An extreme difficulty, when it comes to something as severe as spinal pains and nerve damage, is the medicine you need to take in order to keep from tearing your spinal column out. First off, most medicines react terribly with each other, and if they don’t, they work together and cause some serious side effects. In my case, I was on several different painkillers, antibiotics, and nerve-repairing medicines that all conflicted terribly.

The first medicine was called Apo-Tridural, and it was possibly the worst experience of my life. It influences chemical imbalances in your brain and causes severe mood swings, sending your brain down dark paths. You contemplate everything from suicide to arson simply because you get bored. It has an extreme reaction with antidepressants and causes them to work negatively – your mental state declines and begins to fall to pieces.

The second was called Apo-Gabapentin, a high-level anti-seizure medication used to treat people with epilepsy or nerve damage. This was the most positive medication I was on over the summer – it helps the pain with nerve issues and it has very few side effects. The only one worth mentioning is that you become as ditzy as a sixteen-year-old with a pumpkin-spice latte. Your short term memory is nonexistent and you will forget what you’re saying in the middle of a sentence. You randomly stop doing whatever you were in the process of doing and find yourself staring at a wall. Productivity decreases a hundredfold and you become extremely absentminded.

Combine those two with the final medicine I had to take, Naproxen, and you become a shell. For nearly four months I was barely human. Instead of living, I just existed. Naproxen is a painkiller, and when combined with other medication you become tired. Every day you are absolutely exhausted to the point where you can sleep eighteen hours and still be too tired to move. You feel trapped and sluggish and slow with all the medicine you’re on and it eats away at you.

The amount of medicine you need to take with nerve damage is ludicrous, but it could be much worse – you could be without it, feeling like you’re on fire for hours on end. Next time you pass by someone with a cane or a serious limp or a wheelchair, you might understand a bit more of their pain – it is a living hell and you have no choice but to keep waking up in the morning to this burning, electrifying sensation, until you reach for the bottle beside the bed and fall back into the shattered numbness of your mind. You simply have tunnel vision until the next time you can fall asleep. 

DANIEL HENDRIKX

Daniel Hendrikx is a Professional Writing student from Newcastle, Ontario. Daniel grew up working on farms, and writing his own fiction. He finds time to write between playing video games and his guitar. Daniel is aspiring to be a professional writer. One day Daniel hopes to write a memoir as he draws his best inspirations from his own life