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Paper Hearts
Paper Hearts
It wouldn't take much. Just a few more pills and another swallow or two.
I look up at the paper hearts strung across my art studio. I remember making them, hand-punching the hearts from old Christmas cards and any scrap of cardstock packaging that arrived in a happy color. An empty embossed perfume box. A colorful file folder that had seen better days. Garlands of invisible fishing line swoop out from the middle of my ceiling, hung together like the swag top of a circus tent.
The rotary fan swings toward the bed I've parked in the middle of the studio for days exactly like this one. The fan's breeze catches the garlands, and my paper hearts do the hula. Then the air reaches my feet.
I suck in a breath. It's only a breeze, the kind anyone else would call pleasant. But it lands on me like a struck match. The veins in my legs push up under my skin like snakes wrestling under silk. Both feet are swollen, mottled red, going blue at the toes. Everything from the waist down is hot to the touch and burning, as if pointed teeth were devouring my flesh from underneath.
I kicked off the sheets over an hour ago because even smooth cotton feels like sandpaper. This is my Princess and the Pea moment. Every grain of dirt, every bit of fuzz, every g*ddamn f*cking "pea" is unbearable. The acid fire keeps climbing, and my emotions race alongside it, neck and neck.
I know this kind of flare all too well. The CRPS will cost me more time, more mobility, more living. More everything. It wants to bankrupt me.
Am I bankrupt? Hm. Have I hit that place of desperation that has made others in my situation start to cut off their own limbs just to make the pain stop?
I start to tally how long this episode might last and how much of my life I'll lose to it again. A day? A week? A month? Months? Years? I've lived with these flares for decades now. (Yes, plural.)
Ugh. That's the part that's hardest to process with chronic pain. The loss. The part the "professionals" never prepare you for, because let's face it, those motherf*ckers don't know anything about living with real chronic pain. They're textbook smart. Research smart. They have that in spades. But they've never lived it. Not one of them…, at least none I’ve met. And living with it is devastating.
But still, I keep making their recommended follow-up appointment every month, each one costing me another $75 copay, plus whatever it costs out of pocket to pee in a cup. All this joy only to be informed that yes, I'm taking pain medication, and nothing has changed. The prescriptions they write me cost hundreds of dollars I don't have, but I spend them anyway, on dwindling credit.
Then one day the opioid crackdown is all over the news, and the same pain "specialist" I've been responsibly working with writes in my file that I'm suddenly an addict. He will no longer prescribe the only medication that helps. The one that took years to get right, the dose and the combination, mind you. Nope. Addict is stamped in my file. Wait, what?
If I were dying, they'd hand me the pills and a warm blanket. But I'm not dying. I'm just living, the whole long timeline of it, under siege. And now this idiot has cut me off for the sake of his comfortable career, not the well-being of my health. Great job with that Hippocratic/hypocritical oath, asshat. You have caused me harm. No, really, I insist. Go enjoy another round of golf on me.
I look over at my easel. I should probably start something new. Sketch, or paint, or write, or hell, even cut snowflakes out of folded copy paper. Seriously, anything to get me through this funk.
Life isn't that dire, is it?
I sigh and refuse to cry.
I'm sitting in my stuck.
Hurting. Broken. Alone.
All alone.
So why not a handful of pills? Right?
I know why not. I think of my friend who made that choice. His mother's face at the funeral, how she kept smiling at people so they wouldn't have to.
The fan comes back around. The hearts are still dancing, even though I cannot. They'll stay colorful and cheery, those virtuous little recycled color bombs.
I could sleep it off, or I could call a hotline. I think about the hotline the way you think about a dentist. I'd have to explain it all again to someone reading from a script. The buzzword pep talks. The reminders that Jesus loves me. The therapists who just listen and then question every word, with no end in sight. F*cking counselors. And f*cking doctors, for that matter. Such a racket.
I decide. My hand finds the pill bottle. The pills I've saved for these kinds of flare days. An opioid prescription they won't give anymore to those of us who really need it, because of those who abused it. Because of the "specialists" who once threw it at their patients the way banks handed out mortgages before the crash.
I fumble with the cap until it gives a small click. The pills rattle inside as I shake out one, no, two…
No, one.
I put the other back before I can reconsider. I need relief, need to sleep through the worst of this, but I hate having to weigh today's pain against a day that hasn't happened yet. When these are gone, I don't know whether I can get more.
I swallow the Vicodin. Better to try and sleep through 10 out of 10 fire ouches than try to be human at this point.
But when I wake up, I should get my charcoals out and draw instead of this nonsense. Or a bath. Yeah, a cool bath might help. But I know, nothing really helps.
I look at my legs and wait. Twenty minutes until the pain meds kick in. I start counting. Twenty minutes. I can do this… Lord, help me through this.
Victoria Anderson
