Tag Archives for healing

How Do Some People Do It?

It’s been about two weeks since a significant pain flare up locked my body in its grip. I’ve been trying to block out my pain through numbing my mind by mindlessly watching a copious amount of movies (all six of the earlier Star Wars) and entire seasons of TV shows, while keeping my legs elevated as much as humanly possible on my couch; then sleeping when my body allowed. Roughly translated, that means sleeping when the pain exhausts me. I’ve also talked to as few people as possible, on the phone, or in person because it felt like talking required energy I didn’t have and added fuel to my pain. Fortunately, somewhere inside me the same question kept surfacing: How do some people do it?

How do people with unbeatable diagnoses and/or prognoses beat them? Over the years, I’ve seen countless stories about gravely ill people who inexplicably recover from an illness, for which there is no cure; recover from accidents, when the odds were heavily stacked against them; or learn to walk again after breaking their spines. How do they do it? Are there people blessed with superhuman healing? Are they resilient in a way that science is yet unable to explain and capture in a treatment or deliver in a pill? What is it about a person that makes them so tough they can fight through the worst life throws at them?

I want to know. I need to know because I want to be one of these people. I want the strength to heal my pain, even if it initially causes me more pain and because I want to get better like these people worked so hard to do. This illness that still causes my doctors confusion more than two years after it started and four months after major abdominal surgery, well, I want to figure out how to beat it – with or without a positive prognosis. I wish I knew exactly what I’m fighting to better understand the options I can apply and how to find more if the first set don’t work. But I don’t know; yet, I don’t want to limit myself to what my doctors tell me I can or cannot do to heal. I don’t want to limit my life at all.

I don’t know how other people do it, but I want to beat the odds that seem so highly stacked against me, even if it means approaching each day as if it was the biggest battle of my life. I don’t want to spend more two-week spans feeling helpless or that I’m trapped by pain. I’ve lost a lot because of this illness, but I know it’s time to figure out how to regain fully at least one of the things not completely lost: my fighting spirit. I’ve had to fight for everything my entire life, but I lose a little more of that spirit each week I spend lying on my back.

 

Bon Jovi – It’s My Life

In The Not So Still Night

In the early hours of this morning – when I woke up for maybe the third time in what should have been a full night’s sleep – the strangest questions crept into my half-drowsy mind: What if the high dose of pain medication I’ve been taking since my surgery is the dose I should have taken all along? What if I’ve been looking at this all wrong? What if I kept landing in the emergency room as often as I did before was because I wasn’t prescribed the correct level of pain medication? After all, the doctors at the pain clinic had expressed a fear of not being able to manage my post-surgery pain if they prescribed a higher dose of pain medications before my surgery.

That had been the point of the nerve block – to give me more pain relief without prescribing more oral opioid pain medications. But what if my nervous system is so damaged by whatever underlying illness caused the pain to begin with that I needed more pain medication or possibly a different kind to manage my pain? Instead of feeling this high level of anxiety about taking more pain medication, shouldn’t I think about how many times in the past two years I landed in the emergency room for extra pain relief or the countless sleepless nights I had because of the pain? Shouldn’t I feel more positive that the pain specialists recognize the need for better treatment for me?

I just stopped writing and thought about those things for a moment. I haven’t landed in the emergency room since surgery, but I’m still having the sleepless nights because of pain even with the higher dose of pain medications. I still can’t travel in a vehicle without feeling pain afterward that forces me to rest to recover from what shouldn’t be an ordeal; and walking any significant distance is out of the question. Unfortunately, stopping to think raised more questions. The main ones being, what if pain medication isn’t the answer for me or what if I need an alternative method of pain management that hasn’t been tried yet? And worst of all what if I am as unusual a case as they think that doesn’t come with a straightforward cure.

So why am I awake in the wee hours of the morning ruminating over these torturous questions? Do I or don’t I need more pain medication? Should I have had this higher dose sooner? How long should I take it at this high dose? Should I focus on lowering the dose – if the higher is what I need – so significantly so soon after surgery, and if not, how much harm will extended use cause me?

How many more days and nights will I wake to find these types of questions pouring out of me in small trickles or gushing as if busting through a dam? Maybe what’s doing more harm is my inability to just allow myself to be sick and count on my body to do what it needs to do to heal itself, instead of forcing my mind to hold all my pain.

Kim Carnes – Crazy In the Night