Playing Through the Pain

I didn't want to write this blog post today. In fact, I didn't feel like writing anything today.

That's nothing new. I haven't written anything of substance outside of the day job for the past eight weeks or so. It's not that I haven't had the time to write, or been blocked, or any of the other reasons I usually use to not write. (If you're a regular reader of this irregular blog, you've heard them all before.) No, the reason I haven't been writing, or doing much of anything outside of the aforementioned day job, is because I've been sick. Sick and tired.

More specifically, I've been in pain, and constant pain wears you down. And the medicines they give you for constant pain may help, a little, with the pain itself, but they will also make you drowsy, or dizzy, or a plethora of other unpleasant side effects that all leave you not in much shape for writing either.

The pain is the result of shingles. Not the roofing kind, although sometimes it feels as if roofing nails are being pounded into my armpit, but rather the herpes zoster kind. It's a viral infection of the nerves that anyone can get as an adult if you ever had chicken pox as a child. (Talk to your doctor about the shingles vaccine, particularly if you're over fifty. This has been an unsolicited, wish-I-had-known-about-it-and-done-it, endorsement.) And now that my rash has faded, it's quite possibly the postherpetic neuralgia kind, which is the technical way of saying that there can be long-term nerve damage from shingles that lasts long after the infection has run its course.

How long? "The natural history of postherpetic neuralgia involves slow resolution of the pain syndrome." That's a polite way of saying, we don't know how long it will last for you. Days, weeks, months... Years. Nobody knows, because it's different for everybody.

Bottom line: it still hurts. Hurts every day, all day, to some degree. But I'm not going to whine about that any more – really, I'm not. I've done that for eight weeks now, it doesn't make me feel better, and it's certainly no fun for you to listen to.

Instead, starting yesterday with a half-hour of exercise (also something that I hadn't done for the previous eight weeks), and starting today with the writing of this blog, I'm going to take back my life. I'm going to write, to run, to have fun, and do many if not all of the things that I haven't been doing because of the pain. Oh, I may not do them as well as I've done before. It may take longer to accomplish certain things. But I'm going to do them anyway. I'm going to enjoy the game of life, even if I'm playing through the pain.

If Kafka could write with turberculosis (not to mention the Brontës, and George Orwell with not only tuberculosis plus a bullet in his neck, etcetera, etcetera), I can write with shingles pain. I'll continue to hope it ends soon, and continue to work with my doctors for long-term and short-term pain management, but regardless of all that, as of this weekend I'm going to continue to be me. To live life, to write, and to have fun.

I'm playing through the pain.

Thanks for reading,

Stephen