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How Music Is Helping Me Cope After My Pain Medication Was Taken Away

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Music is such a powerful healer. The sounds and vibrations can help break up stress and tension. Feeling the the beat can raise or lower your heart rate. It provides positive feelings and an escape. For someone with chronic illness, this can be such a welcome escape.

When I am going through a fibromyalgia flare or when anxiety starts to pump adrenaline through my body, I have a method of calming down. I use a sensory deprivation where I go to a dark room, put a nice heavy blanket on, hug a plushie and I listen to music.

My personal favorite is the Lord of the Rings soundtrack (Fellowship of the Ring, Track 17: “The Breaking of the Fellowship”). I hear the notes and get lost in the music. It gives the soul something to attach on to and it pulls the body with it. By closing off the rest of your senses, with darkness and being alone, you get swept up in the sounds. It is amazingly peaceful.

In difficult times, music has a way of helping us find a way through. I have known quite a few people going through a bad break-up and listening to their couple’s song over and over. I distinctly remember living in a 22-foot pop-up camper with my family (six people and a dog for six months) in a trailer park. The trailer site next to us had a husband and wife who fought like cats and dogs. Being a trailer park, with very thin walls, everyone in a five-mile radius heard everything, much to our regret. The husband who left each night slamming the door and the wife who played “I Will Always Love You” by Dolly Parton, sung by Whitney Houston while drinking wine.

Every night.

As a teenager, this was not a fun event each night. However, I realized that this was a coping method and a way for her to calm down. The next morning they would come out of the trailer, smiles and hugs until the next evening. Now this was a very unhealthy situation, but it has shown me that music can help in very difficult situations and lead you through them.

I am currently facing a huge hurdle in my health. I am having my tramadol removed from my medication. My doctor is no longer allowed to prescribe it to me. He was very chagrin while telling me. He was upset. Due to the “opioid crisis” I am found to be no longer fit to take it. After almost six years of being on it with little to no side effects, a much higher quality of life and one of the backbones of my pain management, I am being told there is no reason to have it. My chronic pain and illness disagrees.

Strenuously.

I have to agree with it. I am having to go through a new cycle of pain management. I am having to adapt to life with severe pain once again on a daily basis. So in order to do this, I have been bringing out music once again. My new favorite is “Country Roads” by John Denver. I have listen to the track 20 hours in the last month alone, though not all at once. Most times it is only about 10 minutes. And finding 10 minutes to allow my body to relax and get a break from feeling is sometimes all I can get.

I will take it.

Getty Image by g-stockstudio

Originally published: July 7, 2018
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