Pain

This is a bad word in our family. I guess it's a bad word for Americans in general. We get shameful if we suffer pain, and especially if doctors can't find any underlying pathology.

Everybody in my mother's line of the family suffers chronic pain. They all have intestinal difficulties of one kind of another, as do I, and arthritis everywhere, as do I. I've relied on narcotic painkillers, and they do alcohol. Alcohol is a lot easier, because nobody hassles you about it, but it doesn't particularly agree with me. When I drink, I exchange my pain for nausea, and severe IBS problems the next day. Plus, it would make me even fatter.

But whenever I have to refill my hydrocodone, if I'm even a day early, I have to undergo humiliation as well as pain. I've never talked to anybody else who Uses, but I'm guessing we all have the same problem, since I get this shit everywhere I go, from doctor's staffs and pharmacists.

I don't know what the doctor will say when I see him this afternoon. I know he's sick of my problems, but he can't be any more so than I am.

End of rant.