This morning I woke up in pain. My muscles were aching from the waist up and the soreness extended right down to my fingertips. It was difficult to ignore, and yet I tried. The aches are part of my MS and there is nothing I can do about it so I might as well suck it up, right?
It may sound irrational, but I try not to take medicine if I can avoid it, even over-the-counter medicine. Back when I was in high school, I used to take six Tylenol pills at a time for headaches. Nothing bad happened as a result of that, but I decided one day that I was putting too much medicine in my body and I stopped. Ever since then I've lived by the philosophy that most ailments are temporary visitors in my body and I can wait them out without medicine or trips to the doctor. That worked fine when I was dealing with colds and sprained ankles, but multiple sclerosis is on a whole other level. MS is not passing through and it is not going away. Not only that, but every day it seems to bring with it a different symptom to deal with: fatigue, pain, flu-like chills, tingling or burning in my extremities, headaches, etc. I can't always take a day off and wait the symptoms out like I would with a cold because the next day something else may be on deck. So I have to take medicine to make me more comfortable and help me function.
Back to this morning: after spending a couple miserable hours hoping the muscle aches would go away, I gave in and took some ibuprofen. Despite my neurologist's assurance that my liver is fine and that taking ibuprofen whenever I needed it wouldn't hurt anything, I'm having trouble adjusting my thought that taking more than two pills a day is bad. It makes me feel like an old lady, and it's not sexy. Still, being curled up on my bed in pain doesn't exactly paint a lovely picture, either, does it?
1 comment:
Well, I guess I'm not the only one feeling that I'm living in an ancient body & being to young at the same time to be going through what I'm going through. Thanks for blogging. I've read the ones that caught my eye & Now I see I'm not alone. Thanks for sheading the light on a few things that I don't complain to my doctors about. I've found that I can take my shower with a medical chair is way easier & now for the airdrying that you wish to do, I do exactly that & I pray that my hair will not be a tangled mess so I opt to leave it in the towel to dry through the night since it seems to be the best time for me to shower as I'm already exhausted from the day & the cleansing of the water gives me just the right amount of exercise at night to finish out my bucket of energy. I'm a stout dwarf queenly shaped woman & when I don't seem to have the strength to manage My gentle giant of a husband that the Lord blessed me with after I straighten out my life. Thanks, I don't take anything currently for the MS as they are still not even positive I have it & I'm allergic to so many medications anymore they don't even try to introduce another into my system.
Post a Comment