I'm screwed, well and truly screwed. In 48 hours I'll be on the highway with my sister driving to Buffalo Airport so I can catch my flight into DC (via NYC!). For the last 24 hours I've been fluctuating between "Ok, it hurts but I can manage." and using my cane to be able to walk. I'm so screwed.

Right now I'm in a manageable stage of the pain. I've been icing my ass and spine -- the point of inflammation of my sciatic nerve and taking things nice and slow. I called my physiotherapist this morning and she's going to fit me in early tomorrow morning, even though she was fully booked for the next 2 days. Yay! for awesome therapists. She'll most likely poke me with the acupuncture needles again. I hate the needles, but if it means I can walk, bring them on.

I'm stressing about the DC trip and all of this, and I think I've been clamping down on just how much I hate this. How much it scares me. Not being able to walk... oh my god. It's not even the pain that upsets me. It's the numbness, the muscle weakness and sometimes... the absolute disconnect between my brain and my leg. The memory of standing in the middle of my hallway in the middle of the night and just fighting with every ounce of my stubbornness to take just one more step and failing so completely keeps running through my head.

If it was just pain, I'd suck it up, drug it down and deal. And most of the time when I have a flare up, it is just the pain. What has me so worried about this flare up is that the numbness is there beside the pain. I know what comes next. I know that after the numbness comes the muscle weakness and my knee gets mushy. And then if I'm really unlucky... which, let's face it, I'm not exactly the most lucky person in the world... my brain and my leg just stop talking to each other completely. That's the way it works. That's the way it looks like it's going right now... this week I go to DC.

The bitter irony just cracks me up. I've spent all this time worrying about my appearance, about how people will perceive me, about my own sense of fun, about how it's all going to work out. I never worried about my nerve going. I thought my back would get iffy, but not my leg. Not like this. And all I did was go for a WALK! A nice, easy walk on a Sunday morning.

So I sit here, looking at my list of things that need to get done before I leave on Thursday and I don't know what to do. There's a part of my head that says, "Do it all, work through the pain, because it's all bullshit anyways. You're not actually sick; you don't have anything wrong with you. Whiner." and then there's the part of me that read over and over again last night that this is not a good thing, that the pain is very real, the muscle weakness is real, that if I don't take it slow and rest, it will get worse and then I'm really screwed. Sensible non-self-hating part will win because I'm not totally stupid and I'll get stuff done nice and easy.

And again, I'm faced with being a 29 year old with a cane that I need to use to walk. Go team. *sighs*