Pain, part 1

I didn't set out to become an expert in pain, but that's pretty much the way my life has gone. I think this is a fairly common thread among American acupuncturists -- the first two people I knew who became acupuncturists did so after breaking their necks in car crashes -- acupuncture was the only thing that helped them with their pain, so they followed through by becoming acupuncturists.

I've had chronic knee pain from soccer injuries since I was 13 years old. That's 37 years of chronic pain, and I thought I understood it pretty well. My knee pain led me to exercise therapy based on breath work and then to acupuncture. However, I've been having new experiences in the last decade which have blown my old ideas of pain out of the water.

First was the tectonic heave into fatherhood, which brought the simultaneous establishment of a huge increase in expectations of my ability to provide long-term protection, financial support and emotional stability with an ironically huge reduction in my invulnerability to emotional pain. This was efficiently followed by the emotional pain associated with losing my closest family members to death. Next was the disappointed exhaustion of losing 2 political races. And now, most recently, is mysterious, chronic, diffuse and severe physical pain. Bad pain all over, every day, with no clear origin. Pain which intensifies as I sleep, by the way, so that from 3:00 a.m. until waking most days I am tossing, turning and groaning. On one hand it catches me by surprise: "It really does happen!" The thing some of my patients have told me about over the years now has a first name as well as a last name. On another hand, it makes me kind of nervous: "Gee, what new kind of pain will I experience next?"

There's a whole other round of concern, as well. One problem with body/mind/spirit medicine is that it can seem like every health issue is the sufferer's fault: "Well, that's what happens when you don't process grief." This is where the sensitivity, maturity and humanity of the practitioner come into play. Yes, there is truth to "that's what happens when you don't process grief," but a humane, mature and sensitive person will understand that grief happens in life, sometimes unendurable grief. It is a cruel and unhelpful person who simply offers a generic observation, and it is a more useful one who tries to help you with your specific process. Even less helpful is the person who says "That's your karma." Maybe it is and maybe it isn't, but it certainly is useless, offensive and entirely presumptuous advice.

When you are in the middle of extended, severe pain, though, to some extent you do have a choice to make -- will you succumb to the pain and try everything in your power to retreat from it? Or will you try to learn from the pain and try everything in your power to work through it, even if you must do so over and over again, day after day? These are very personal questions and no one on the outside has any right to make any judgment or determination about the pain sufferer's answer. The answer may change, too, from day to day or week to week, and none has the right to judge those changes, either.

For now, my decision has been to try to understand my pain as well as I can, seek such assurance as I can that the pain doesn't herald some lethal condition, and seek the assistance of those whose opinions I value to help me with understanding the pain or (please God!) relieving it.