The terror of the night

...for many years, tv during the night has been the thing that has kept me from completely going insane. Being in pain, in the dark, alone, is awful. I used to wander the house for hours, crying. When my children were quite small, I'd go to the furthest end of the house from their rooms so they wouldn't hear my crying, and I'd sit in the laundry room in a stack of laundry waiting to be done, and cry and ask God "Please, take this pain or take my life, but please please don't leave me here with both." I don't know how many hours I spent on top of Mount Laundry begging God for relief.

I learned to block out some of the pain by turning the tv on during the night. We never used to have tv in the bedroom. I didn't believe in it. The bedroom is a sanctuary. I'm trying to make it that way again, and today I had the perfect opportunity...but I choked. Nighttime is still pretty scary. I have a choice to drug myself into a stupor, or try to sleep more naturally and brave the dark alone.  Now that hubby has had his stroke, I have nobody to wake in the night and just say out loud "I'm in so much pain, I don't want to be alone." Saying it out loud and letting him go back to sleep is a great comfort to me. I'm less alone. It's been acknowledged.

For now, it's Criminal Minds reruns. And on nights when I'm not starting out hurting as badly, I've been trying to go to sleep to audio books. It must be working as I keep having to rerun almost to the same place every next night! plus it keeps the lights off, which helps my brain shut down. And if I wake in the night hurting, I can keep my eyes closed and see if the audiobook is enough. I can't usually listen to music to go to sleep because I get too involved in it. I've made music all my life, so listening is very active, rather than passive, and wakes me up.

It's been a very long 13 years since I had my first back surgery - a brutal fusion because of a freak injury 11 years before that fractured two vertebrae and caused a severe misalignment of my spine. Poor alignment equals poor mechanics. Poor mechanics prematurely wears out parts. By the time I had the fusion done, my right foot was dragging and catching at times and I was in constant, practically unspeakable pain. I waited too long to get it done. I was so afraid. But waiting so long caused permanent nerve damage from the pressure of my vertebrae pressing down onto the nerves due to the disc being nearly completely degenerated. There was little to protect the nerves from damage.

The surgery itself was far worse than anything I imagined, and I did a lot of imagining. They cut me open not just on my back, but on my abdomen. They accessed my spine from front and back, as well as cutting bone from my pelvis, then taking bone from the bone bank (cadaver bone), and then removing what was left of the disc and replacing it with bone, and screwing it all together with 5 screws and 2 rods. It's a very impressive X-Ray to be sure!

They promised me I wouldn't wake up in agony (doctors should NEVER make such promises) because they would insert an epidural, similar to the pain relief for childbirth. But it didn't take and I woke with no pain relief and the most terrifying pain. Pain isn't the right word. People who've had bone pain know it's about the worst kind you can have. They sawed out bone from my hip, they screwed rods to existing vertebrae, and I felt like I was exploding.

I later found out it took them 5 hours to get me to where I could stop sobbing and begging for help. I had no sense of time, only agony. Exploding agony, over and over and over exploding agony. Once I was able to think again and have a sense of time, it was still awful, but I survived on my every 6 minute morphine button...for 3 days. I never slept longer than 12 minutes at a time.

After that I was in serious pain, but not agony. I never knew what agony was before. Childbirth was a piece of cake compared to this, and I birthed a 10 pound 4 ounce baby without a drop of pain medicine. I wish I didn't know what agony was, because now I have a true terror to fear. Anytime my back starts spiraling out of control, I have to discipline my thoughts to not fear the terror of the night again. And so...I didn't cancel the cable today. I'm disappointed, but I wasn't ready, and I'm going to work on not feeling guilty about it. It's money that could be better spent on a thousand things. But God did not once take my pain or my life from me - He left me with both. I may not be truly alone in the night, but I no longer know how to take comfort from God when the terror stalks me. In the meantime I distract myself.