Pain

Two nights ago I experienced what I think may have been the worst pain of my life.

Following a very high stress week, like crying at work, the students can tell something is wrong stress, like your elderly parents and disabled brother are living in filth with mouse shit all over their kitchen and only you can clean it and solve the problem stress;

following a very high stress week, I experienced a let-down illness moment. I was done with the work of hiring cleaners, decluttering, organizing, and wiping and vacuuming up the mouse shit, and the deep cleaners came, and everything is safe and clean again. I went home and laid down and then it began.

Cramps and a sensation of urgency. Explosive diarrhea, the kind that only someone with Crohn’s recognizes and thinks…”Well, shit.”

Maybe that’s it?

No, you fool. You could never be so lucky.

More cramps, more severe this time, progressively moving the entire length of my large intestine, feeling like someone is squeezing something out of my guts like a sausage casing. Momentary relief punctuated with a comical fart.

Maybe that’s it?

No, it’s more explosive diarrhea, and this time you better run to the toilet, mortal.

Back in bed. Position the pillows and heating pad just-so to provide some pain relief while not applying any additional pressure to my guts, which appear to be simultaneously inflating and collapsing into a singularity under the weight of their own existential weariness.

The pain hits different now. It takes my breath. It makes me nauseous. I consider going to the emergency room.

But what if I shit myself in the car?

I could put a towel down.

I can’t afford to go to the emergency room. It’s 9pm on a Friday night and it’ll take 3 hours to get me into a bed. I won’t even get to eat the food at Riverside because I’m on a liquid diet. God damnit.

What is my limit?

I can’t take pain killers now. I would throw them up. The only painkillers I have is Tylenol, and I know from experience that acetaminophen won’t even touch this type of pain. I’m in too far.

Deep breaths. Breathe out and try to expand beyond the cramps.

I endured this for three hours, then, exhausted, fell asleep.

The next day my abdomen was sore from the cramping. But there was a deeper, more dreary pain, the pain of my actual intestines and all of the goo and fibers around them, the existential pain of your internal organs when something is seriously wrong.

And let us not discount the searing, burning, raw pain of a thousand paper cuts on the anus following 30 bouts of acidic diarrhea. The anus, work horse of the digestive tract, always quietly and diligently doing its job; now swollen like a waterlogged corpse.

The doctor at urgent care said she couldn’t give me anything for the pain.

I feel like maybe she didn’t understand what I had been through. A level of pain often likened to 8cm contractions, childbirth, and a xenomorph bursting through your chest, and she told me I should take two extra strength Tylenol. Bitch, if I were pregnant you’d be giving me an epidural right now.

I told myself if my pain gets that bad again, I will be going to the hospital. I look forward to writing another entry about how that goes, and hopefully I would be treated to some form of pain management. Don’t we deserve that, Crohn’sies? Just some basic, run of the mill, “I see you are writhing due to your fucked up internal organ, here is some pain management” type care.

Your pain is valid. You deserve better care. You deserve to be able to talk to your gastroenterologist on weekends. You deserve pain relief. You deserve a treatment modality that doesn’t have heart attack, stroke, and cancer as potential side effects. You deserve research on your disease. You deserve paid time off work to destress and manage your disease, your doctor’s appointments, and your well being. You deserve social security disability. You deserve affordable, universal health care. You deserve human dignity.