Some like it hot

So for more than a year I have had constant relentless high pain and almost eighteen years of pain problems. I left the San Francisco Bay Area to go to Bakersfield Ca to warm up to try to get a handle on my pain which tends to go up in cold weather and down in hot weather. It worked. The temperature here in Bakersfield has been about 104 degrees lately. My pain has gone down by the day until now where I am almost pain free. The first respite in over a year. I love it. There is no complaining on my part of how hot it is. Everyday I hear people complaining about the heat and all I can do is smile at them as I drip in sweat. I would much rather be hot and sweating than be in pain. Pain is very destructive to the human brain. Heat and sweat are just irritating not destructive.

I am very thankful for the respite but I dread the return of the pain. My mood these days is very high but when the pain returns I will crash big time. I dread that day. No amount of drugs will protect me from the return of the pain and the resulting crash. All I can do is wait and enjoy my days right now. When the pain returns I will lose it big time. There is nothing I can do to protect myself from the crash. It is like a light switch, when the pain returns my mood plummets. Period. No question about it. I may or may not survive the crash. I wish I could control the response but it is so strong that there is nothing I can do to prevent the inevitable crash. Does that mean I am weak? Am I helpless? Well I am not helpless or weak but the truth is that the pain is more in control of me than I am and I am aware of that fact. Knowledge is power in most cases but here in this situation the wave of response to the pain returning is actually out of my control. I am trying to avert disaster by acknowledging the situation but through many years of experience I now know that I am just a puppet on a string. I know other people have experienced this type of fault but not many people will actually admit the helplessness of the situation. I am not a fatalist in any manner. I seriously try to protect myself with positive thinking and all sorts of other methods but it is all a fallacy. I will lose the battle not because I am weak but because the response to pain has rewired my brain and that is merely the way it is. You people out there that are judging me as you read this have never experienced the devastation of chronic pain. Twenty years of the brain rewiring itself is just flat out impossible to fight. Maybe if I could get a long enough respite I might be able to build up some defenses but I am not counting on that. What happens happens and that is just the way it goes sometimes. Such is life. Enjoy it while you are still able to.