Sometimes, as we age and change, our bodies betray us. First we might think it is stiffness, then soreness, then we enter the treadmill/s of doctors, tests, questions and very few answers.
For women, it’s hard. The earth and life flow, as energy, through our bodies and when the body hurts this flow is interrupted and redirected. Energy gets blocked by painful parts, or it gets diverted into trying to carry on and adjusting to the pain. The body becomes stressed as there is less energy to accomplish the tasks that women perform everyday.
If you have a body with which you have already had to make compromises, because of differing abilities, energy is already being used (and abused) at a higher rate to get through every day. This alone is exhausting. Then the body decides to add a little change to the mix and this is challenging and painful. Change demands that you surrender control of part/s of your body and what it can do. At first you fight and think, “No, this is not happening”. Then you might try ‘flight’ by taking pain treating medication. (“Pain treating” not ‘pain relieving’ because nothing really gives relief or “pain control”, as doctors like to say. And sometimes you take medication only to find that the effects it has on your mind take more energy than the ‘pain’ itself.)
Boarding the fast moving train of change is like being flung from a sling-shot towards the void of the unknown. When this void is a black hole of pain in a changing body, there are invisible sharp pins, like those used in voodoo, that come hurtling at you at great speeds. These are pins of pain. Originating within the body or joints, they leave a tearing, burning sensation that cannot be seen. It can only be felt. The pain/pins hit you and your body stops. You might want to keep going but you cannot. These invisible pins of pain feel as if they are tearing the flesh from your joints and bones.
If this pain could be seen, it would be red and bleeding torn flesh, with tight bands of sinew and muscle, stretched, sometimes broken. The thing is, it is continuous. There is no calm and healing time. There is only tearing and not tearing and you learn to live with it. You also learn to live with the fatigue it causes and, if it is not the fatigue of the body dealing with pain, there is the fatigue of the drugs you take to try to ease the pain.
This is why, when a surgeon says “we can take that joint out and replace it with metal”, you think ‘yeah, bring it on’. There is almost a sadistic pleasure in knowing that the muscles, nerves and tendons that have been cause the pain are going to be stripped from the joint and sliced and diced at the surgeon’s will.
Where surgery is an option there is the possibility of relief. But some women manage pain, change and life for the latter half of their lives. These are strong women. But then, there is a saying that “What does not kill you makes you stronger”. Sometimes I have thought I would stop breathing and die from the pain…
I haven’t died yet……….so I must be getting stronger.
