The Separate 'Planet' We Live on as People With Chronic Pain
Living with chronic pain is like living on another planet with a completely different atmosphere.
Other pains can usually be pointed to or clearly described. They are polite enough to stay within certain physical or emotional confines, and have a reasonable shelf life.
Chronic pain, on the other hand simply refuses to leave, and often roams around the body wherever it pleases.
To add insult to injury, instead of keeping within the physical body, it sort of oozes out of its original borders and takes over more and more of the territory of experience, eventually seeping through and soaking into the entire fabric of one’s existence.
Pain Becomes the House We Live In
What was originally on the inside, now feels like its taken over the outside, too. Like you are within it, instead of it within you. At that point, pain isn’t just here or there, it’s everywhere.
It’s really very strange, and challenging to explain to others who haven’t had the experience. It’s like nothing else. Sometimes it feels like an unwanted house guest who never leaves, but eventually it feels like the house itself.
You’re surrounded by a field of pain and everything you see, do, hear, express, or receive must pass through the ever-present fog of the pain zone. I think this might be the most difficult thing for others to understand.
Pain is no longer just part of our experience of life. Life must now take place completely immersed within it.
Too Late For A Band-Aid
I think this is one reason it’s so hard to find treatments and modalities that actually work for chronic pain. It’s complex and has become interwoven with the whole self and the whole body and the whole nervous system and everything that is offered is just way too small, or too specialized, or too directed to a single aspect of this all-encompassing thing, called chronic pain.
It’s sort of like calling in the plumber to fix the leak in the kitchen sink when the whole house has just fallen off a cliff.
The well-meaning plumber focuses on the kitchen sink and says, here, let’s change the washers or whatever and you’re living in this disaster of a house that needs all kinds of different and simultaneous attentions and the plumber just can’t see past the broken faucet.
Or something like that.
Looking For The Door That Lets Pain Out
I’m looking for the door that lets the pain out, like on a spaceship and you open it and everything is sucked right out — the whole atmosphere of planet pain – and then you get to close the door and start over.
But I think the door I’m looking for doesn’t open out like that, it opens in.
Anyway, I’ll let you know as soon as I’ve found it.
Getty photo by interstid
Sarah is the author of The Pain Companion: Everyday Wisdom for Living With and Moving Beyond Chronic Pain (New World Library, 2018). She is a multiple award winning producer and director of educational films, including Dancing From the Inside Out, a highly acclaimed documentary on disabled dance. She holds an MBA in International Marketing and has worked in high-tech management and taught undergraduate and graduate business administration. As the result of a work related injury in the Fall of 2007, Sarah contracted Thoracic Outlet Syndrome (TOS) and lived with debilitating nerve pain for more than a decade. She writes and creates videos about positive approaches to living with chronic pain. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. You can visit her at www.ThePainCompanion.com.
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