When cooking, I avoid cutting big things, hard things. I go for easy food. I was making some traditional food like, which needs lots of shoulder work and hand, like dough pastry and other stuff, I’m not doing this anymore.

Sometimes I get them ready made, although they’ve not very good, as I used to make them, I stopped because of the pain. Cleaning, sometimes I see that things need to be cleaned but I can’t. Sometimes I force myself, although I have the pain, and I do the job, I do the cleaning and afterwards it goes worse I mean and I have to take the painkiller. Sometimes I request my children to do the things for me.

I also think about my, what’s left from my family, they’re back in my country, they also complain from pain. So whenever they call me ‘How are you?. ‘I’m all right’ I say ‘I’m all right’, I don’t want to complain and increase the worry, their worry about me more.

So ‘I’m all right’ I say ‘I’m okay. ‘How is your health?. I say ‘I’m okay. I don’t say ‘I’m not well or ‘I have headache or this or that because like today I have headache, tomorrow I’ll be better. Why should I make them worry and think about me.

They’re already thinking about me and about my loss and so I just don’t complain to them at all. Yeah. I know they have, they have enough there and they don’t need more. But I just don’t say to them. But close friends here, of course, know what I suffered.

Do you find that your pain varies at all?

Yes, it varies. Yes, I mentioned this earlier like today, maybe it’s my best day, I feel that I don’t have a headache. Every three, four days, once a week at least, I get very, very bad headache, which will last like twenty four hours until I take the heavy medication, it will not go.

Then, if I feel sleepy like at night and I don’t go to sleep at that time, then I develop headache and it will continue the whole day. So I have to sleep like eleven o’clock, twelve o’clock, if I keep awake for one hour extra, for some interest I have, then I get the headache, yes.

Does the pain often disturb your sleep?

Of course, especially at night, I feel it more. When I lie down, I have to sleep on my right side, the shoulders gives me very bad pain. So I try different types of positions and the pillow and try to adjust myself until I sleep and I sleep with pain sometimes.

Do you ever have to get up in the night because of the pain?

Oh yes, yes. Two times like, sometimes, even if I go to sleep late, I wake up early morning. Like last night I took a sleeping pill, two milligrams, I slept about two o’clock after midnight, after I rubbed the ointment and things. I went to sleep at one, I couldn’t, then I got up from bed about two o’clock, I took the medication, I did the requirement and I took the sleeping pill, ibuprofen also, and I went to sleep. Then I wake up at six o’clock because the pain again started.