Oct.25/10 0640 I am neither complaining nor whining here , just documenting. I am not in much pain at the moment. I was able to drink ¾ of a cup of coffee without choking much. It has been over 3 hours since I last took some pain medication. At the moment I am relatively comfortable , there is mainly just discomfort (not much pain) and I am relatively lucid. If I had to compare how I feel right now to a time when I was ill when I was cancer free. Or if I was trying to explain how I feel to a healthy person that has been ill before. I would say that I feel somewhat the same right now as I have before when I had severe pneumonia . One of the differences would be that right now I feel a chocking sensation that causes some anxiety. I feel as if a large gloved hand is wrapped around my windpipe , starting at my “adams” apple , extending down to my mid-chest and is squeezing my airway. If I lay down the weirdest notes are produced as I breath out. Not a whistling sound but more of of a high pitched moan , it sounds as if my right lung has voice of it’s own and is moaning a dying dirge. The last 2 hours are close to being the best that I have had for over 40 days. I was able to lay on one side of my body for a few hours last night. I have had to maintain a semi -sitting or standing position now for over 40 days and nights . When I laid on my side I immediately went into a deep sleep for a few hours. I had all but forgotten what sleep was. It felt good!!! . I also started to decrease the amount of pain medication that I am taking. I am assuming that the radiation therapy has or is having a beneficial effect. My goal is to have a few more weeks , or perhaps months of semi-pain free and lucid time. I am amazed at the difficulty of concentrating on anything else but the discomfort and choking. I am hoping that I will get enough relief to forget about the assaults on my body for at least a few hours a day. You might be better to be able to understand what I am trying to describe if you try to think back to a time when you were very ill and uncomfortable. Remember how difficult it was to concentrate on anything else but the “crappy” way that you are feeling at the time , wishing that it would end soon. For myself there is no end , only undulating waves of severity. One easily becomes miserable. It takes a lot of effort to put myself into a semi-positive state. Again I am hoping that the radiation therapy that I received will alleviate the severeness of the adverse effects that the radiation , drugs and cancer that now plague myself. After not being able to sleep , barely being able to swallow water , hardly being able to eat and being in excruciating pain for weeks I would say that the last few hours have been good. Not good enough to put on a smiley face yet , but comparatively good just the same. Having said that I have a bit of a “pet peve”. The advice that I received during the worst times over the last 40 or more so days was to keep increasing the pain medication. I cannot say for sure that this would be the case ,but my “gut instinct tells me that that had I kept increasing the amount of drugs during the worst of the suffering that I have had during this last downhill slide. that I would not be sitting here now and writing this down. I still feel like I am holding on by the tips of my fingers , but I now feel like I have my nails dug in. Maybe Tomorrow !!! I can write about something else other than the assault on my body ? Maybe tomorrow I can put on a smiley face?
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