I haven’t written anything these past days due to the most pernicious , continual headaches borne out of the injury at the top of my spine. I have had days of utter despair to disbelief that I am constantly bombarded by issues that I feel are so unjust and unfair. I have rallied against evil forces at work , become a victim feeling sorry for myself – I have vented to God all my disappointment and disbelief that He is doing nothing to help me. I have gone around in circles trying to find justification both in my responses and God ’ allowing ’ this pain to persist . I have accepted the pain as part of my existence, to refusing to accept it in any shape or form. Pain is not an occasional impediment to my existence . If it were, I would have no right to feel as strongly as I do. Pain has been part and parcel of my life for 14 years now starting with procedures on my teeth that led to a total of 26 root canals on my 6 front teeth ( some of them had 8 root canal procedures on each of them ). Each and every nerve in my teeth began dying and yet, when all the nerves had been removed, I was still experiencing excruciating pain. It transpires that the neurotransmitters in my brain had been so a-skewed that they couldn’t work correctly and so my brain still interprets pain where there is no rational explanation for why I should be feeling any. The only way to deal with this is with drugs and cognitive therapy. Traditional pain killers don’t work and so I was given Amitriptyline ( an anti-depressant thought to be effective with certain types of neurological pain ) and Gabapentin ( an epileptic drug , useful for the same reason. ) At one point I was taking 75mgs of Amitriptyline and I was so out of it that I could barely function. I hated not being in control and so I gradually managed to titrate the dosage downwards and am now on 10mgs a day. I felt uneasy about the Gabapentin for many years and decided one day to stop it. I did so under my own steam and the withdrawal symptoms were so horrendous that it revealed to me just how dangerously addictive this drug was. I subsequently found out that addicts use and sell this drug on the black market and there is such negative press about it and yet doctors still prescribe it almost willy-nilly.
Thats enough for now about my pain journey but perhaps this illustrates that whenever I have had an injury in recent years, my response to pain, my healing, my inability to switch off – all of these things are augmented and experienced way out of proportion , unlike most other people’s normal responses. It is therefore quite a revelation to me, that despite this setback and the fact that this injury may well have hi-jacked my weight gain challenge, yet I have persisted through it all and I am happy ( I think? ) to report that I weighed 46.6 kgs this morning . This is a 2.5kg weight gain in 3 weeks. If I were looking for an excuse, a reason that this could not possibly be true, then I could say that its because the scale wasn’t working efficiently before and so I had to put in a new battery this morning, therefore its been incorrect all along. But by looking at this probability, then it may have been deceiving me all along and I was always fatter than I thought and the low original weight that I thought I was is incorrect. Where does that then leave me?? So instead I am going along with this current weight and I must admit that I am not nearly as panicked as in the past. Rather, curiously for me, I am secretly proud of myself and desire to continue because then I can prove to others and myself that I can actually do it, something that I have never been able to announce with pride before. This sense of self congratulations is entirely alien and new to me and I’m still not quite sure what to do with it but I like it enough to want to carry on with this mission. On the flip side, yes, I am concerned about the rapidity of the gain – that old fear that has always been with me but I am not going to let it derail me at this stage. I still have a long way to go and I am sure that my body will take a while to settle and adapt to a new set of rules and allowances.
A quick mention of what I have been doing to introduce an increase to my body mass: I think that the years of not eating anything until lunchtime enabled me to maintain a low body weight. Eating breakfast is the biggest adjustment I have made and at times, its been difficult because the last thing I feel like doing first thing is eating a large breakfast. I have also been increasing my portion sizes and consciously putting more on my plate and in my stomach. I still feel full and uncomfortable after meals but I am sure that in time I will adjust. I have also been eating puddings every night : rich ice-creams and lovely, sweet French baked custards, rice puddings with caramel and cafloutis , followed by chocolate. its incredible how subtle changes can make such a difference and so I need to keep up with these adaptations to my regular diet . However, I am still stuck on certain routines and need to challenge myself to explore various foods and different meal choices. However, as long as I am taking steps forward and have visible and conclusive results, then I don’t feel the need to beat myself up all the time. Hey, does this mean that I might go a little easy on myself? Thats a bonus that I hadn’t expected. Can a donkey ever refuse a dangled carrot?
