The Irony of It All . . .

Getting sick of me complaining about my back? Yeah, well if so, spare a thought for me - I have to live with it.

I'm now at the point where I'm barely getting any sleep. I'm not too bad during the day. Sure, I have back pain 24/7, and a constant stinging-type sciatic pain down the back of my left thigh & calf, and sitting at my desk for 9 hours a day in my job certainly isn't helping the situation any, but it's probably a 6/10 in severity. I can deal with that.

What I can't deal with is the pain in bed at night. On a pain scale out of 10, this is an 11. When I go to bed, I'm not too bad, however, when I wake up around 3.30 am, that's when the real fun starts. No matter which position I'm lying in (and I'm naturally a side sleeper), I wake in absolute agony and simply cannot get back to sleep. I try flat on my back, I try sleeping on my stomach, I try the left side & then the right side and then repeat the cycle endlessly with no relief whatsoever. I always thought I had a high pain tolerance, but I admit, the sciatica is beating me down. The burning/stinging/throbbing pain radiating from my back, deep into my butt, down my thigh and into my calf is finding me about >>>THIS<<< close to finding a cliff and throwing myself off.

Apart from not being able to sleep, the one part of the day I loathe more than any other is getting out of bed. I know I mentioned it in an earlier post, but seriously, it's truly the single most horrendous pain I've ever experienced. If I do manage to get back to sleep after waking around 3.30 am, then I've been finding myself waking around 7.00 am and lying in bed for a good 40 minutes terrified at the prospect of having to get OUT of bed. When I finally work up enough courage to actually roll/stumble/fall/hobble out of bed, I can't even sit on the edge of the bed without feeling like my leg is going to explode with the pain.

And you want to know what the irony of this situation is? Well, I'll tell you. You know I'm a medical transcriptionist, and the two areas of medicine I'm most proficient in transcribing are - psychiatry & orthopaedics. And the irony in that you may well ask? The only medication I take regularly, apart from anti-inflammatories at the moment, is an anti-depressant, and the condition that is going to drive me insane is back pain/sciatica - basically an orthopaedic condition.

It's just as well I don't transcribe oncology on a regular basis.