Category Archives for Mental Health

Gratitude and Creativity: Jet Lagged Pain Doodles

I’m home after a long absence.

I left for my trip a few weeks before Christmas. During the days leading up to my departure, I felt conflicted for so many reasons about whether I should go or not. Even, when the plane landed the knot of doubt in my stomach still hadn’t begun to unwind. Now that I’ve returned home and I feel somewhat settled, I’m happy and grateful that I went.

My trip was a mix of adventurous ups and downs. I did so much more than I planned or expected. During my travels, I spent time with family, I met up with old friends and I made some new friends; but, unfortunately, I also had to face losing and removing relationships with some overseas connections from my life.

I walked a lot too; mainly because I had little choice but also because it’s the best way to see new places; and I traveled, more than I cared to, by train, which proved uncomfortable for my legs and back. I even took a trip within my trip; that required more travel by airplane. I re-familiarized myself with an old city I love and I fell in love with a new to me city I’d long dreamed about visiting.

I’ve been home for more than a week. Although I’m resting, as much as humanly possible, since I crossed the threshold into my home, the jet lag and pain from an 8-hour flight and crossing five time zones aren’t being kind to me. I knew I’d have to take it easy for a few days, just as I did when I landed on the other side of the pond, but I’m feeling as if coming home might have been the hardest leg of my travels. The pain in my legs and my overall fatigue may actually be ganging up on me…

Thankfully, I always have something to distract me – even if just slightly – from the pain coursing through my legs, which is now preventing me from sleeping peacefully to get the rest that I need. Instead of sleeping – most nights, and long stretches of each day – I’ve been drawing and I finished a page in my art journal/sketchbook that I started while I was away. The intention behind this page was to help me choose patterns for the wings of a butterfly that one of my young cousins asked me to draw for her. I chose the patterns a few weeks ago but I also wanted to add colour to the page.

My inability to sleep and the need for distraction from my pain, proved the perfect combination to keep me focused on finishing the page. As has happened at similar times before, the creative practice I’ve developed in recent years got me through more tough nights; and it will probably help get me to the other side of countless more.

 

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Having a Period While Living With Chronic Pain

I’ve been contemplating writing about this issue for a while, and finally decided to just do it because I have yet to see anything written or discussed about it anywhere. It’s an issue I assume that countless women who fall within the reproductive age demographic and live with chronic pain and/or other chronic illnesses struggle through regularly.

I’ve always had difficult menstrual cycles, or what is more commonly called monthly periods. Since the first one arrived when I was in my early teens, it’s been a painful monthly – or near monthly – reminder of my femininity and reproductive health. Each period I’ve had has been accompanied by excruciating pelvic/uterine cramps, back pain, nausea, heavy bleeding, fatigue – and more often than I’d care to remember – debilitating migraines. Over the years, I’ve even had multiple investigative surgeries to look for potential causes and to rule out the possibility that I might have endometriosis, which I don’t have. Alas, each surgery has resulted in no explanations for why I’ve lived with this degree of period pain (dysmenorrhea) since entering womanhood.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve adopted a glass half full approach to the way I look at this situation: I take comfort in the knowledge that each of these monthly episodes means I’m one month closer to menopause. The phase of my life when I‘ll no longer have to live with the anxious anticipation of the arrival of my period or suffer through its painful symptoms. Nonetheless, from my current vantage point, menopause seems to be farther away than I’d like it to be.

More unfortunate, is that since I’ve been living with daily, nonstop chronic pelvic pain and leg pain, I’ve also been battling with the added monthly pain caused by my periods. The worst thing about this is that I feel each of these intense pains separately. That makes it even harder to cope or do basic daily activities during the time that I have my period.

For the duration of each of my periods (usually 7 days, sometimes longer), it feels like an extra layer of piercing pain is thrown on top of my unrelenting chronic pain and it makes my pelvis – and every organ in it – feel as if it’s being squeezed in a vise . Strangely, I feel the pain from my periods strongest within the same area where I had surgery to remove the growth that triggered the illness I now live with. However, since that growth is no longer sitting in my pelvis, the increased pain during my period makes no sense, at least not to me. Worse still, is that the copious amount of opioid pain medications I take daily to manage my chronic pain do nothing to relieve my period pain(s).

As I struggle with this agony each menstrual cycle, as I am now, I wonder how other women living with chronic illnesses and/or chronic pain cope if they also have painful periods. How do they go about living their lives when they have to endure extreme menstrual symptoms – including crippling pelvic cramps – combined with other incessant symptoms and pain(s) from a chronic illness that may affect multiple areas of their bodies? How do they cope with the bombardment of pain in multiple areas of their bodies for days on end, when pain in just one part of the body can make one feel as if they might lose their mind? Moreover, since women have lived with painful periods for as long as we’ve had periods, why aren’t there more definitive solutions – medical or otherwise – for treating menstrual symptoms and pain?

This may sound like a rant to some people but these are legitimate questions when one lives with these types of pain. Why do women have to suffer like this continually and why should we have to endure painful periods on top of a chronic illness or already debilitating chronic pain? When will modern medicine develop something that stops us from suffering this way each month of our lives when we mature to reproductive age?

I’m hoping this post sparks some discussion and encourages women to share what helps them cope with painful periods. Aside from curling up in the fetal position and begging the universe to make the pain go away, I wouldn’t mind hearing some useful ideas to help get me through these periods with less extra pain…

 

Monica – Don’t Take It Personal (Just One Of Dem Days)

 

 

Note: There’s some interesting sharing about this post happening on my Instagram page .

Breaking My Unplanned Break

I took a break from writing for what should have been a few weeks. The weeks have ballooned into months. Not because I planned it but because it was becoming difficult to parse through what I need to focus on to keep myself healthy(ish) and sane while living with chronic pain; and what I want to do, to stay engaged with the world while keeping myself above any potential downward spiral into depression.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been trying to restart what had become my daily mindful, creative practice that included writing, but I’m still struggling. I had hoped that eliminating the pressure of scheduled time in front of my laptop keyboard and mound of art supplies would somehow recharge me and reignite my enthusiasm to share what happens in my life involving my illness, treatments, and coping methods. However, it’s possible that the opposite happened. Stepping away for so long might have further rusted my ability to concentrate and coherently string words together; or it could simply be – as it was when I started my break – that it continues to grow more difficult to find a comfortable position to sit in for long enough to engage my creativity and to record my thoughts.

Thankfully, my break did not extend to creating in my art journals/sketchbooks. In the time I’ve been away, while drawing and doodling, I’ve been inspired to handwrite poetry that doesn’t feel forced for the sake of having content for my blog. I’ve also scribbled thoughts about all that has happened in the margins of my art journal/sketchbook pages. My hope is that some of these scribbled thoughts might make their way into or become full posts in the near future.

In the time I’ve been away from writing, I crossed what to me is a significant milestone: the fifth year of living with my illness, its growing list of side effects and continual pain. Since all of this started five years ago, I’ve grown intimately familiar with the struggle of maintaining focus and concentration – on pretty much everything – as I push myself through each day physically and emotionally with some days being monumentally worse than others are. Strangely, most days, I feel numb at the same time that my body is overwhelmed by intense and sometimes unbearable pain. I don’t know if that will make sense to anyone else: Feeling nothing, while feeling everything all at once.

I may not have recharged during this break, but I’ve come to realize that whether I’m engaged with my creative practice or not, I’ve managed to make it this far with my illness; and, I suppose, I’ll continue to move forward whether I write about it daily or not.

Breaking My Unplanned Break Outline – November 2018
Breaking My Unplanned Break Filled – November 2018