of fear that all I am really doing is speeding up the process of landing up on higher and higher doses. I guess what I really fear is that I land up on a dose so high that although the pain and the mad sensations are controlled, the result is I can then do nothing but lie in my bed and sleep.

Our entire lives are filled with questions, what we should or shouldn’t do, in my experience those choices just get harder and harder. You would think that experience would take you through it all, but unfortunately the experience we need, hasn’t been learned by the time we need it. That much needed knowledge just isn’t there and it will only ever be there once you do exactly what you have done all your life, find out what you can, then toss an imaginary coin. I though in the past that I had had to make some huge decisions, looking forward all I can see are bigger and bigger choices, all of them life changing in the extreme, but still I am sat here trying to make a decision about one little blue tablet.

My brother hasn’t answered my email, so I expect that he hasn’t even checked his email as I thought I remember him saying, so I sent it to Adam at work and he has now printed and sent it to him by post. I guess there will be another length of time ahead waiting for it to get there and for him to reply in what ever way he chooses. The longer time has removed me from the day the letter arrived the more calm I am becoming about the whole thing, I am still angry at my core of how they chose to keep me out of the loop but I am not angry at all on the surface any longer. If he chooses to phone me I think I would actually be able to talk to him now without loosing it, but the whole situation is now back in his hands and it is up to him what the next step is.