Anyway, we’ll ignore the false sense of non pain from that and concentrate on what happened once they took my happy button away. I (obviously) had a lot of pain that I would label as post-operative. That is, all around my incision and my chest drain hurt – heck, they’d just slashed a large hole in me, what did I expect?
Nope all that was Ok, but what I didn’t expect was the nerve pain (see I may be rambling but I’m getting there). Once I was awake(ish) I found that I’d lost some feeling in my left thigh, groin and around my buttock. Its only surface sensation (and the same as lots of other areas in my feet and legs) so in itself is no real biggie. Around the edges of this area though really hurts – it’s the kind of pain that makes you skin hypersensitive and that goes right through you in the way that scraping your fingernails down a blackboard does*. You can’t touch it, the bedclothes are torture and any clothing feels like sandpaper or worse. It’s like super-bad sunburnt skin or like someone has taken a cheese grater to you and then sat you in a salt bath. It is seriously yuk and was the only thing that reduced me to tears in the hospital! Anyway, it’s been caused by stretching my spinal cord around and since it was already damaged/deformed it decided to complain at the rough treatment. The bad news is that it may take as long as a year to settle down – the good news is that there are specific drugs for nerve pain and once they’ve built up (takes about 2 weeks) – they work! Yep, thank goodness they really do (even if they do wear off a bit before the next dose is due. Grrr!
)Since I’m on the subject of pain, I thought I’d mention a couple of other things that might help you if you are trying to identify what type of pain you have. Muscle pain usually hurts more if you try and move, but may be fine if you stay still. Everyone has had a stiff neck after sleeping funny at some point in their lives – that’s normally muscle pain. Anti inflammatory painkillers are usually used to treat this. Muscle spasms are related but different. You get hit by a muscle spasm and you’re not going to move – in fact, you know that if you try and move the teeniest bit you will be screaming your way to the ceiling.
You get one of these, you’ll know what it is – and tablets will work way too slowly (you try not breathing for 30 minutes while you wait for the tabs to kick in!) – I always use heat or massage (if you can stand it) for this. Lastly, there’s bone pain – this is relentless and hurts whatever you do – constant grinding tooth-achey feeling.So that’s pain – and here’s a really useful page which explains the type of painkillers available and how and why they are used. If you suffer from regular pain, it’s worth looking at. Click here for a useful page on Pain Management
*For my younger readers, a blackboard was an archaic torture device used by teachers back in the Dark Ages when I was in school. Although many teachers of the time would have you believe this was nothing more than an early forerunner of the visual aid, it was in fact it was a device used to torture generations of small children. Fingernails were dragged down this board creating an excruciating noise which was used to punish actions such as talking in class or not paying attention. Interestingly, the item used for marking the board (called chalk) was another type of torture device and was used by hurling across the room to strike the offending child. Many teachers could rival the best fast bowlers in terms of both their speed and accuracy. Of course, all this would be termed as child abuse in this day and age – which may be why the white board was invented…
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