Tomorrow is two pretty important things. Well, I suppose important is kind of relative. Important to me, I guess.

Tomorrow is another month in the bank of perpetual headaches. Ten months of headaches tomorrow. Ten months. I live this every day and I still can’t hardly believe that it’s been 10 months since this all started.

Tomorrow is also my appointment with the latest neurologist who also happens to be a pain management doctor. I’m hopeful, but I’m trying to temper my hope with reality. I think that I’m on the right road, that this doctor, unlike some of the others, may be able to afford me a balance between not giving up on finding/treating the cause of the pain and also dealing with it in the meantime.

I also know that it won’t be that easy. It rarely is.

Look at a list of medications for chronic pain. Chances are I’ve tried them all. Some more than once.

Look at a list of suggestions of ways to mediate pain without medication. I’ve tried nearly all of those too.

The options seem very narrow. I am sure that there are ones I don’t know about, I’m not a doctor (I just play one on twitter a lot of the time) but I’m trying to be a realist.

I want this to work, I really do, but I also know that if history is any indication, it very well may not. I’ve seen five neurologists since my Chiari diagnosis in 2006 and only one (and maybe a half) of them have ever taken me seriously, haven’t completely given up, or told me I needed to find someone else because they can’t help me. That track record doesn’t exactly inspire endless hope and optimism.

But even I recognize that tomorrow holds potential. It holds potential disappointment and potential success. It holds potential to wallow in an another month of pain without relief, it holds the potential to be the start of the end of the pain.

I’m scared, and sad and hopeful and humbled by tomorrow, by what it means, by what it might hold. And for tonight I’m going to try to stick with the hope that in marking 10 months with a new doctor, I might also mark the end of this onslaught of pain. The end of nights like two this weekend where I lay on my couch in tears. The end of blog posts mentioning that another month has past, that another month has been lost to pain.

Tonight, the potential of tomorrow overwhelms me. We’ll see what the reality is all too soon.

Share this on

7 Responses to “The Potential of Tomorrow”