I’m on the last few days of my last few dribbles of pain medication (Prgabalin, a nerve blocker) then I’m drug free!

I’m stopping taking the pills because I hate the side-effects, the most severe of which is a throttling of my concentration. I was struggling for words and for conceptualisation. I was thinking always through a fog and I didn’t feel like me. Since the drug wasn’t even relieving my pain particularly well, my choice seemed clear.

Now that the drugs are mostly out of my system, that has changed to my great and enduring relief. But of course with that has come increases in pain.

Lots of it. Lots of increases, lots of pain. So far, I’m managing it, but it is… difficult.

It’s hard to characterise pain, but I have three basic types:

• Just general pain all down my legs, particularly in my thighs and feet. This feels as though my legs are being crushed and it is constant and very severe.
• Contact pain. Touching the skin on my legs causes severe pain. This lasts while contact is held but becomes less severe over time. If I move the point of contact or release and reapply the contact, the pain begins again, as severe as it was the first time. Wearing clothes triggers the contact pain, but annoyingly, so sometimes does not wearing clothes. It’s worse at some times than others; it tends to be worse at morning and night. Which is the worst possible time for it to be worse as it interferes with sleep.
• Shooting pains. These are awful, proper, nightmarish lightening-in-the-bones. But thankfully they are intermittent rather than constant. They tend to be worse during the evening.

So this is what I have to work with and I imagine it will get worse as the last traces of the medicine leave my body.

I still think I’m doing the right thing but I’m under no illusions; the next few months are going to be hard.

I’ll write about some of the ways I’m coping with pain soon.

As always, take a look at my fundraising page. I’m doing wheelchair half marathons (hopefully three this year, plus sundry 10k events) to raise money for nia, a women-led, women-only, secular, rights-based registered charity which has been delivering services to women, girls and children who have been subjected to sexual and domestic violence and abuse, including prostitution, since 1975.