Four weeks and counting. I must say it’s been an interesting four weeks. Filled with fire and steel. It’s amazing how exhausting constant, never-ending pain can be. Even my RA pain, as excruciating as that can be, did not last this long or keep me this down.

The surface of my bedside table became a bouquet of pill bottles. In different shapes and colors.  The pills themselves are colorful. My Elavil is pukey green. It’s supposed to mess with my brain and short-circuit the pain signals. It’s meant to derail the train tracks and send the pain-filled railroad cars off into oblivion.

Well, it’s not quite doing its job. Or at least, not as efficiently as it could.  My doctor said he would increase the strength. But, I don’t know that its side effects are worth the increase in dosage. Though, I can’t help but wonder what color that will come in.

Sleep has been my refuge. When I sleep I have no pain. Miraculously. But I can’t spend my life asleep, nor can I spend it taking narcotics for said pain. They made me dizzy, drowsy and ditsy. I’d forget what day it was; I’d forget what time it was; I’d forget what pill was next. I actually made myself a med sheet, or cheat sheet, so that I would know what was due when.

The worst side effect was having my computer screen fade out. For a nanosecond, I would be gazing at a big black hole. It was only a flash, just long enough for me to detect that void, but it was quite disturbing. This has stopped and since I stopped taking several meds at basically the same time, I don’t know which one was responsible. Or a more disturbing thought: maybe none were.

But regardless of the pain, the dizziness or the big black void, I managed to keep working. I had windows of time when my thoughts were clear, my pain dampened, and my computer screen consistently brightly lit. I gave all those good moments to the projects I was working on, and I advised everyone within “hearing” distance to get the vaccine if they could.

Unfortunately, I had to let my blogs and my blog reading languish.  Now I have a lot of catching up to do. And though shingles still demands attention, its cries are more muted and I can block its diminished fires for longer periods. I can’t extinguish them completely, only time can do that. Hopefully. But by the looks of things, I have turned the corner and am on the mend.