If pain reminds you that you're alive then the aforementioned episode with the stomach acid is the most alive I've ever felt. If that's true though then is the converse true as well? Is the inability to feel when we're at our least alive?
After the initial high of receiving Diamorphine it rapidly became a terrible burden. I couldn't cope without it but being on it was a horrendous experience. I've mentioned the dreams before but that isn't even the half of it. My waking hours were spent with a mind gone wandering. I couldn't trust my own thoughts and often made little sense to whoever was with me. Normally that would frustrate me as I always like to be understood, even if someone disagrees with me, but I felt nothing. I was as they say 'oot the game'.
So I couldn't interact with the world in the way I would normally like to and I vividly remember feeling completely detached from it. Allied to the sleep deprivation I was suffering from I just didn't feel like I was operating on the same level as all these people around me. Feeling so detached from everything around me, I felt like I wasn't making a mark on the world, that my life wasn't of note, that death might not actually be either too far away or even unwelcome. The numbness felt like preparation for the end in my mind; a fog that hides everything yet gives the sense of impending danger.
All these thoughts are, with the benefit of the retrospectoscope, side effects of the chemicals sloshing around in my bloodstream but they felt so very real at the time. I've never really spoken about it to anyone because there's very few ways to crowbar that there were times that you wanted to just close your eyes and slip away into the conversation.
I know that when I get my chance at a lung transplant that pain medication will be necessary at certain points but I'll be doing my best to minimise how much of it I get. I'd rather feel a little pain than have to endure that fog again.
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