Doom Scrolling

Sensative Content note - description of chronic pain

I wish I could tell you I was awake for some interesting reason, maybe even something nefarious. Like some late night ritual to summon a demon, or even something fun like returning home after a night of drinking and karaoke. Unfortunately, I can’t. No, the reason is depressing and mundane, or at least mundane for me.

You’re thinking insomnia, aren’t you? I wish. If it was insomnia, I could take some sleeping pills and finally crash. God, I am so tired.

I want to be asleep, my brain is foggy and my eyes are heavy but there is no position comfortable enough to relax into the dream world. No matter how I toss and turn, I can’t seem to sleep. All because of this barb-like pain in my core. Cramping and twisting and throbbing, tightening down around my organs, and over-the-counter options only do so much.

Still, I take them. I measure the time between doses to be safe, don’t want to kill my liver along with the pain after all. It’s 2:15. The last time I took something was 12-something—three hours ago—too soon to take more.

I have done this dance before, a flare-up pushing my pain to the point where the only option is to run myself into the ground in hopes that sleep will demand its price in a louder voice than the pain.

So, it’s chronic pain that has me up at this hour. Yep, the simple answer with no answers. I told you it was depressing and mundane. No one has any answers, or at least not answers that would solve anything.

I did try to sleep, just so you know. I took my meds, laid down, and stayed there for two hours before finally declaring defeat. Now I’m on the sofa with no lights on, scrolling through too many apps in search of a distraction so I can manage to wait out the clock to take something else—that likely won’t work either. Doom scrolling, that’s what it's called, right? Honestly, I kind of resent that title. I have worked very hard to make my algorithm pleasant. It has to be if I want to use it to counteract my pain, but I guess the algorithm does favor bleaker, more upsetting content, and who is up at 2:30 AM curating their feed? Besides me.

Red and blue lights pass my open window, silently; there is no need for the siren this late. I watch the ambulance on the empty road and wonder if someone is inside, in pain right now? Or are the EMTs on their way to someone’s rescue? I hope whoever it is, they don’t have to spend the night in the ER, a plight I know all too well, though I’ve never needed an ambulance—that’s a win, right? Honestly, if this were a few years ago, when the pain was new, I would be in the ER tonight. Not that it ever helped, whatever the pain was, it wasn’t killing me, so I didn’t ‘belong’ in the emergency room. Now I just grit my teeth and bear it, I wait for my appointments, GP or specialist, and listen as they tell me the tests are all normal. Everything looks good. It's not good, I’m still in pain, the tests are normal, so I go home with nothing.

Do you think frustration can make pain worse? I do. Of course, I have no proof that it does, and even if there was a test, I’m sure it too would come back normal. They’re always normal.

I wish it was winter. If it was, I could use my heating pad to get something like the shadow of relief. Honestly, it feels like it's the most reliable option, heat rash be damned. Currently, in the humidity of late July, more heat is not an option. How is it still so hot in the middle of the night? The sun has been down for hours; it has to be some natural crime that you can still feel the shadow of its rays. Loitering on a cosmic level.

Everything is so heavy, heavy with fatigue and pain and not moving for the last two hours. I should move, stretch, go back to bed, something, but I don’t. If I move, I know it will be sharp, that pain will ripple like lightning from inside my hip, up to my ribs and back to my back. I feel it in the tension now, the flexing of muscles that have found no rest despite my stillness. I know I can’t stay here forever, I have to try and sleep, and if I try on the couch, I will just wake up worse.

Even on its lowest setting with dim mode activated, my phone feels too bright. I squint at the time—3:07—and groan. I drop the phone onto my chest and cover my eyes with my arm. Another hour, can I manage it? What else can I do? Scrolling clearly isn’t working.

I could try watching a show, but the noise feels blasphemous so late, and I doubt I would be able to follow the plot. Reading is quieter but needs more focus than a show, video games are louder and more intensive than either watching or reading. I kick my feet in frustration and flinch as that waiting pain flashes through my body, sudden and crippling. I roll onto my side and curl up.

This is better. Or is it that I’m still now, I don’t know.

I can’t stay like this, though, and I need to kill an hour. I wish violence killed time. Not that I would have the energy to enact the necessary violence. I feel like a shadow, a ghost, only physical enough to feel but without the strength to act. I have to act, I have to move and live. There comes a point where if you don’t do it in pain, you’ll never do it.

So I roll off the sofa to take an hour-long shower.