Chronic Pain

Last night I realized that since my operation, I haven't had my usual nightly sleep through. Pre-surgery, I mostly slept right through the night, some nights heeding nature's call but falling right back to sleep once safely back under the covers. Even in the past year, starting mid autumn with my hip pain escalating enough to make me consider and then agree to last week's hip surgery, I was never bothered with chronic pain. Once I stopped using my hip, it stopped hurting me. Lying down, taking a load off as it were, relieved my pain enough that I fell right to sleep. Now, the pain is unrelenting.

Now don't go on thinking that I'm writhing in pain, my face does have a pained look on it but that is pretty much normal for me. On the Graphic Rating Scale of pain measurement, using the scale 1 to 10, with one being pain free and 10 being tear inducingly excruciating, I'm at a 3 or 4. During the day, I can ignore/compartmentalize the pain by keeping busy such as blogging. (That way you get some of pain, too). But at night, the story is quite different. Since I am only allowed to sleep on my back and my right leg can only bend partway, not move to the left but only a little to the right, I just can't get comfortable. Now, there may be a position which would be comfortable but these restrictions don't allow me seek them out. Within this small envelope of allowed movement, there is no position into which I can maneuver that would alleviate the pain. So I hopelessly spend all night just slightly twisting and bending trying to get into that magic position, like a hatching pupae.

I had hoped that the Vicodin would help with the comfortable/pain portion of the sleep equation but in the last 4 nights, taking two just before bedtime gives me about 5 minutes of pain free bliss. Taking anymore to get a full night's rest just doesn't add up.

So, each night I'll take the Vicodin, afraid that without it I won't even get that 5 minutes of pain vacation. I swallow the pills, hoping that this night will be different, the Vicodin will last for hours and I'll awake refreshed and alert. Instead, I lie there each night, like a living mummy, struggling this way and that, trying to wriggle out of my linen wrappings, over and over, only to fail each time. I lie there and wonder if the surgery was worth it.