Patch Me If You Can

I haven’t slept at all for two nights.   Don’t know why.  And yesterday was horrible pain wise….and this has never happened, but I had it in my head my patch day was Sunday, but it was Saturday.  I went five hours past the time I was supposed to change it.  Boy, I found out the hard way what happens when you don’t change it on time.  I have all these safeguards in so that won’t happen, and it never has; I write it down, I put the patch in the bathroom the night before….but somehow, I missed it all.  I’ll have to now program a reminder in my computer so it pops up. 

In the meantime, my left eye is twitching, my hip is throbbing, my stomach is growling and my head is spinning.  It’s very entertaining: twitching, throbbing, growling and spinning.  A real carnival on the couch.  I almost got up in the middle of the night to write something that was on my mind but I wanted to give sleep a chance.  And now, of course, I have no clue as to what it was that seemed so important at 3 a.m.   Reminds me of the time when I smoked weed recreationally and we always thought we had such profound thoughts….then we’d write them down and in the morning, what we thought was so insightful were musings about the color orange. Oh well.

I actually attempted to do something I’ve always wanted to do when the pain reaches the stratosphere.  And that is, separate my body from my mind to see if the pain lessens.  It worked a tiny bit, but forgetting to put on a new patch for just over five hours probably was the reason it didn’t work very well.  I will attempt it again when it gets bad.  It’s scary for me to do because I sometimes fear I won’t be able to get back.  But the drumming exercise works because the drumbeat changes at the end of 30 minutes and draws you back.

That experience of forgetting was frightening because of how quickly I started going into withdrawal.  I will NEVER be able to get off this merry go round.