The Other Side of Me, Giving In to the Pain

So, I've had this headache since last Thanksgiving, and I think it might be starting to affect my sanity.

I've been diagnosed with occipital neuralgia and the muscles in my neck, causing the pinched nerve to radiate pain throughout my skull, simply won't relax. I've tried drugs that relax muscles and stop nerve transduction, I've tried exercise and heat and some massage. I'm going to try to convince my husband that it might be worth it to try acupuncture and intensive massage therapy, but I think he's frightened and resentful of the cost, as those aren't covered by insurance. Does that sound shitty? Maybe. But it's his reality and I have to live with it, because it's his money. I don't work, I don't generate income, so all the financial everything is up to him.

I wrote another blog about the headache, on my Domestic Goddess blog on MySpace. It's a funny, sarcastic, lighthearted look at the pain I've been in and how I've tried to get out of it, and it's true. MySpace is where I go to have fun, my blog there is semi-popular and I have a great audience, who leave great comments and most of whom I consider friends, even though I haven't met them. But I am very careful to keep that blog light and fun, even while writing about complex issues. I consider it practice for writing my fiction. Plus, I don't want to be viewed as a dramatic, dark, whiny girl who wants fawning and delicacy and sympathy. I don't want that to be my persona.
So I've brought it here.
Because I need to get out what this pain is, really. And you people, if anyone is reading this, don't know my MySpace persona, which is a real part of me. But not the whole of me. This is where I will come to be the other part of me, the one who is weak and hurting and not very funny or clever at all. Consider yourself warned.

This pain, while bearable, is now wearing away who I am. It is waves of torment, smashing against the rocks of my psyche, turning them into sand as it bashes and foams and swirls along my nerves. My head is a stone, wedged in the vise of a crack in the earth, slowly being squeezed by incalculable pressure of the tectonic movement, and soon it will begin to shatter and crack and it will implode, taking my personality with it. I will become the pain. That is all I will be. I will no longer be Vanessa, the wife and mom, the sarcastic one in my group of girlfriends, the room mom who constantly invades my daughter's classroom to see what's going on, the writer, the reader, the cook who loves to try new recipes. I will simply exist; I will be one with the pain and I will not fight it anymore. I will give in to the need to curl up and weep, head clutched in fingers weakened by a drug that might be killing me.
I am fighting this urge, the urge to just give up; give in and be the pain. It is not who I want to be. But, can I continue? Is this pain just going to be something I have, or will it become who I am?