Collection of thoughts on pain

No one will ever love you the way you used to love yourself. 

How do you become okay with being someone else? How do you convince someone that living like this is unacceptable to you, especially when that someone is a doctor who has told you to stop looking for an answer. 

This can't be forever. 

I don't want this future if it is. 

Will anyone blame me for that? 

They don't see the emptiness this has created. That nothing can fill that emptiness except being able to do things I enjoy again.

I told her I didn't see the point of trying if I couldn't do what I wanted to do ever again.

She walked out of the room. 

I can accept that I may have some level of pain forever, no matter the underlying cause. But as long as I can participate in my own life and tell my story the way I want it to be told, I can live with it. But walking around like a zombie--being able to look but never join in--is something that I can't handle. That's why I avoid people. They're all living in a world I can't be a part of anymore, and that is too painful for me to handle. 

I know myself, and I know exactly how this evaluation with the pain psychologist is going to go--because that was more important than trying any treatment to actual relieve the immediate pain that has reverted me from doing pretty much anything for weeks now. Not even a strong NSAID. Six months without medicine, other than Advil. Anyway,  going to be told something along the lines that I need to practice radical acceptance, that I need to accept that doctors cannot help me and that I am responsible for dealing with this (at which point I will remind them of all that I DO Do to prevent things from escalating), etc. Maybe I will also then mention that you can accept your situation while still actively working toward finding an answer. That no one has actually taken an MRI of the area that hurts--in which an anatomical deformity has recently been identified on an x-Ray. That they are focusing on the disc herniation that completely healed, which was associated with completely different pain and a better-than-full recovery. That the pain I have now developed quite gradually and continues to worsen over time, which is quite uncharacteristic of "chronic pain" with no identifiable cause. That based on the most recent movement tests conducted last week, the pain is probably not originating from the area of the disc herniation at All. 

I could go on. I could cite study after study. It gets tiring when no one seems to listen. "So, it's a sharp, shooting pain, you said?" "No, I said it wasn't like that at all, more than once." 

Stop projecting your generic image of a patient with chronic pain onto me for fuck's sake. Your generic PT probabbly won't be helpful either, as I guarantee that even as fucked up as I am, I have pushed through and can do more than most healthy people ever will in their lives. I know what you see when you read my charts and look at me--though you never even bothered to get the medical records from West Virginia. 

I feel that this approach is going to turn me into the very thing they already think I am. And I wonder for how many people such severe, lifelong pain issues could have been prevented. 

This heaviness is becoming too much to handle. I don't feel like myself anymore. And I know myself well enough to know that I can't just replace or forget about the things that allow me to feel like me. 

When I truly did accept that this was forever--when I stopped trying to find an answer--i spent a lot of time researching assisted suicide organizations in other countries. Because without the things that make me me--which also enable me to function socially, mentally, and otherwise--I'm already dead. I've tried to replace these things. I worked fucking hard to do it. I'm not interested in becoming someone else or in being so non-functional that I need to be heavily medicated like before. 

So I guess I'm trudging forward for the time being. But there is always that part of my mind that wonders how much more I can take. If this all goes the wrong way, how do you tell your own mother that you don't want this life anymore? That the gift she gave you has become a curse? That you are no longer yourself and can never be again? Do you think she would blame you? 

I'm not okay. And today has made things so much worse.