Last night I did not sleep.

The pins and needles and burning in my hands are now unchanged by any sleeping position I can discover. I tried taking nearly every medication in my night stand – insomnia, nerve pain, muscle relaxant, prescription-level (and now nearly impossible to obtain due to its side effects) anti-inflammatory prescribed in similar doses to horses. Everything except the opiods, which I am often tempted to take just for their mood-altering properties, a road I dare not set out upon. Nothing worked. I tried meditating and could not relax. I tried watching TV and gave up around 3 AM. I laid in my bed, perfectly prone, arms straight down and pitched slightly out in an attempt to keep them as stretched and relaxed as possible. It did not make any difference.

I must have dropped off, finally, fitfully, around 4, and then awoke again at 7:30 and dozed intermittently for another couple of hours before I gave up and got out of bed. And now, my forty-something body, unrecovered from the day of physical labor yesterday, hurts all over, in particular my upper back, the very muscles I have now developed to combat persistent shoulder pain that I thought was an after-effect of my surgery, but which now seems to be due to another cause entirely.

I can’t do this again.

As I lay awake in the dark, that thought was on reel, incessant, useless, over and over in my head, even after the few tears I shed were decommissioned due to exhaustion. I didn’t even have the energy to weep. All I could do was beg the god of my understanding, slumping out of bed to assume a praying posture against it, on my knees, head bent on clasped hands.  Please, please, please help me, please make it better, please make it OK.

I don’t think have another trip down the chronic pain hell-hole left in me. Last night, I received a text from Momma Ape about another surgery to remove one of the implants whose placement resulted in a six week hospitalization that, frankly, nearly killed her. I had thought that this weekend’s post was going to be about my feelings regarding her going back to the same surgeon and hospital for a corrective procedure, an idea I vehemently opposed, to make a grossly inadequate understatement. I was all set and ready to go on one of my card-carrying, this-is-why-people-read-my-shit rants.

And then last night happened.

Before the crisis that spawned this blog in the first place three years ago, I was bigger and stronger than I am now. I’m not unhealthy, and I am strong again, though not as strong as I was despite my pretendings at work to the contrary, and also not as big. I may very well be underweight, a possibility which I am unopposed to intellectually, but which my body image issues override and thereby refuse to entertain, making it a condition that is unlikely to rectified in the foreseeable future.

I also had no idea what was in store for me the last time and oh, what I wouldn’t give for that blissful ignorance now. If the issues with my hands do not rapidly improve, or at the very least, do not get any worse, I am not sure I will be able to work. This past week, we had to help a large mastiff outside following a life-saving, forelimb amputation procedure. The dog weighed upwards of 125 pounds. One nurse lifted the back with a sling, while I slipped a large towel under the front to help the dog get outside to the walking area.

I could not manage my share of the weight. Not because of how heavy she was, although that certainly was a factor, but because I was unable to command the strength required to grip the towel and lift the dog at the same time. My hands would not cooperate. A third nurse guiding the head had to switch places with me.

It was the first time I had been replaced by a non-male nurse due a strength issue since I started working there last year. It was humiliating, and worse, frightening. I could swing a 65 pound animal off an x-ray table, no problem. But I couldn’t lift that same weight via sling because of the loss of tactile capacity and burning, pins-and-needles pain in my hands.

Even in the surgeries yesterday, which, fortunately, only involved managing soft-tissues elevations, I had to watch my own hands as much as the surgeon’s to make sure things weren’t slipping, because sensation in them disappeared seconds after taking hold of the instrument in question. Even while simply standing with the next instrument to be used, or waiting for further guidance from the surgeon, because of the demands of sterility, I was unable to let my arms drop to my sides, the only position in which my hands are even remotely comfortable, because I would have been placing them outside the sterile field.

For one procedure, the surgeon was on the phone with the client for an extended period of time after we had opened the room and scrubbed the patient, and I was forced to remain in sterile pose, hands clasped at my sternum, for over a half an hour before he himself came into the suite, scrubbed and gowned, to begin the mass removals.

Following that same operation, I was asked to hold pressure to a debulking site in the subject’s mouth for close to ten minutes because the area was not amenable to suturing. I lost sensation in my fingers completely long before the ten minutes was up. I placed my left hand over my right so I could relax my fingers without relieving the pressure, which helped a little, but not much.

It was excruciating. And of course, I told no-one. The fragile eco-system that is the veterinary surgery support staff at that hospital demands that each member operate at maximum capacity for virtually ten hours straight, in particular when one or two members are unable to work and call out – likely, now that I think about it, due to the stress entailed in that very situation – and my position, in particular, is extraordinarily specialized. There are only two other nurses who can act as surgical assistants in the OR, one of whom is full-time, like me, and already has a full slate of surgeries of her own each week, and the other of whom is semi-retired and one of the primary caregivers for her grandchildren. If I go down, or even if I can work but not in surgeries, the efficiency of that eco-system will devolve significantly, and may result in my eventual replacement.

As it is, though, even that worry is superseded by the fear entailed in the diagnostics of the upcoming weeks. I have always been the zebra among the horses. I probably get it from Momma Ape, in some strange way. I am concerned, and I think rightly so, that the tests will fail to show a definitive cause for my condition. The the doctor will insist on the treatments that would have accompanied that cause anyway, telling me that sometimes it works even if the diagnostics are inconclusive, but probably doing it because it’s the only thing she knows how to do to fix what may (or may not) be wrong with me. These treatments will run the gamut from unpleasant to excruciating, and what if they don’t work? I will be stuck bouncing around the far reaches of medical science once again, waiting until I stumble upon a practitioner who has seen my condition, and its resistance to common treatment, and knows what to do. If I get that lucky again. Which I am more than a little worried I won’t.

I got lucky with my shoulder. But it wore me down. I don’t know if I have that much strength – or luck – left. Not after last summer with Momma Ape. Not after the previous two years plus of relentless pain and fatigue. No. No. No. Not again. I can’t do this again. I just can’t.