I don’t like to be redundant, so I won’t describe my pain again. But, I don’t know if it is too redundant to say that I am in it, pain, that is.

I spent the last 40 minutes wailing like a baby and fumbling with drug bottles. You see, I had a rough night, I have a pinched nerve and my head was achy from a day of me trying to act like a quasi- healthy person (meaning I tried to go to Marshalls and run some errands without first taking meds to keep the pain at bay). My body was paying for this moment of normalcy. 

I knew normal was fucking overrated.

Then, this morning as I very gingerly stepped outside with the dogs, they saw a dead rat lying in the sidewalk and lost it. They yanked. I weighed my options, pry a dead rat out of their mouths after chasing them across the highway or hold tight and let the headache that had been creeping in take over.

I let the headache win.

It took over my body.

So now I wail and cry and play my songs and wrap myself in ice packs and write it all down here so it feels just the tiniest bit less lonely to be totally, completely, utterly in pain. 

Tomorrow I get the lumbar puncture to test for my CSF leak. Maybe that answer will lead to some relief. Maybe it won’t. But it feels like a step forward (a scary step forward, but a step nonetheless). So that my friends, is progress. There is always hope as this is the part of life that is suffering, and I must believe that with great suffering, great joy will reveal itself.

Or some crap like that.

Peace and love,

Samira