Here For Not A Long Time

But I also had a bad time.

I was numb and awake, on my back, face in the hole, sweaty pants pulled over my butt. Vulnerable. He pushed through a wall of muscle too quickly and the quick tug startled me so I immediately broke down. It was pitiful. The MD guy had to finish while I was whimpering and shaking. It took a long/short 45 minutes. I have two more sessions next week. Each time, they feed a total of 12 lines into the nerves in my back. It's minimally invasive fluoroscopy so they don't cut me all the way open but instead use continuous x-ray to guide the instruments to the root of my nerve bundles. Radiofrequency ablation uses electrodes to heat up the tissues and damage the nerve's ability to send pain signals to the brain. The tugging and pressure and vulnerability of being on my back and awake and with sensitivity and emotional baggage in the very location... it's all too much and it's been really hard for me to separate the sensation from the emotional weight of it all. Today my muscles hurt in a new way. My back is sad at me. I spent over a year working on my relationship with my body and building trust so we could make it through this together. I need these procedures because I deserve relief after so much time but my body doesn't understand this. 

A whole other category of difficulty has been sitting with the idea of not being in pain anymore. I somehow have gotten it deep in my head that I somehow deserve or need this pain to walk through life and be appropriately cautious in feeling or movement. I live my life based on what aggravates the pain and what helps it. I'm not sure what I will use to determine how to be or how to move once this is done. I will have to practice letting it be and relaxing for the very first time. And holding my body how it wants to be held.

Today I feel quiet and small. That's ok.

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I'll make another post later about how annoying this “file type/size/compression/upload restriction” combination is. Anything over one freaking mb takes about 25 minutes to upload, so I'm having to run all of my photos through compression software that makes them less appealing to look at. I am determined to figure this out and provide a 5 star Patreon experience just for you. It really hasn't been that bad so far but it takes up a lot of time. Soon I will figure it out and this will take less time. Maybe a local art school offers a file type/sizing class I can take, ha!

Today I compressed the original file but because it was so zoomed out, I provided a cropped shot to show off the troubled skin sack in question. It looks strong here and I love it. We love the sack. The sack is good. 

Bisti Badlands, NM, Oct 2019, selfie, Canon rx100, unedited, but pretty compressed, like my spine.

Pain brain talk is for all tiers.