Another Week of Torture
May. 6th, 2016 08:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
trickykittyDespite my fun programming posts this past week, most of it has been plagued by another flare up of the torso pains. They've come and gone about every other day since Saturday. Despite taking lots of pills upon going to bed last night, it still took an extra hour or two before I fell asleep and the pain kept waking me up during the night.
Even knowing what this is, I still sometimes feel the urge to commiserate with others when it's acting up. Threads like this one are good to read, but ultimately bad for me. They remind me of two things. 1) There's no known explicit cause nor cure, and everyone with costochondritis has reached the same conclusion as I have: it might be less painful to OD on a bunch of pills than to keep having to deal with this symptomatic issue. 2) When someone says they've been dealing with theirs for a year, and then someone else tops them at 5 years, I realize that I got them all beat by a decade-plus and the duration just seems to keep getting longer every time it comes on.
I wonder if all the long-timers of this condition are, like myself, out there enduring without commenting. Reading and trying to decide which is better, laughing or crying. I can't imagine that I would be one of the longest sufferers of this, but I'd hate to post something in a forum like that to say, "Oh, don't worry. It only gets worse over time, and so far, from my experience, it NEVER actually goes away." That would be a horrible bummer for the readers of such a thread.
Instead, I imagine an extra-secretive clique, where other folks like me are all thinking the same thing and opting to not post out of the hope that by not posting we won't jinx it for others. Maybe they'll get lucky, only deal with their one episode, one year, five year battles, and then be done with it. I think our secret-agent handshake is a self-fetal-position hug, and our battle cry is a combination of whimpering and moaning.
Even knowing what this is, I still sometimes feel the urge to commiserate with others when it's acting up. Threads like this one are good to read, but ultimately bad for me. They remind me of two things. 1) There's no known explicit cause nor cure, and everyone with costochondritis has reached the same conclusion as I have: it might be less painful to OD on a bunch of pills than to keep having to deal with this symptomatic issue. 2) When someone says they've been dealing with theirs for a year, and then someone else tops them at 5 years, I realize that I got them all beat by a decade-plus and the duration just seems to keep getting longer every time it comes on.
I wonder if all the long-timers of this condition are, like myself, out there enduring without commenting. Reading and trying to decide which is better, laughing or crying. I can't imagine that I would be one of the longest sufferers of this, but I'd hate to post something in a forum like that to say, "Oh, don't worry. It only gets worse over time, and so far, from my experience, it NEVER actually goes away." That would be a horrible bummer for the readers of such a thread.
Instead, I imagine an extra-secretive clique, where other folks like me are all thinking the same thing and opting to not post out of the hope that by not posting we won't jinx it for others. Maybe they'll get lucky, only deal with their one episode, one year, five year battles, and then be done with it. I think our secret-agent handshake is a self-fetal-position hug, and our battle cry is a combination of whimpering and moaning.
