Insomnia

The pain kept me up last night. Here is my revenge.
This pic is a bit of a metaphor for the neurologic pain.

did you have to fiddle with it for a while? or are you just a light genius/lucky shot?

this is one of five or so that weren't off center or out of DoF.

This was shot in manual mode with a Nikon D1.
1/60th sec/ F8 / 50mm Nikkor D.

It is a seriously heavy camera, but it dampens the fine tremor in my somewhat spastic right hand.

I am holding my left hand like a bounce card, and steadying the magnesium brick that is the nikon against my chest. So I figure that puts this shot firmly in the luck column.

And in Black and White, a perfect choice. Hard on the ol' "peepers" though, I'll bet you were seeing spots for awhile.

yes. After this session, I had a prussian blue blob shaped like a flash diffuser in my visual field for a bit.

That neurologic pain stuff is just awful. I suffered with it for about a year after I had meningitis/encephalitis back in 1980. The nerves in my arms were so messed up I couldn't even type two lines -- a bad thing considering I was working as a legal secretary at the time. I had to take a couple months off from work and go to work as a correctional officer for a year so I wouldn't have to do much typing. It finally got better though. Now I can type all day and into the night if I have to.

The right side of my body is numb like a glove (I have become a 7-8 finger typist) from the stroke, but the muscles spasm fairly frequently and ironically, I can feel the muscle pain just fine.

When I get charliehorses, I have to keep moving to keep them from really wracking me up. If I don't, I have actually torn muscles.

It has been 4 years now, and it is probably not going to get better than this. With warm weather, it seems to be less frequent, and less severe.

I am glad to hear you have gotten it back from the disease process. Was this viral, or bacterial?

I've never in my life had a headache like that, and it lasted for three weeks. I just wanted to beat my head into the wall and knock myself out or otherwise kill myself. I was too sick to even get up and go to the doctor until after the damage was done. After the headache subsided, I had this weird feeling like tight rubber bands around both of my arms at the elbows, and from there down to the tips of my fingers I was all cold and dead, numb feeling, but still tingly and excruciatingly painful. It's really hard to describe to someone who hasn't experienced it, but you probably know what I'm talking about. Even now 25 years later I sometimes get bad cramps in my forearms, but I just suck down the Aleve and push on through. Gotta make a living.

in my upper right arm and knee.

I found that if I got out on my bicycle and rode for 3 or 4 miles, the endorphins would kick in, and the pain would slack off. To some extent, the farther I ride, the longer the effect lasts.

I also have a couple hypersensitive spots that when touched take me completely off the table, as it were.

I had to explain to a Neurology resident that if he tried a Bubinski reflex test on my right foot again, I would be terribly sorry, and apologize to everyone at his funeral.

I know you went through hell, but man am I glad to hear that you managed to get back out of it again!

I like the way your right eye seems to be floating in the light

Beautiful lighting, it almost looks like you used infrared film on half your face. But I bet that flash did nothing to relieve the pain. :(