Can't wait for March 4th

Well...in about 4 hours the Spinal Cord Stimulator will be powered up & tuned....hopefully. All depends on the doc feels about how the incisions, in particular the one over the device itself, looks. My wife thinks they have heeled nicely. I am hopeful that it gets powered up...I want to start at least walking some. The stimulator not being powered up is not stopping me, the pain is. Lucky if I can make it form the front door to the gate, which is about 200' without some serious pain setting in. Getting in a vehicle is more than a bit painful. If I am driving I need to grab my pants leg and help swing my left leg in. If I am the passenger...glad the Explorer has running boards...I put my left foot in, grab the handle over the door and get my fat arse on the seat, I then put my right foot on the board and push myself in. Normally I can not reach the door....so if we are leaving the house I just have Ernie start driving until the door moves close enough for me to grab it.

The blend door went bad on the Explorer. Have no heat, not good with my wife having some health issues. Felt so effing worthless as I was sitting in my friends garage while he swapped it out for me. One the verge of tears just typing this. Just grateful to have a friend like Skip. He has put up with me more or less telling him to go f.ck off for more than once...simply because I was not in a very good frame of mind and did not want to hear anything that I did not agree with.

Chronic pain, and the depression that rides its coat tails can really suck the life out of you.

Seen my doc the other day to get a refill on one of the meds I am hoping to get off. He asked me when the stimulator was being activated....and when I will be seeing him for my next Oxycontin/Oxycodone refill. He is planning, if the stimulator tune is correct, on starting the reduction of narcotics. I feel like I am about ready to explode from the excitement of it...yet at the same time I TERRIFIED. I just hope that, if I can get off of the narcotics, that the guy who comes out the other side of this is not that evil monster that I once was. I say I have only been on Opioids for a decade...truth of the matter I started taking them back in 2003 or so...just not for pain. I was taking them to sedate myself in order to avoid hurting anyone at the Post Office. I used to chug a 6 pack of Corona before going to work every day, the buzz normally lasted long enough for me to make it thru the bulk of work. But I had a sit down with a boss that....well...really cared for me. Enough so that if I were not such an asshole when she started with the PO she very well may have been my wife. This young lady told me that she had more than one complaint of me smelling like beer...and that if she could she would have been sending me down to Urgent Care for a piss test. My wife was already injured and had a script for Hydrocodone...which she did not take because they made her puke. So I started taking her script...and convinced my doc to give me a script for the same strength to help with my aches and pains. Took 16-18 of them when I was at work. Also took 6mg of Xanax at work....and if any of my "buddies" could spare any of their Perocets I would down a few of them as well. How my liver survived all that Acetaminophen I will never know.

My doc is a bit concerned as well. He knows that I don't do real well on anti-depressants and mood stabilizers...but said he has a plan of sorts that he will resort to if it is needed down the road.

So....here it is....the day I have been waiting for since I had a successful Spinal Cord Stimulator trial. The day that the permanent one gets powered up and tuned....and I am 100% terrified.

I just saw my shrink on Thursday. We often talk about the line between dependency and addiction. I told him how I felt about not my brain not caring about the line between the two when the drugs start going away...and he agreed, to a point that once the drugs start going away there will no longer be a line...beginning to wonder if I should perhaps find an NA group to attend.....