The Heart of Darkness

Apologies for being so long in blogging. The bottom line is that I hit bottom...emotionally...depression set in like a stone. You can be in a depression for weeks, months, years even and have no clue that you're sliding down the slope. But that's what happened to me.

About a week after my last entry, I woke up at 2:30 in the morning, my right foot burning with pain, unbearable pain. I stood and limped to the recliner in my bedroom and sat in the dark of looking at my beautiful girlfriend sleeping. At that moment, as if a switch had been flipped in my head, I saw myself sawing off my own foot! It was not good, folks. It scared the shit out of me. I started shaking, because, for the first time in years, I decided the only way out of my chronic pain was to either cut off my own feet or kill myself. That's when the plan to kill myself came to me in full form. I would do it on the night my girlfriend Laura's son was with his dad and Laura was still at work. Remember, this wasn't a conscious construction of my own suicide. It just rose up from my mind full formed.

Fortunately, I had only a few days before finally broken down and made an appointment to see a psychiatrist who specialized in pain management. I had figured out that the pain which had been steadily increasing over the last couple of years was now out of my control. The fact that the seven specialists I had seen before then weren't able to help me figure out how to solve my problem or weren't willing to give me the medication I needed to help manage my pain had only sent me deeper into a depression that was now totally taking me over.

A week later I visited the psychiatrist who was the first doctor truly sympathetic to my situation. She prescribed Lexapro for me, which has helped enormously both pain wise and emotionally, quinine sulfate for my nighttime leg cramps and Licodaine patches for my lumbar spine. But still the neuropathic pain burned in my feet and legs. I finally broke down and at the behest of my psychiatrist, mother and girlfriend went back to the office of my primary physician, who, fortunately, was out of town at some conference, to get a refill of the only medicine that had worked thus far for my neuropathic pain: Hydrocodone aka Vicodin.

The doctor filling in for my asshole of a primary doctor was much cooler and not only appreciated my need for the controversial narcotic but gave me a recommendation to see a pain management specialist. A month later I was sitting in the examination room of the kindest physician I had ever seen. Like some kind of dream, he not only provided me with the Hydrocodone I needed to be comfortable but determined, as had my psychiatrist, that I had been undermedicated not only by primary but by myself for years! He said that I had to approach my pain management like a diabetic approaches taken their insulin...on a regular schedule. No matter how good or bad I feel on any given day, I will take one pill in the morning, one in the afternoon and one at night...and, here comes the worst part, it would be a part of my daily regimen for the rest of my life...

I was relieved that finally I had found a doctor who recognized my need for pain relief was greater than some asshole doctor's fear of my become a wild Hydrocodone addict. In fact, he told me that if I found myself increasing the amount of medicine I was taking, to let him know and he would supervise my increase. He didn't tell me not to, because he recognized my disabling conditions were unlikely to ever get better. In fact, he told me in no uncertain terms that in a year or so I would probably need to go to a more powerful drug as my condition worsened.

Don't get my wrong, I was devastated to hear from yet another doctor that it was unlikely that any surgical procedure could remedy my problems and that in as short as 10 or 15 years I could be really messed up beyond functionalism of any kind, but the fact that my own internal instincts and despair over my conditions was rooted in something factual, medical, reality. I wasn't going crazy, anymore; I had been in tune with the decay of my own body.

Believe it or not this help to lift the depression. And that's when things really started turning around, my friends. The darkness had descended quicker than I could have ever imagined, but just as quickly it began to lift. But more on that later...