I was able to definitively prove it yesterday; for the first time in a week the pain was bearable, I'd been able to lift the laptop; things were looking up. Then out of the blue, I suddenly realised that I'd forgotten to pay my credit card bill a couple of days earlier. This is very rare for me - normally I'm Mrs Über-Organised - and would mean a late payment fee and interest charges.
I was really annoyed with myself. I called the company to find out what my error was going to cost me (after first paying the offending bill). By the time I'd done all that, I was in raging agony, none of the mental approaches would work and I had to resort to pills. They were bloody useless too, and I had to take multiple doses and go back to bed before I got any relief.
At first, I figured it was just the stress of if all that had kicked off the pain, but the more I thought about it, the more certain I was that actually the problem was that I was really annoyed at myself for being so careless. And I was punishing myself with pain.
Unfortunately, working that out does nothing to stop the agony. I came back from therapy today all chuffed with myself for having worked out such a key trigger for the pain, but within a couple of hours, I was in the same situation again. This time the cause was less clear - I think something I saw on TV triggered memories that then made me angry with myself.
The pain has been out of control ever since and the pills are doing next to nothing about it. I desperately need to find a way to turn the pain off, once it's been triggered, and how to not set it off in the first place. And of course I can't be sure there aren't other triggers too.
Addendum
I'm convinced the reason the pills have been doing nothing / actively making the pain worse lately is that I'm punishing myself for needing / taking this stuff that I hate so much. If that's true, I'd be better off without them.
I spoke to the therapist a few weeks ago about coming off the morphine. I felt (and still do) that if the pain is a construct of my mind, then every time I take a pill, I'm feeding the delusion. I didn't see how I could possibly get rid of the pain whilst I was taking the meds.
She said that although she felt that if anyone could come off the morphine and manage without, it would be me, because I'm so determined, it would make things unnecessarily difficult for me. Given how bad the pain was with the meds, she felt it would be too unbearable without them; she convinced me to stay on them.
All of that is still true, but now I'm regularly finding that the pills either do nothing unless the dosage is ridiculously high (and even then it doesn't last long) or they actually seem to make the pain worse. I haven't taken a pill and had relief FROM THAT SINGLE DOSE in a least a week.
I think I need to do a day with no top-ups and see if things are any more bearable than recent days where I'm constantly chasing an effective dosage.
I still don't know if coming off it would be feasible, but things have been so bad lately on the stuff, it's hard to imagine how much worse it could be without it. That said, several times in the past week it's been bad enough that I've seriously contemplated ending it all, because I simply couldn't bear the pain anymore.
I don't want to do anything that might tip me over that edge, and I feel frighteningly close to it already. But if the pain is me punishing myself, then half of it could just disappear if I no longer had 'morphine' to punish myself for.
I wish there was someone who could tell me what to do.
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