Distractions

Pain.

Pain, discomfort, and general 'suckitude' have been my constant companions the last few months. 

Actually, I've had tingling, burning pain ever since I began to feel the harmful effects of radiation more than a decade ago. But that pain was manageable. Just take enough neurontin--a drug to dull nerve pain--and I could ignore the pain. Relegate it to the back of my mind. On the pain scale from 1 to 10, it was a 3: always there, but I could live with it, like a tight fitting, old leather shoe. 

But this recent agony is much worse. For the first couple weeks, it was constant aching in my back; sharp pains in my armpit, across my chest; burning down my arm that turns into stabbing pain whenever I tried to lift anything in my right hand. Lately, much of the pain has settled back down to the 'manageable' variety, but the discomfort, crapuation (that's defined as "a situation of crappiness;" I'm making up words left and right), and a dose of depression are still with me.  

How did I get here? I was getting back into Crossfit and looking at getting back to normalcy after the skin cancer surgery I had in January.

I should catch you up on events since my last blog post concerned my decision on whether I should get a skin graft or a skin flap after surgeons cut out the skin cancer on my neck. In the end, I went with Vanderbilt's doctor, and asked him to just put a skin graft (a piece of skin from my thigh) over the wound, rather than the much more complex flap surgery. I figured I could always get the flap surgery down the road if the graft didn't take.

Good news! The graft was successful. The surgeon successfully cut away all of the squamous cell carcinoma and the skin graft took to my neck...for the most part. There were still areas on my neck that hadn't healed; areas that needed wound management. I started going to a different wound care clinic here in Knoxville to, ideally, finish the healing process. I started hyperbaric oxygen, yet again, to hopefully improve blood flow in the area. The wound is now looking better than it's looked in a long time, thanks to this new clinic's ministrations, or the hyperbarics, or both of these. Yea!!!

And yet, the wound is infected. Not with just one bit of nasty bacteria, but two distinct colonies of the little bastards. Pills won't be enough to kill these suckers; I have to do IV antibiotics for weeks. Hyperbarics takes up three hours of my day. Now I have a PIC line--a permanent IV going up my arm and into my chest--so I can spend more of my day getting drugs pumped in my system to kill the infection, and all the fun side effects that come with hardcore antibiotics.

Back in May, the pain was really getting to me. 

I spent more than two weeks mostly bedridden from pain. I complained about it to my wound care doctor and infectious disease doctor enough that they did an MRI of my neck and chest to see if my infection had possibly spread. Happy news (it you're in the pro-bacteria camp), it looks like the infection has spread, at least to my clavicle bone. So, instead of two weeks of IV antibiotics, I'm doing six weeks. 

Not only do I have an infection in my bones, but there is now exposed bone at my wound site and an unexplained hole next to the exposed bone that Betsy has to pack with gauze every day. I swear though, the wound is looking better! There's just a bit of bone sticking out and a fun little hole that I can use to smuggle drugs across the border.

In the meantime, what can I do about the pain? My wound care doctor said a steroid shot to the area could alleviate pain, but that would also give a nice boost to the tiny bacteria monsters I'm trying to get rid of so steroids are a no go. Fortunately I have a drug my brother started me on when I was a kid. It's gotten me through many difficult periods in my life and I've been helplessly  addicted to it. Not a day goes by that I don't crave its soothing effects. Betsy asked me the other day how I'm dealing with this. She's been having a difficult time with the constant doctor visits and a husband who's basically good-for-nothing around the house. She's the one holding the house together. Am I in pain? Am I losing sleep? Am I feeling constant frustration at having to sit on my ass all day (can't exercise with a PIC line). Sure, I'm all these things, but I'm dealing with it. I'm not moaning about it constantly. I'm not screaming, "Why Me?!?" shaking my fist at the sky. 

Books. Books are my drug. Betsy knows about my addiction of course, but doesn't realize how much reading helps me escape. Not just any books either. Fantasy. Science Fiction. Books that give me other worlds beyond this one. I can sink myself so deeply into a good fantasy novel that I'm completely oblivious to the world around me. 

As with any drug, my addiction to books carries risks. I can get so engrossed in Pierce Brown' or James S.A. Corey's action-packed science fiction that I lose track of the good things going on around me. But, for times like these, when I'm tethered to an antibiotic pump all day, books really help me keep my sanity.

If you've no interest in SF/F then read no further. I intend to thoroughly geek out.

What are the latest books that help me forget my pain? I've been enjoying Joe Abercrombie quite a bit. One of the characters in his First Law series, Glokta, is a crippled man who was brutally tortured in a foreign prison, to the point where every moment is pure agony. He's unable to chew food, and walks only by painfully dragging one foot over the ground. Glokta used to be a dashing swordsman, loved by the people, but now they look at him with disgust. Since he was set free from prison, he's taken a job doing something he's uniquely qualified for: torturing  others into giving bogus confessions for his government. I know it sounds like an awful story, but Glokta has a macabre sense of humor that I find hilarious, and somehow reading about his loneliness and various ailments makes me feel better about my own problems. 

Of course, there are many other authors I've been into reading. As a kid, I had Lloyd Alexander, Alexander Key, Terry Brooks, David Eddings, Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman, R.A. Salvatore, Alan Dean Foster, Raymond E. Feist, Orson Scott Card, Tad Williams, and Robert Jordan. More recently, the authors I've been engrossed in are Scott Lynch, Patrick Rothfuss, George R.R. Martin, Robyn Hobb, Brandon Sanderson, Neil Gaiman, Pierce Brown, James S.A. Corey, Brian McClellan, Brian Staveley, John Scalzi, Andy Weir, and Lev Grossman (in no particular order).

I'm always on the lookout for books with strong female protagonists that I hope Grace will one day read, if she ever gets off her iPod. She's read all of Harry Potter, but it's been hard to get her to enjoy other series without forcing her to do it. I have a hard time reading to her because I get out of breath easily when I read out loud, and it makes me dizzy. I loved Anne McCaffrey's Pern books and can't wait until Grace reads Dragonsong. More recently, there have been excellent series by Samantha Shannon, V.E. Schwab, Leigh Bardugo, and Marie Brennan. Of course, the one thing all these female protagonists have in common is that they're white. N.K. Jemisin and Ann Leckie have really cool books with non-white female leads (in Leckie's case, the protagonist is a spaceship, but she's mostly written as female), yet I'm still looking for fantasy or science fiction with an Asian female protagonist. Any suggestions?