As a follower of the Diary of a Benefit Scrounger - Sue Marsh's views on life I read with a growing awareness that her blog And Drugs Don't Work They Just Make Things Worse mirrored my life.
I am fairly fortunate that my GP understands how much I respect the lack of control that some medication gives, the fact that some of the medication he has me on is OK for some parts of my life, but doesn't quite help out at the times I need it to. Yes, my GP has agreed to let me control some of my medication with the clear knowledge and understanding that I do respect the maximum daily dose.
Through this, I have now been able to adapt my medication levels to the extent that I can manage to cope with my voluntary job on a Tuesday. This is a good thing.
The negative side to being able to cope with Tuesday is to lose Wednesday. I don't do Wednesdays very well, it takes until about 2 p.m. for the near overdose of Tramadol on the Tuesday to clear out of my head enough for me to feel safe driving (I just pray I don't get a drug test when driving on Wednesdays).
In addition to the loss of Wednesdays and the fuzzy headedness is the disbelief of my wife. Yep, she that must be obeyed can not get her head around the fact that I can cope on Tuesday but not through the rest of the week.
The other really annoying thing about pain, that thing that I have tickling away at my nerve endings even now as I sit here feeling no pain, thanks to the meds, is describing it. Every Health Care Professional wants to know how much pain I'm in on a scale of one to ten. I don't know, I seem to remember the pain I had when my knee dislocated as being the worst I can remember. Now this being the most, it should be a ten. Now I have to think where my pain level is compared to that? At times it seems more as it lasts longer.
Is it as bad as hitting my thumb with a hammer (about a four)? Is it as bad as breaking a rib (about a seven)? Is it as bad as slicing my arm open when falling through a plastic gutter (6)? Is it as bad as ... ? That's my interpretations, what is someone else's?
I can understand 30°C temperature, I've felt it. I've felt it in the south of Spain, I've felt it in the South of France (well in the Pyrenees), I've felt it in the south of England. Three places where the temperature at ground level was the same. Oh no it isn't! In Spain, it's warm. In France it was tolerable. In the UK, however, it's stifling, to hot to breathe.
We can measure temperature, we can measure blood pressure, we can count the number of pulses in a minute. We can do all these things, and do them accurately and repeatedly. So why can't we measure pain accurately?
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