Some days really are OK

Several years ago I was in a pretty serious motor sports accident which left me with a dislocated and de-arranged knee, multiple contusions, a concussion, extreme whiplash and general badness all up and down my back. Things have never really been the same ever since and I live with some amount of leg and back pain pretty much all of the time no matter what, but there are times when all these old injuries get aggravated and the muscles in my neck and back twist and bind up for days at a time. The pain is immense and there is pretty much nothing anyone can do but give me some anti-inflammatory meds and tell me to just wait it out. The last two days have been bad for the pain. My right shoulder is always the worst because I am right handed. I have been bound up from the tips of my fingers all the way up my arm, and all the way up into my neck where the pain spills downward into my upper back and it finally all feels like it sort of pools under my right shoulder blade. I used to be in treatment for this, seeing a pain management specialist for almost a year trying to track down the cause. I was poked and prodded with needles, undergone nerve blocking procedures in my spine and finally just prescribed enough pain medication to make everything in my life seem like foggy shadows of real things. In the end I gave up the management and just decided to accept it and live with it. Last night it was so bad I had to sleep in my living room so I could wedge my arm up over my head against the couch and try to sleep with it stretched out like that. I woke up this morning still hurting quite a lot, but pleasantly surprised by my own mood. 

Some days really are OK. In fact, some days are better than OK. Some days I wake up ready to climb a mountain and tackle a bear and complete another college degree and invent a new kind of cake and crochet all of the things for all of the people and all the positive ambition starts spinning around and around in my head and it can get so intense that I really do feel sort of dizzied by the force of the thing. Today is one of those days. I usually try to make the most of these kinds of things, these seemingly random changes in my, what I like to think of as weather. The clouds sort of part and I will catch a sort of emotional tail wind that pushes me forward and makes me feel like I can do anything. It can last anywhere from ten minutes to two weeks. Two weeks is the most I have ever gotten before crashing back down to earth again and getting crushed under the weight of all the things I haven't yet done, all the things I am not good enough to do, every little moment, no matter how small that I disappointed myself or someone I care about. Those things are always all still there, they never go away, they wait like monsters under my bed waiting to creep out in a single moment of weakness and drag me under again. So when the winds shift and the sun finds its way into this weird little storm that I carry around with me, I want to make the most of it because I know in my heart that it just can't last. I really hope that today is the start of one of the longer upswings. I could really use two good weeks right now.