The blue rinse brigade

Something about having a bad scoliosis, is that it separates you from other people your own age. It's hard for people to understand what it is like to live with chronic pain, unless they have also been there. This has led me to feel sometimes like an elderly person, with creaking bones when I get up in the morning... (I seldom lie in because it's not comfortable), and by mid afternoon will have munched through my first of a few slow-release codine tablets that will be consumed until bedtime.
Going home early from parties also, not because I'm ready, but because I can't bear the pain any more. I'm amazed that Bryan is so understanding about this, but I try and make sure he can pursue his own interests without worrying about me.

The blue rinse factor has been amplified since my surgery. I couldn't help but feel once I had recovered enough to be bothered, that I had awoken in some home for old-age pensioners. I shared a hospital room with two elderly ladies whose snoring could wake the dead, and my earplugs needed the additional help of my i-pod earphones resting on top at full volume to drown out the noise. Unfortunately, I have unusually small ear canals (according to my audiologist honourary mother in law), so at random intervals through the night my ears ejected the earplugs, and I awoke to more snoring. At one point, one of the nurses with a sense of humor, kindly went over to the loudest one and woke her to ask if she was sleeping ok.... admittedly, I had asked her if she could just do a set of 'obs' on her to wake her... she was pre-op, she'd never know it's not normal! I hoped that I would manage to fall asleep in the time it took her to re-orientate herself.

Someone also mistook me for an elderly person and bought me a very fancy looking tube of individually wrapped prunes. This is a mean trick because they look like chocolates to someone who is a bit out of it. These sorts of weird things, must surely be hugely appealing to elderly folk, because their paranoia about their bowels leads them to consume excessive quantities of prunes... And, because these individually wrapped numbers look so appealing, I can see how much fun grandma's would have offering them to children, who like me- mistook them for choccies. Then they can watch with delight as the child takes a 'sweet', unwrapps it, and consumes it... and then their face contorts in the shocking realisation that their beloved nana has duped them into the eating of prunes.

You can see by my ramblings thus far, that I am getting cabin fever, and it's only 9 days after my operation! I'm not enjoying being stranded, but at least my pain has come down to a bearable level so I have ditched the morphine. I'd really like to hear from people, while this blog is really great for me to communicate out, I miss out on people contact. I blame the pre-christmas rush and people being timid. I think that might be another nana factor there, the 'no-one visits' complaint, when really people do visit regularly... just not the people that you had thought. Maybe that was just my nana that was like that.

I had a much better night last night, slept until about 3am in the lazy boy with Bryan on the couch. I felt well enough to go to bed for the remainder of the night and had a blissful sleep. It was so nice to be able to feel a little bit normal again. No nightmares, just bad dreams with more wierd content.