During the past few months, I’ve been trying to do more, in spite of the pain I live with daily.

Today, however, the pain forced me to do less. I can’t sit without feeling piercing pain through the right side of my pelvis from where a huge cyst was surgically removed almost four years ago, after I’d lived under the shroud of a misdiagnosis for two years. I also can’t stand without that same piercing pain shooting up and down my right leg and through my right hip.

I had plans to do something today that I’ve been looking forward to doing for weeks: I was going to visit my new nephew at home for the first time. He arrived a month before he was due to be born. Because of that he had to spend some time in the hospital in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) after his birth before he could go home with his parents. Today would have been the first time I could hold him since he arrived in the world.

If you’re familiar with the saying about what happens when one makes plans please suspend belief in god for a moment and imagine having incessant pain mock you for thinking you have the power to do what you want when you want. That’s how I feel now. That’s how I feel most days. It’s how I feel when my body hurts so badly that I can’t do anything that requires much movement.

I wrote most of this post on my smartphone while lying in bed on my back with my right leg elevated on a foam pillow. When I started writing it, I hadn’t yet been able to make it to my living room where I keep my laptop (this won’t get posted until I do). In fact, it was almost noon and I hadn’t done much except take the morning doses of my meds, use the bathroom, and cancel the plans I had for later today. I thought lying in bed a while longer would help to ease the pain but it didn’t.

On days like this, I have no choice except to surrender to the fact that my body has limits; and that those limits may vary depending on the level of pain I feel at any point in a day. There was a time early in my illness where I couldn’t accept this. Because of my resistance and attempts to work against or ignore the pain, I made things worse. Usually meaning that I caused myself to have more frequent and more intense pain flare ups that stretched for long periods—sometimes for weeks—and often landed me in the hospital emergency room to get help managing the pain.

As frustrating as it is to have my life dictated by pain, at least now, I pay closer attention to what might be too much for my body to handle and I set my limits accordingly. Unfortunately, there are still times when even within the limits I set, I experience pain flare-ups. Then I have to assess what could have caused each of them and what I may have to change in the future.

Writing while lying on my back is the least active thing I could think of doing today. While doing this, I hoped for the pain to return to a level that feels more normal and I can cope with and get back to doing the things I want to do. As I post this that hasn’t happened yet…