Silence still hurts

Again, I'm realizing another thing I thought I had worked through. Apparently, as busy as my I try to keep my life and as much as I have continued to live, I still don't like silence.  I've enjoyed background noise all my life. I don't like loud, obnoxious noise, but I want to hear people talking. Maybe it makes me feel less alone, I don't really know. Silence is not just an inconvenience for me, it's so much more than that.

Early in the morning on Tuesday, I had to go to the hospital because I was experiencing a lot of abdominal pain. I'm not a big advocate of pain medicine, but I was that day for sure. They got the IV in and gave me the first shot of dilaudid; that dulled the pain for about 10 minutes. They came in and gave me another dose that only lasted for about 10 minutes. Finally, she came in and doubled the dose; I'm not sure how long it worked, but it wasn't very long. When they came back again, they told me they couldn't give me any more because it was going to send me into respiratory distress. I had to wait two hours.

My son, and two of my daughters were there in the room from the beginning. I know they were there because they drove me up there but, the dilaudid had me very out of it. I could still feel the pain, but I was having vivid dreams at times. I don't remember my kids talking, but I saw Steve; maybe I will be able to go into that more another time. I was amazed at how completely out of it I was. I was aware enough to talk to people periodically, but zoned out enough to not care about anything.

I remember thinking about Steve when the nurse told me they couldn't give me anymore dilaudid because it would send me into respiratory distress. I was thinking no one seemed too concerned about doing that to Steve. He was on way more of it than I was and within the hour he died, the nurse had given him an extra dose of dilaudid.

After I woke up from surgery I was thinking, now I have some small idea of the medication high Steve was on. I had never been in the hospital for anything before. Now, I understood that Steve really had no realization of what was happening around him and he certainly didn't have a choice. Which leads me to a hundred other questions about what I should have done, but that is beside the point. That night, the next day, and in the days since after everyone has gone back to work and everything, I've had a LOT of time alone to think...

I've realized that I still hate silence. I still can't deal with it. Silence depresses me and causes me to overthink things. It's seems like such a huge setback to look back at how far you thought you had come and realize you haven't even really taken a step. Some days the thought of the fact that you have spent almost 2 years trying to work yourself through something like this and you still can't deal with something as simple as silence makes you question your ability to be able to do anything more than merely survive, EVER.