Yeah, I love you @bigb, but really does that matter?
I'll just say I've had a small issue with my ankle for the last couple weeks. Not even sure what is going on, but it's getting better (getting old sucks, btw). So it has affected my stride a bit, but I try to overcome that and not make it obvious that I'm in any pain. My hope is that no one notices that my ankle hurts a lot. But if I look normal that doesn't mean I'm not suffering.
To get a little extra personal. I loved my mom. I loved her. When I was in elementary school I had legit stomach problems sometimes, but after a few times staying home when my mom had her day off, we'd watch Price is Right, we'd do the grocery shopping, we'd chat maybe play uno or something, I started having extra stomach aches on days my mom didn't work. I loved her and respected her more than anyone else.
But as I grew up I started to realize that my mother wore her pain on her sleeve. She wanted everyone to know that she was suffering. I don't doubt that she was suffering. She was. But she had to dramatize it, so that we all knew it. She had surgeries on her feet, her spine, her hip (she started waitressing in her family's diner when she was an early teen, she was a Vietnam era Army vet, she waitressed for many of my early years before getting a job delivering mail for the USPS. Her body was broken down.). But I honestly started resenting the show. Started resenting the dependance on powerful opioids. Started to understand the ebb and flow of having more than enough opioids and not enough.
When my mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer, a cancer she had originally been diagnosed with 20 years earlier and went through radiation treatment and was cleared, obviously it was devastating. I lost my father only a few years earlier to suicide. He didn't wear his suffering on his sleeve. I knew. I knew he was suffering. I was a few months away from getting out of the Navy and I was looking forward to having a new man to man relationship with my father. I knew he was alone. I so much wanted that opportunity for him to know me as the proud man I had become. But I didn't get that chance. He killed himself.
I blamed my mother, silently, but I did. She blamed me, also unspoken. We had been so close. My mother and I were both early risers. My father and my sister were not. I started drinking coffee when I was 13 years old, because that's what my mom did in the morning. I had to beg for the better part of a year. She finally told me I could drink coffee, but only if I didn't use any cream or sugar. She thought that would stop me from drinking coffee, but that's how she drank her coffee, so she didn't know, but that's how I wanted to drink my coffee anyway.
When my mother went into home hospice care she jumped into her deathbed enthusiastically, and never stopped asking for more opioids. She was on a ketamine pump and a morphine pump. They kept increasing the dosage until the doctor told us that her vessels couldn't take more pressure than the pumps were already introducing, so we started also giving her liquid oxycontin from a medicine dropper. Once she was there she never really came back. She lived for several months like that. Got very severe bed sores. Eventually the hospice nurse told us to stop feeding her, and more than a week later told us to stop giving her water. And then she died. And I resented her, and her weakness. Her years of broadcasting her pain. Putting that burden and that pain on the people around her, who cared about her.
But many years have passed. Now I wonder if it is really more noble to suffer silently. I don't know. But I'm not going to judge someone who is hiding a limp, nor a person who is emphasizing it.
So extra long story short. If a person has a handicap plate or hang tag, they get to park in the handicap space and I'm not going to worry about it.
). 
