Life Begins at 42...in August...42 is Always the Answer

What is it about the number 42? According to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, it is the ultimate answer to life, the universe...and everything. Based on Arthur Dent's suppositions, along with the lyrics of Bob Dylan, it could be the number of roads a man (or woman in this case) must walk down. Of course, in the case of a woman, most of them don't actually want to be called a man, but being called a woman will suffice. Then there are the mathematical questions, such as, "What is six times seven, or three times fourteen?"

In my case the number 42 seems to apply to restarting my life. Finally. So, what's the big deal you ask? Well, I'm 42 years old now, and I'm finally off to see a new family doctor. This was my third referral, on top of multiple personal efforts to find a new family doctor. Now I've got an appointment!! The huge shortage of family doctors in this country (thank you, United States, for that one) is the biggest downfall of the health care system here. They all migrated south amid promises of better pay and less paperwork (yeah, right - less paperwork in a doctor's office - those were some gullible physicians), and so some of the best-trained doctors in the world are now ex-patriots - who stand a far greater chance of being sued for malpractice. (We're not quite so litigious up here.)

Now that I've latched onto a new doctor in the city in which I currently reside - it took me less than a year, which is better than what some people face, believe it or not - I'm probably going to fly through the rest of my stuff. There are a lot more specialists than there are family doctors, and they're happy to get new patients...as long as you have a referral from your general practitioner. Aargh! Well, the hurdle has been leapt, despite my physical inability to leap hurdles at the moment - I have to use my hands to drag my leg over a motorcycle seat these days, but not for long!

I'm so tremendously excited, amidst being scared to death of the actual surgical stuff - the anesthesia, not the surgery part. I mean, sure, they'll most likely be dislocating my legs to pull my hips out of their sockets, which would make anyone squeamish, not to mention scraping out the torn tissue and reshaping the joint. Fun stuff. However, I plan to be completely unconscious for that. I believe general anesthesia is optional, but as much as I fear the anesthesia, there is just no way I'm up for feeling my whole body jerk while they literally yank out my leg. Ugh! (Gives new meaning to the term pulling my leg, doesn't it?) I'd be heaving so fast I'd knock the anesthetist into a wall with my projectile vomiting. There's only so much mutilation I can take when I'm awake for it. This coming from a woman who has no problem viewing autopsy videos. Go figure.

So...my own version of the Hokey Pokey:

They'll yank my left leg out,
Then put it right back in.
I'll recover for a while,
but then they'll do it all again.

Yanking my right leg out,
just to put it back in.
Living life is what it's all about!

I'm not much of a poet, I don't think, but, "That'll do, Pig. That'll do." Pig in a poke...hokey pokey. Seven degrees of Kevin Bacon, and bacon comes from pigs. Yes, I have the most bizarre thought processes, I know. I like to think it makes me interesting. Well, I find myself interesting anyway, but then I tend to be a bit egocentric. It's probably a flaw that I should work on in order to become a better person...but I won't! Writers need to be egocentric, particularly if they want to promote their own work.

So, I will choose my writing over my humanity, I guess. I've been doing that lately anyway. I've veered away from writing non-fiction. I'll be getting back to it, but it won't be the same as a lot of what I was publishing before. I decided fairly recently that I've gone severely off-course with it. My main intent has always been to write fiction. I like writing articles, but I was getting too deep into a world that was looking more and more like a very dark pit of despair. I've pulled back for a bit of re-tooling, so to speak. I'm sure I'll still have plenty to say about certain issues, but it will be said with my own voice rather than the voice of the extremists. I will speak on the things that make me personally angry, and not the things I feel I should be upset about yet I'm really not.

I've avoided working on my book for some time, as well as writing erotica. Part of it has been the level of pain I experience on a daily basis. It makes it difficult to get into the writing zone I need to occupy with my fiction. It's not just my hip joints that's the problem there. I have flare-ups of occipital neuralgia (massive pain on both sides of my head). In my case it's nerve damage (along the occipital nerves) that was caused by coughing brought on by an allergy to a feather pillow. The coughing was really bad, and basically caused the same kind of damage people experience with whiplash when they get into car accidents.

I need to go for an MRI - yes, on my head as well as my neck - feel free to make all the jokes you want there. Once they're certain there are no other issues (ha ha), all they have to do is permanently deaden the occipital nerves. I will never have that blinding pain in my head again. Every time I get a cold and start coughing, I'm hit with massive pain in my head. It's the kind of pain that will actually make me throw up, similar to what happens with a migraine - except that migraine medications didn't work on me, and they ended up giving me IV morphine instead.

Once my hips and my head are taken care of, I might even get my wrist surgery done. It would certainly be nice to have myself repaired and back to my fully-functioning self again. I feel like I've aged twenty years in the last five, though. It's going to take time to get back into shape, but after living so long in physical misery, and having absolutely no life, I'm looking forward to taking on the challenge again.

One of the best parts about having a doctor again, will be getting on the proper pain medication finally. My last doctor was far too happy to prescribe narcotics for me, which is the last thing I want. I'm going to request gabapentin, which is a neuropathic pain reliever. I was on it for a couple of weeks once, and it was amazingly effective for me. I actually had my life back during that time. I was getting things done that I'd been putting off. I wasn't taking the narcotics (and the anti-nauseants I had to take because of the narcotics), which meant I had brain function again. My pain was severely limited, too. I still had some, but nothing like my usual level.

The thing about pain that most people will (hopefully) never understand, is that it will ruin your life. Think about what it's like for you while you're in pain. Do you feel like getting up to cook dinner? Do you really want to go out with your friends and hang out in public places while you're hurting? Probably not. Now stop and think for a minute what that would be like if you lived with it every single second of your life. I'm not talking about mild pain that we can tune out, either. Living with chronic, intense pain, means that you spend every second of your life not wanting to do the things that make up a normal life. You never want to get out of bed, or your chair, to cook a meal. You never want to talk to people and carry on conversations. You never want to be out in public.

I mean, if you spend your life on the verge of whimpering or even sobbing, most of us get to a point where we don't want to keep sharing our misery with others. We're all too well aware that nobody wants to hear us complain every minute of every day, about how much pain we're always in. So, unless we're completely lacking in awareness regarding our effect on others, we eventually stop whining about it. It doesn't mean the misery has gone away. It just means no one else is hearing about it. Resentment can build up, in part because of having to keep our mouths shut, but also in part because everyone else seems to be doing so much better than we are. They get to live a full life that those of us suffering from chronic pain can only dream of.

Pain also changes who we are, personality-wise. We're no longer carefree individuals. We stop socializing. We get inordinately cranky. There are major psychological ramifications to chronic pain that are almost never discussed. Now, in my case with my issues being long-term yet still temporary, I have to wonder if those negative changes are permanent. I've done my best to look into the future and tell myself that it'll eventually stop, and that one day I will be able to live again, but I know I've changed. Will I be able to get back some of my old self once the pain is no longer a part of my daily life? Will I want to get that person back at all? After all, everything we live through marks us in one way or another. I feel I'm a better person than I was five years ago, and the obstacles I've overcome have everything to do with who I am now.

Well, it hardly matters, since life will move forward. I'm certainly not going to stop my progress because of a few philosophical questions. I don't consider myself any kind of philosopher, and have little patience with it. I'm just an egocentric rambler. I ponder the things that have a direct impact on my life, and the things that matter to me. Kind of like the number 42. It might be the ultimate answer, but we still haven't figured out the ultimate question, now have we? Personally I liked the bowl of petunias. Having read the books I had to laugh when the answer was revealed as to why it said, "Not again," as it was plummeting to the planet's surface. Life really is quite strange, no matter which one you're living, or what dimension your existence happens to be in.

The ultimate question is probably different for everyone. In my case I think the question is, "When will my life begin?" The answer? 42.