Sensitivity

Sensitivity

 

My whole pain scale has been redefined, yet I don’t know how yet. How do you go from a “pain level 8” is not being able to get up off the bed because of chronic pain throughout your body because every muscle is tensing up to “the sensation of your lower jaw feeling like one giant exposed nerve with a hurricane over it every second of every day for over a week at a time to the point where you’re falling asleep even with that pain and drifting off and having that pain on and off and working and having conversations and functioning daily as if nothing is wrong and yet your body wants to scream and be asleep simultaneously?” How do you define that? A 9? I leave a 10 for being pregnant, something I will hopefully never feel. But it did feel like unimaginable hell.

My jaw and cheek swelled up as well as the actual tooth. There were three teeth, but it was the lower left one that caused the most pain. I was even told during this that I was in too much pain. That I shouldn’t be in this much pain with the antibiotics and pain relieving agents given to me. That I should even be told that while I was in this much pain??? Yeah, there are people I wish I could cut out of my life, but not my choice.

It is an anthem that has run throughout my life. “Stop being so sensitive” “You’re being too sensitive” “Stop taking it so personally.” Well, as an autistic person, I finally have a voice in my head that says that I wasn’t being overly sensitive… I was just being me. People find that overly sensitive a lot. And they are just going to have to get over that. Yes, I might get offended where others don’t, but that means you shouldn’t have said that stupid remark or phrased it differently, not that I shouldn’t have gotten offended at it. I’m tired of it being my fault for being offended at something that narcissists say. And I’m tired of finding more and more narcissistic tendencies and calling them out, even when they are within myself.

Really, I’m just tired of it all. I’ve been sleeping since my surgery Thursday morning, and it is now Saturday evening. I’ve been awake an hour, if that, asleep for a few hours, awake, asleep, barely keeping track of my meds, barely drinking and eating when I can. My husband makes sure I’m taken care of. Now that the intense week of hell is over, the question now becomes, do I go back to the life I lived before, or what kind of life do I live now?

It seems pretty dramatic to say, but worrying about diagnosis after diagnosis is no way to live. Yes, I need to figure out how to live with it, but obsessing over it (which IS a very autistic thing to do) just adds to the stress of the family and in no way alleviates the tension building, and I need some time away from all the burnout I’ve had with the new job. I’m getting the hang of the new job, but now I have over a week to catch up on, a little over a week of training left, and then hitting the floor running! It’s going to be crazy! I feel like my body finally had time to unwind a little where it didn’t quite “need” the nap every day after work, then the dental emergency, and now who knows what will happen!

What is going to happen in your life?

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