You open your eyes and realize that you are awake but don’t feel tired and have to wonder have you slept at all. It’s not until you notice the time on the click, 3am, that you realise the beast is paying you another early morning visit. Suddenly your whole body breaks out in sweat and your bed clothes become soaked and you start to shiver from the cold air hitting your body. Your eye starts to swell on the left side and the pain starts to build slowly behind the eye and on top of the jaw also on the left side. You jump out of bead and rush to get your injection but by the time you have it you are already in full attack. The pain shoots from the top of the jaw, behind the eye socket and out over the top of the head along the left side and into the back of the head where it connects to the neck.
The pain is so bad all you can do is hold your face and pray that it will end soon. You take your injection hoping that it will work as fast as possible and then sit holding your head waiting for the drugs to kick in and the pain to ease. You feel your chest tighten and your breathing becomes heavy as the injections starts to work and you feel a strange feeling along the path of the pain and suddenly as fast as it started the attack is over. It’s amazing, no matter how many attacks you get you never get used to how they go and how strong the pain level becomes. It actually feels like the pain becomes stronger each time an attack appears.
You would think after suffering from so many attacks i would be used to it all by now but i don’t think you can ever get used to this condition as it is so unpredictable and can come at any moment. It’s not like it waits until you are home relaxing before it comes, you could be on a bus or in a car and suddenly an attack would appear rendering you completely at its mercy. It’s not until the pain eases can you start to do anything or try and get back on with what you were doing before the attack. Sometimes it can take up to an hour before you come to your senses again and other times it can just take 10 or 15 minuets , there is just no telling how long an attack will last until you have one.
It makes it very difficult to plan things or go out for a day out as you just don't know if the beast will show its face. I try and stay indoors especially in winter as the cold is one of the main triggers for my attacks and by staying in the warm and keeping my flat in a certain temperature i am able to reduce the amount of attack i get in a day by a minimum of 50% which is a huge difference from what i normally get,. It does help that i now have the injections and other medication that i didn’t have a few years back and though my life was going to end and it was going to finish me off. When i was diagnosed and told there is medication to help ease the attacks it was like a huge weight was taken off my shoulders. When i was told that there was no cure for the condition and that it could go into remission on its own i wasn’t very hopeful but this year i have seen a huge decrease in the amount of attacks i have been getting and although i still suffer i am pleased with the progress i have made.
I am just hoping that i will continue to improve and manage to claw back some of my life style that i lost when i became so ill. Hopefully now as things re slowly improving i can start to plan some kind of future for myself and start to look forwards to things rather than just worry how ill i am going to be each day. It feels nice to finally get my life back and start to feel like i have some sort of control again. Lets hope this improvement continues. I am just getting over a nasty cold that seemed to take a lot out of me so its time to strengthen myself up again and get back to my fishing as i have missed out on so much this last year i need to get back into it.
