Category Archives for Chronic Pain

No Fire In My Legs

I’ve written often about the pain in my legs feeling like fire when it gets unbearably intense. Today the pain feels manageable, but I’m excited to share about another kind of fire. For the first time in my life –   without anyone’s help – I successfully lit a fire in a wood fireplace. That may seem like no big deal for a person who lives in a house with a wood fireplace or anyone who goes camping regularly; but I’m a city girl who never goes camping and only ever has to flip a switch to light a gas fireplace.

I won’t lie, it took quite a few tries to get the kindling to stay lit until it became a fully crackling fire. When the flames finally started shooting, I felt a great sense of accomplishment.

No Fire In My Legs – December 2018
No Fire In My Legs – December 2018

Interestingly, I’m away from home and before leaving on my trip I was stressed about the very real possibility of experiencing a fiery pain flare up. Nevertheless, here I am today, after traveling thousands of miles and for the first time in a long time, the fire I’m feeling is exactly where it should be…

 

Alicia Keys – Girl On Fire

 

Returning to Writing

Today is the first day I am writing here since my surgery on August 11, 2015. It’s not the first day because I was incapable before now. It’s the first day because emotionally I feel ready, although I’m not ready to write about the details of what happened to me. However, I will tell you that regardless of how things have turned out – from a surgical perspective – I still feel blessed. From the moment I woke up from the anesthetics, I’ve had so many people caring for and about me (medical staff, friends, and family), and that care continues today and probably will for some time to come.

The reason I’m writing now is that my emotions overcame me during a conversation I was having with my friend M this afternoon when she told me to “let people care for you. It serves them too.” It’s the first time I cried since having surgery – not counting the moments I will tell you about at another time when I was in the recovery room. M’s words opened me up because, I assume, I needed the right stimulant to open me up. M felt that this emotional breakdown might be a combination of all the chemicals, the drugs, and effects from surgery building up in my body. That does make sense, but what makes more sense is that I haven’t had a moment to be alone with myself and feelings about all that has happened since I came out of surgery and her words landed on me in a way that made it impossible to keep the emotions and tears inside me any longer. So, the tears spilled out, my breath became shallow, my throat ached and my shoulders shook as I cried.

I recognize that I am being cared for, but I haven’t been caring for myself. I haven’t been tending to my emotional needs even though I know that I’m the only person who can do that. Things – unnamed feelings, fears, anxiety, hurt – have been building up and I have to start to release them before they bury me.

 

Peter Gabriel – Digging In The Dirt

My Legs Are On Fire

Intellectually I understand the definition of referred pain – pain felt at a site different from that of an injured or diseased organ or body part – and how “it is due to the fact that nerve signals from several areas of the body may “feed” the same nerve pathway leading to the spinal cord and brain.” I also understand how it’s physiologically possible for pain signals to get altered as they travel along the nervous system to the brain and result in horrendous pain in a body.

Pain and How You Sense It

Pain and How You Sense It

But, after all this time I still can’t make sense of how it’s possible for something in my lower abdomen to cause me to feel so much pain in my legs, back – and since my unsuccessful procedure in February – by right butt cheek. Since waking up this morning my legs are on fire and my back hurts from my lower spine to my neck. I can’t find a comfortable sitting position. I’m walking like someone whose body is significantly aged and has experienced decades of brutal punishment. While every nerve in my body is on high alert waiting for what might come next.

I feel such burning pain that I imagine it would be easy to set another person on fire with the slightest touch from my skin. Today is not a rare day. This is the kind of pain that I am now accustomed to feeling. Whether it starts early at the break of morning, in the middle of a brightly lit afternoon, or as evening winds into the darkness of night, my pain cannot be separated from my body. All the same, the intellectual logic of knowing why this is happening cannot blend with the desperate, emotional child trying to jump out of my body and run as far away as possible from all this pain.

A Flock Of Seagulls – I Ran