Ditzwhat now?

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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. 

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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

Curses and blessings

With spinal and/or nerve damage, the first few weeks are the hardest. You begin to lose hope as you’re bounced back and forth everywhere, between doctors and specialists. For me, I couldn’t even get a straight answer as to what was wrong with me. I was diagnosed with everything from arthritis to kidney disease, and I was treated for it all. With something like that, you begin to feel quite helpless.

That was my biggest problem at the beginning. It’s extremely frustrating needing to ask for help at everything. When it comes to grabbing a glass of water, you find dozens of obstacles. In my case, one arm couldn’t raise high enough to the cupboard while the other one couldn’t stay steady enough to hold the glass. Even standing long enough at the tap to fill the glass was exhausting enough to cause me to have to lie down. I broke more than my share of glasses.

All the stresses and pains begin to wear away at your mind. You begin to lose sleep, and then you begin to stop trying to get better. You have a few weeks where you work hard, where you’re determined to get better, but the energy required to keep going is beyond what the human body is capable of. At some point, you give up.

It’s an extremely humbling experience. It throws you through an existential crisis because you begin to question what the rest of your life will be like. Being unable to get up and go for a walk, or even for a glass of water, it begins to show you exactly what you are capable of at your worst. And unfortunately, depression soon follows

It isn’t some romanticized sadness; it is a genuine, crippling depression. You start to question the point of continuing  to breath, and the bottles of painkillers or sleeping medicine begin to tantalize you. Most people can’t stay alone with their thoughts for more than a few hours without an activity to distract them and I was no exception.

The most important thing once life has hit such a point is to speak with people. It is a clichéd notion to speak of but it truly helps. Having friends and family to speak to, it changes your viewpoints. The unending support of your loved ones gives you something to hold onto when you feel like letting go. Spinal damage is terrible, and nerve damage is awful, but feeling the love and support of people around you...

It’s a humbling experience.

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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.