Paralyzed

Paralyzed.  When I was a college sophomore, I had a severe neck sprain (falling from a bunk bed in my sleep) that left me almost completely paralyzed for several hours.  I was sent to the ER on a backboard, where I waited for about three or four hours for treatment.  It seemed like an eternity.  They wouldn't give me any painkillers because they said they were worried about possible head trauma.  So for hours, I agonized in the most exquisite of pain, but couldn't even move, besides fluttering my fingers and turning my head.  It seemed so unfair.  If I couldn't have painkillers, at least I should have been able to writhe in agony to release some of the horrible pain.  The image that came to my mind while I lay there in mute, suffering agony was that of a live butterfly on a pin. 

Well this butterfly is on a pin again, wings soaked in chemicals and transfixed in agony by a pin.  The psychotropic drugs have completely cut off and/or deadened from my emotional and spiritual life--in short, from those capacities that make me human.  I know that this disconnected, alienated, cocooned person is not me, but I am too anesthized to do more than cry and long for an end to this hopeless misery.  I am paralyzed.  To make matters worse, I am in terrible back pain.  I know from yoga class last night that the drugs are having a very definite impact on my muscles, causing spasms, tightness, stiffness, and a sense of arthritis in my joints.  My legs and arms are so heavy that it takes a massive act of will to move them.  I can barely turn my head when I drive or wipe myself after relieving myself at the toilet.  But the most unbearable part of my pain comes from my ribs, lats, and thoracic (sp?--too sick to look it up) spine.  Just lifting and extending my  arms--to take a drink or a bite, to type on a typewriter, causes unrelenting, excruciating pain.  I recognize that thoracic pain--it is  part and parcel of my original back injury from 10 years ago.  And I learned how to cope with that pain teaching myself to self-medicate through prayer and meditation.   But now, I am cut off from the capacity and ability to  pray or mediate, and thus I am completely unable to heal my own pain.  10 years ago, I was in despair at the thought of being in chronic pain or dependent on painkillers for the rest of my life.  Now I face that despair all over again.  This pain is not tolerable.

My dream last night indicates the destitute position I am in.  I dreamed that Debbie C. had to move into a a totally derelict apartment--a completely ramshackled, rotten, and ugly place tenanted by dope addicts.  There was vomit on the walls.  Debbie C, for me, stands for a prayerful and mature Christian.  Debbie metamorphed into myself, and I was the one living in this horrible place.  My mom was coming to dinner, and I told myself, "at least I should clean the vomit off these walls."  But I was too sick to do anything.  Someone gave me some stale restaurant bread to feed my mother, and she was so pleased when I gave it to her.  She actually took it as a sign that I liked my new place so much that I had cooked in it, baking the bread for her.  I was shaking my head at her naivete.  "Typical Mom", I thought, "she doesn't have a clue what is really going on with me or my surroundings.  How could she think for one minute, that I could ever cook in this hideous, derelict place?"  Int.--my spiritual, prayerful self has lost its beautiful environs (my normal, "mildly schizophrenic" personality, and is now housed in a hateful, ugly place where it cannot function or be creative....