Yes, I have put a gun in my mouth. I write this blog for
two reasons, one for my own catharsis and two with the hope of helping
someone. If I am writing this too help people by sharing my experience I
should probably share the parts that make me uncomfortable as well.
The month before I started Remicade was bad. To put things in perspective I was on the
receiving end of pedestrian/auto accident when I was fourteen. I had
several injuries but the worst was my leg. My foot had become
disconnected from my leg, at least in the sense of my skeleton. It was
attached but not in a natural looking fashion. My tibia had also split
length wise, three inches from the ankle. At that time it was the most
physically painful thing I had ever experienced.
Flashback to when I was first sick. What finally drove me to the doctor to finally be diagnosed with
sarcoidosis was pain. I was leaving a dinner with my father and it felt
like someone had ran a railroad spike through my back to the point where it was
almost coming out the right side of my chest. If getting hit by a car was
a ten on the pain scale this was an eight. I went around with that pain
for two weeks. It had not lessened and I finally broke down and went to the
doctor. I won’t bore everyone with details but if you have any questions
or you would like me to expand on something for a future blog post let me
know. My email is fatrasputin@fatrasputin.me and my twitter handle is @frasputin.
One final flash back to about a year after my diagnosis and I knelt down
to lift a chair up to put a rug underneath it. My knees felt like someone
had stabbed large carving knives into my knees and then had grabbed a ball peen
hammer and was beating around the knives that had been stabbed into my
knees. With the car accident still being rated as a ten on the pain
scale, this was a twelve. I became nauseated and for lack of a better
word swooned. The happy ending to this story is the pain eased up in
about five minutes; now in what I call pain time, that seemed like a
lifetime.
Now we come back around to the month before I started Remicade
and it was bad. My hips, knees, and ankles have been the most effected by
sarcoidosis. For the entire month the lowest my pain level was an
eight. There were hours at a time when the pain level would be a
twelve. I would writhe in pain, I would cry out, and sometimes I would
weep. I took pain pills and found no relief, I took twice as many pain
pills as I was prescribed and found no relief.
Now I am about to talk about religion and faith. Do not
let that scare you off. I came to Christianity late in life and I must
say with great reluctance. I do not speak of my faith often and I never
try and convert anyone. I could not be converted by anyone when I was an
agnostic. I had searched and read a great deal. I had always believed
God would not give us the ability to reason and then ask us to suspend
it. Most people I spoke with had no real understanding of their own faith,
and to be honest I thought them fools and dismissed them. In the end I
had a Saul on the road to Damascus experience, since I did not share my
experience with anyone and it has no earthly reference I do not speak about
it. (I am aware Saul did not actually get struck down on the road to
Damascus).
I do pray- but not for relief. There is a Catholic prayer
that you can ask Christ to take your suffering and use it. Here is a link to
the prayer http://www.catholicyearoffaith.com/i/YEAR%20OF%20FAITH/card_2_2603-final-back-web.jpg . I like the idea of my suffering
being offered up for the life of the world. I buy a lot prayer cards from
this site, I like his prayers and he has a good ministry. Whenever I buy
a few cards from him he always send me twenty or thirty, but I
digress.
I am an optimist in the sense of Thomas of Aquinas or I guess more accurately Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. You are welcome to read about optimism from these two giant thinkers but I will give you a brief and incomplete sense of what I mean. I will start with a few postulates that I know cannot be proven but I believe. God sees all, the past, now, and the future. God is good. God is all powerful, including complete power over Satan. That being said the world he created must be good and following that the pain that I experience is good. Not good in the immediate sense that we can understand as humans but good in the sense that is part of God's plan which will always be for good even if it is beyond our understanding.
Now I know at this point you are probably wondering is he ever
going to get the gun into his mouth? The answer is yes the gun will end
up in my mouth shortly. I rambled on about my faith because it is the
reason I keep a positive attitude in the face of adversity. I have never
questioned my faith or that my suffering is for the good. I have
questioned my ability to live with the pain.
I should also specify the month before I put the gun in my mouth was no picnic. The level of pain I experienced effected my ability to reason, my brain
started to lose its form. It started to become the consistency of runny
Malt-O-Meal and then individual grains of Malt-O-Meal began to swirl and it
became difficult to keep two of them together to form a thought. All I
could think is that the pain would never lesson and would never end. I
never wanted to take Remicade and my mushy brain did not consider it as the only
or most desirable option. I own a gun and it began to speak to me.
It would say I can end this and send you on, the pain will end and you will be
free. As the pain would become acute, what the gun was saying started to
make a lot of sense.
I would sit in my chair and I would need to take a shit.
It would hurt so much to get up I would start to think, how bad would it be to
shit myself? I never did, at least not in relation to pain. There was one instance but that is for another post. I could not sit
still and I could not move, I was in a lose lose situation. I would think
about killing myself in the abstract to start with. Could I still go to
Heaven if I shot myself? It was a nice mental exercise but as time went
on and my reason left me the thinking about suicide became less
abstract and less philosophical.
I own one gun. It is a .357 Magnum handgun. I went and opened the safe and took out the box that held the gun. It is looks like silver and smells of gun powder. The silver almost looked like it was moving. The smell was of cheap gun powder that is dirty and burns slowly. I held it with both hands letting it rest across them almost like was holding a prize fish for the camera. It was cold and heavy in my hands, it felt good. It was not far from where the gun was resting to my mouth. The distant was covered quickly but in slow motion and then it was there. It was colder in my mouth than in my hands and I was surprised it tasted more like gun powder than metal. I knew I had an alternative in the short term; I could try
Remicade. When your brain is occupied with pain it does not leave a lot of room for rational though. There are reasons I put the gun away, but it was hard. I do not remember putting the gun away but I did.
Now what is the moral to this story? There isn't one. Sometimes it gets better, sometimes it stays the same, and sometimes it gets worse. The only thing I have to tell you is I understand and I do not regret being alive today. The Remicade has reduced the pain and I feel re-energized. That being said the pain is returning, not as bad and not as relentless as before but it has left me afraid. Afraid to sleep on the chance that I wake up and my respite is over.
PS
The majority of my blog posts are stream of consciousness that spewed from brain, spell checked and the posted. I thought that this was more important topic than most of my posts so I had some editorial from a cousin and would like to thank her here.
Now what is the moral to this story? There isn't one. Sometimes it gets better, sometimes it stays the same, and sometimes it gets worse. The only thing I have to tell you is I understand and I do not regret being alive today. The Remicade has reduced the pain and I feel re-energized. That being said the pain is returning, not as bad and not as relentless as before but it has left me afraid. Afraid to sleep on the chance that I wake up and my respite is over.
PS
The majority of my blog posts are stream of consciousness that spewed from brain, spell checked and the posted. I thought that this was more important topic than most of my posts so I had some editorial from a cousin and would like to thank her here.
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