Pain, part 2

I was born to be a writer, and then there was some training involved. Daddy was an English professor and Mama was a newspaper editor. I always loved to read and write, but the thought of doing it for a job made me depressed, so I pursued dance, exercise therapy and acupuncture instead. I have to confess, I've always had a morbid fantasy that I will some day suffer an accident that leaves me physically disabled, leaving me no choice but to pursue writing. Little did I imagine that pain might be that disability.

I have been thinking of my pain as an internal bed of nails. Like the beds of nails used by fakirs, I hope that it will lead me to new understandings and new insight that I can use to help myself and my patients, but maybe I’m just a deluded masochist. I am willing to endure this pain fairly cheerfully in hopes of such an outcome, but at 4:00 a.m., when I roll over and am pierced for the third time by those internal nails, it's hard to be cheerful. I've only had this pain for 6 months -- in a year I may be begging for Oxycontin. You never know, and I hope I won't be judged for it, however things go.

There's this additional thing with chronic pain: it seems like the pain channels become burned in, as in “screen burn-in” on a monitor. It feels like our nervous systems, like LCD screens, undergo physical changes because of repeated and prolonged energetic transmissions across certain of our circuits. You don't become scarred by the internal bed of nails but rather get sores from it that are constantly inflamed and re-inflamed. In other words, we chronic pain sufferers may hyper-develop the physical channels associated with the pain response itself, ironically amplifying our sensitivity along those same damn channels.

Has anyone else noted that irony seems to be a by-product of pain?




So. Whaddaya do about pain?

Get ahead of it. This is a pretty standard idea with wide agreement among different practitioners. If you were my sister, I'd say, "Acupuncture, Advil, hot bath, massage, hypnotherapy -- whatever works. And try to stay ahead of it -- falling behind and getting back ahead is a lot more stressful than getting ahead and staying ahead." In addition to acupuncture, yoga and diet, I recently started using aspirin, myself. A temporary measure, but it helps me get by while I search out a more profound and permanent treatment.

Be open-minded. Hoo, boy, this is tough. Whatever direction your mind doesn't go? It may need to go there in dealing with your pain. Try to be patient.

Breathe. We could go into a LOT more detail about this, but if you can start a breath and finish a breath, the pain hasn't killed you yet. This is a starting place, and when all you can see is an undifferentiated sea of pain stretching in every direction, a starting place can be a kind of anchor.