Blog post for the week of13 July… Woow Friday the 13th and it feels like it. Having been in hospital since Tuesday, today I had my suspicions confirmed: I was being treated for pain but the cause was poorly identified. Well, you could say ‘wrongly’ as different parts of the body are “different parts of the body”.
However, my doctor is good and believes in working with other people. This is how another doctor became involved. This was a “real live one” – someone who I met many years and who has had many, many, many years of experience treating people with my disability.
This doctor performed the gentlest examination I have ever had and declared the excruciating pain to be a bilateral copying of a condition I already had on the other side. Of course, this makes perfect sense to me as when the pain and degeneration started on the other, the symptoms were exactly the same.
Later in the day, the diagnosis was confirmed by x-rays. If it is possible, the x-ray confirmation of the “real live one’s” diagnosis was almost anti-climatic as I already relieved to have a diagnosis.
Knowledge really is power because as soon as I knew what was causing the pain I understood it.
Showing posts with label pain. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pain. Show all posts
Monday, 30 July 2007
Monday, 14 May 2007
Pain
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.
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.
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