Mysterious pain

Twice last night I woke up literally screaming with pain--an intense, sudden onset pain in my jaw and upper chest. While I know that this is sometimes associated with heart attacks, it has happened to me in the past and each time my heart has been checked out it has been fine. My blood pressure continues to be low and no one has an explanation for this. Both times I took some morphine and ativan and eventually got back to sleep, but as a result neither Marty nor I got very much sleep last night, and I have been very groggy all day, without being able to nap.

I am looking forward to discussing this whole situation with Lauren. For some reason, the pharmacy has been sending very small amounts of morphine, which means I am going through it pretty fast. The bottle they delivered yesterday was just about one-fifth full; and not only that, it had a safety cap that was jammed on so that it was impossible to open, and we basically had to destroy the cap in order to get to the medicine. Safety caps are a bother even when they work correctly, for someone like me with arthritic hands and fingers--to have one that's broken is ridiculous.

There are a lot of changes happening. Katrina was here today for what she said will be her last visit, and it is not clear who will be replacing her. I certainly need to have a social worker. And Caren, one of my volunteers, left a message through Terry, the volunteer coordinator, saying that she is over-extended and won't be coming back. I will really miss her, but I've already been assigned a new volunteer, Mindy, who will be coming on Friday. Tim was here today and will go back to his Monday morning schedule starting next week.

Sometimes little things can get me upset all out of proportion. The other day I asked Marty about making some popcorn, which we haven't had in a long time. I have these great gadgets that pop corn without any oil right in the microwave, but we couldn't find the lids for them and I think they may have gotten tossed during a big throw-away a few weeks ago of lots of miscellaneous plastic storage containers. I got really upset because it shows me how much I have lost control of little things like knowing where things are in the kitchen. I went on line and found something roughly similar which I ordered (we improvised the other day by using the containers with wax paper held on with rubber bands as covers). I guess it's a lot of things converging--being so tired, dealing with this mysterious pain, and not knowing where things are. Fortunately, Judy was able to find two other things that were missing--my "itty bitty book light" which comes in so handy when I want to read in bed while Marty is sleeping, and a bottle of nail polish that I had used the other day and needed to fix up some chips. Lots of things seem to end up under the bed, for some reason.

I'd probably feel better if I could sleep.