Up and Down
Today has been a good day. Two days ago I felt like killing myself. Jump of the high window or slit my wrists in the tub. Or at least self-harm. I’m suffering from fibroid degeneration. This is relatively an under-discussed phenomenon, because it’s a white man’s world to begin with, and fibroids are most commonly found in black women. The doctors and nurses at my hospital (Royal London Whitechapel) thankfully are well versed in this, since our borough has no shortage of black and Asian people. Lots of my nurses are familiar with this, as many of them are black women.
Anyway, doctors tell me I can expect this pain to last for about two weeks. It’s been three weeks since the onset of pain, while we were holidaying in Croatia, on a remote island called Mljet, where there’s no hospital, the only doctor is fifteen minutes drive away from our accommodation and he’s only around for an hour or two each day, and the pharmacy isn’t well stocked and only open for limited hours as well.
It comes and goes, like contractions, like waves. When it’s super bad, I hvae nothing else to do but scream in pain and grip whatever’s at hand--the sofa, the bedsheets, pillows, anything. I’ve been prescribed Codeine, but since it makes me feel nauseous, I have done all i can to only take the maximum dose when it’s unbearable, which so far only happens for a day or two.
The depressing thing is every time I think it’s gone away, and I’m on the mend, I end up doing something that remotely resembles normal activity (like walking moderate distances, or sitting and doing stuff at a desk), and that inevitably brings back more waves of pain. Each time these waves come, it’s slightly better than the last, but it’s still pretty awful, as the worst of them caused unbearable pain.
So three weeks and counting now. I don’t know how much longer it would go on. We saw a doctor at the hospital on Monday, who told me I can pretty much expect bouts of pain throughout the rest of my pregnancy. I got devastated. On the way home from the hospital, waiting for a cab to take us home, with a cup of hot chocolate my husband just bought me, I got a call from another hospital who’s meant to have received a referral from my GP for me to see a CBT therapist, and they told me they’ve got nothing. I asked them to communicate directly to the GP and they said ‘that’s YOUR responsibility’. I lost it. I screamed at the dude on the phone, ended up spilling my hot chocolate in the process, that I’ve barely drunk, and burst out crying. When husband got me home, he went to work, so thankfully I could have some time to myself just to wallow.
After he came back we talked about it some more, and unfortunately I hadn’t cried all the pain away, so I got super upset again. I hated having him see me like this because I know how upset and stressed he gets over it, how powerless he feels.
So that was a bad day. I couldn’t even bring myself to write about it until today.
Today’s been a good day. A last minuted request for some illustration, which got me working for 5 hours for good money, and it made the day go by so much quicker. The flat got super hot over the course of the day, so after I got all the files sent to my client I went down and had a dip in the pool. Pretty lucky really, to have a pool within this apartment complex, easily reached and always there when I want it. The pain has lessened somewhat over the last two days, but I know there’d be more to come.
Some days are horrible, some days are okay. If only i can hang on to the good stuff when things are bad... but it doesn’t seem to work that way. Maybe I’ll just have to keep working on that...