Three days ago, I ran out of the one medication that I allow myself to take for the chronic neurological pain in my legs.

I kept meaning to call for a refill, but forgot.  By last night, every ounce of my being protested this oversight.  About four a.m. today, I realized that I could consider the accidental experiment to be a success.  I had proven the medication to be effective.

As I paced around the darkened room, my body shuddering and weak, I thought about my relationship with pain.  After I weaned myself from a forty-five year narcotic prescription habit, I felt that I would have to live with pain.  I used a muscle relaxant quite a bit for a couple of years, then scaled back to this one drug, once a day, right before sleeping.

The rest of the time, Pain and I walk around in the same body.  We’ve declared a truce.  I think of my pain as something with which I will just co-exist.  That’s better than drugs; it’s better by far than booze.  I’ve tried instead to manage my reaction to pain.   Instead of the cotton batting that narcotics formed around the vile creature, I’ve wrapped her in acceptance.

The one need which drives me to take a pill at night?  Sleep.  I cannot function without it.  So I take one pill and it eases the belligerent being with which I co-exist into a semi-conscious state.  Once she has been distracted, the other being, me, can rest.

I engaged myself in an odd dialogue last night.  I stood at the window, watching the flickering light on the neighbor’s house.  I asked myself what else I had learned to tolerate.  What am I holding inside?  Anything I could throw out?

I huddled in my grandmother’s housecoat, in the dark of my room, and let the merest ghost of a smile pass across my face.  Indeed:  Lots of rotting piles of garbage in my heart.  A couple of boxes that I haven’t opened in a year or two sit in a musty corner.  Faded photographs on the yellowed pages of a scrapbook, their corners folded, the faces indiscernible.

There’s no pill that I’m willing to take for a lot of what ails me.  I can invite my heartache to take a seat like an old familiar friend; or I can sweep it out the door.

I fell asleep about five a.m.  My last thought:  You might need a bigger broom.

It’s the first day of the thirty-third month of My [Endless] Year Without Complaining.  Life continues.

To watch Miss Ross deliver a touching performance of GOOD MORNING HEARTACHE from an early scene in Lady Sings the Blues, click HERE.

My friends, please note:

I am on the road starting at 10:20 a.m. tomorrow.  My blogging might be sporadic.  I do intend to post the Saturday Musings, which you can read by clicking HERE.