Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

So I think that almost my entire conscious sensation of pain is psychosomatic (that's not to say the pain's not real — I mean that I'm so effectively blocked from it that what I actually do feel is at least half false sensations). For example, if you push a needle into me and I don't know it's happening, the odds of me being arware that it happened are about 50/50 (largely what I can feel is pain differentials — so new pains, large changing pains, and so on). I think it's because I have a constant “block” in place that stops me from feeling it consciously (I also believe that this is why I am “mostly” amnesiatic), and the whole management and interpretation of pain is done subconsciously… So not only does it seem to mean that if I look at my leg and see that it's swollen or messed up looking, it hurts more, but if I'm wearing long pants, and can't see the problem, I can push it fairly hard with the pain totally buried. If I push it for a few days (which I did), and cross a line, it comes out emotionally… So for example, yesterday, while it was very difficult to be consciously aware of the pain, but I felt like I was wiped out and emotionally on edge all day, like I was just going to start randomly crying or something. It also means that I am really drawn to sex, drugs, and other things that make your body feel good enough to overwhelm any chronic pain…

I've been bugging Saira, because she's I think the only person who's either seen me or talked to me every couple days for the last fifteen years (and the only person that may have known me long enough to predate the majority of the symptoms — everyone else who knows me may have seen it escalate, but they didn't see it start), to try and help me build up a timeline of all this. I know that at some point in my childhood I complained to my doctor that my knee hurt, so the initial injury must have been highschool — most likely either farmwork or judo, but I have no memory of ever having been injured. Saira thinks it was about 1995 that I started to avoid going out (because she remembers Todd asking her what was wrong with me when he got back from the UK), and having super long baths instead of going out with friends (her and Todd I guess thought it was just a stress thing). I think at around this point my grandmother was having treatment for arthritis in her knees, so I just convinced myself it was that I think. In any case, resting in water helped.

So yeah, anyway, lots of pointless second guessing, more curiosity than anything, as to what's a symptom of the tumor and what's not.

All the hair on my right leg was crazy sensitive in an unpleasant way so I shaved that leg yesterday. It looks funny because it's just the one leg. I think it's because the nerves are reactivating so there's all sorts of sensations that my body hasn't felt in a couple weeks. I think there's now only about a 5″ section of my leg I can't feel (down from basically the entire lower leg). It's pretty neat though — the part of my leg that I can't feel still gets itchy and stuff like that, but if I go to scratch it, it's like scratching the air, so it's really odd… Makes me want to cut off a finger to see what that would feel like. Since a friend told me that he can still feel textures when he touches things with his non-existent fingers, and because of my own observations on pain interpretation, I am becoming very convinced that our experience of who we are, what our body is, and how it relates to the rest of the universe is at best an incredibly simplified and ridiculously personified chariacture.

Haggard but Happy

I've been having intense chest cramps. We're all pretty sure that they're just stress from getting used to walking with a cane. It feels sort of half way between a broken rib and having eating a whole ton of wasabi or something. I don't think it's a big deal.

Other than that, a member's BME update is building now, and I'm getting very, very bored. I'm not allowed (doctor's orders) to be back at the gym until after I see him on the first, and then I guess my trainer is out of town for a little while, so that's one thing that sucks (and I'm sure is contributing to the chest cramps)… through all these surgeries I'm probably losing a combined four months at the gym… Which I don't like (a) because it's crazy boring not going to the gym which is one of the high-lights of my week, and (b) because I don't really want to lose too much of the effort that's been put in. Anyway, I'm off now to get finger paints, and I think I'm going to finish off that chair I've been building today — I'm being a little lazy and finishing it using bondo, so it's going to weigh a ton….

PS. Ferg is a great visitor and has the greatest stories!