Walking Wounded

"I have a pain in the butt!" I said. "And I will BE a pain in the butt if I don't rest up now!"

My husband is used to hearing these words from me.  My sciatic nerves are shot from the trauma of the two total hips replacements and hips revisions.  The pain in the buttock is no laughing matter when it comes to walking or simply being just upright.

A month ago I decided to give it up and called the doctor for another slow/long-acting epi-dural injection of steroids.  This Friday morning I am going in to be poked.  Hopefully this will ease up the protestation and the revolution in the behind for a another couple of years.

It is an archaic attempt to live with pain anymore, by all technological and medical standards.  By that I mean that the medical establishment has created, invented and then re-created and re-invented so many solutions and drugs to pain-control that anyone choosing to live with pain is either a martyr or a moron, so I thought.

Well, I live with pain, non-retractable, relentless pain.  So I am either a martyr or a moron.  I am both.

I am a martyr not by choice, but by my genetic make-up (now the pandora box of genes is open).  Mother nature has predestined me to a life of lupus.  A life that is full of pain.  Mother nature has also designed my digestive system to only accept certain foods and chemicals.  When my stomach finds certain pain meds repulsive and starts a revolt, I am back in pain.  When my body continues to ignite and inflame itself, I am in pain.  So the martyrdom is half self-inflicted without cognitive agreement.  The moronic part is the way I have chosen to make my own pain relief--by walking.

Due to limitations to what I can do physically to make endorphins, I chose walking.  When I walk at least 2 hours a day, my pain is tolerable with help from Tylenol.  It is super time-consuming.

I do have another choice.  The choice of lying around and doing nothing--much like many other lupus patients.  I have given this choice a lot of thought.  At times this choice is so alluring that I am actually "good" with it.  The unacceptable drawback of this choice is:  ONE WILL HAVE NO LIFE.

Life to me is immensely more than pain or lupus.  Life is more important than May Tucker or Walking Butterfly.  Life is a philosophy that echoes a footprint in the sand: it shows that someone has made an impression on this earth, however ethereal.  My footprint is only one in billions.  But it's mine.

I want to step out and be counted.  I want to feel the ocean hitting the shore with my feet.  I want to build my own sandcastle.  I want to bask in the sun and feel its warmth.  I want to taste the salt of the sea. I want to swim and laugh.  I want to party with my friends and family.  I want to have a picnic and then some.  Lastly, I want to have my corner on this earth and make an impression with the writing from my heart.  Nothing, not lupus, not anything else can take that away from me.

So I am the walking wounded.  And woundedly I walk.