Does Having Chronic Pain Mean I’ll Die Young?
/By Crystal Lindell
This morning I got news that someone I knew had passed away.
I describe him as “someone I knew” because my connection to Rich is difficult to explain. He was my fiancé’s, late-mom’s, long-time boyfriend. Basically, my step-father-in-law. Ish.
After battling a bad cold, which may or may not have been COVID, he had an aneurysm and then spent a couple weeks in the ICU before passing away last night.
It’s the kind of news that’s both expected and painfully shocking.
He was too young. Just 58 years old. But his short life had been hard on him and his body. He had spent years doing manual labor and treating his pain with multiple types of medications.
So, in retrospect, if you had asked me for a prediction, I would have told you that I never expected Rich to live to see old age.
But I didn’t really expect him to die at 58 either.
Since 2020, nine people I knew have died. Two long-time friends, my cousin, my dad, my aunt, my step-dad, my fiancé’s mom, my former boss, and now, Rich.
My fiancé Chris and I got engaged in December 2020 and he’s still my “fiancé” in large part because the onslaught of death seemed to freeze my brain in such a way that made it impossible to plan a wedding.
And now, a quarter of our would-be guest list is dead.
Many of the dead were very young. My age. All of them were too young. None of them made it to their 70s.
I can’t help but consider my own mortality. And it’s made me realize something I had been trying to avoid: People who develop severe chronic pain at 29, like I did, often don’t live long enough to be considered old. And when they do, they are the exception to the rule.
Even if the pain itself isn’t terminal, everything else will surely have an easier time taking me out. It’s not like I’m in peak disease-fighting shape.
Not to mention all the damage that taking pills for breakfast every morning must be doing to my organs.
The thing about the kind of nebulous chronic pain that I have is that I never got to have one of those movie-scene conversations in a doctor’s office where they clearly explain how dire my situation is. I suspect those conversations are reserved for illnesses that show up on blood work and CT Scans.
My pain has always been something only I could feel, and nobody else could see or test.
As such, my doctors have always been some mix of hopeful and dismissive about my ailment. They’d tell me that maybe I’d magically get better one day, while also telling me that they couldn’t find anything wrong with my ribs.
And none of them have ever spoken directly to me about the many ways that chronic pain and my eventual diagnosis with Ehler-Danlos Syndrome might shorten my life expectancy. Technically, neither one is supposed to on its own.
That doesn’t mean they can’t though. And I suspect the doctors know this, given the fact that they are willing to prescribe me the kind of opioid regime most people don’t ever go off of.
These days, I’m known among my loved ones as having “a lot of health issues,” while among my acquaintances I’m known as “the one who writes about her chronic pain online.”
So someday, when they all get the news of my death, I’m sure none of them will be too shocked. People aren’t surprised when someone like me, with a rare disease that causes chronic pain, dies young. They’re surprised when we don’t.
There was a time, in my early days with chronic pain, when I prayed for death. A time when I could not imagine spending years of my life with stabbing rib pain.
But over the years I came to accept it, and learned to manage it as much as medication would allow.
I’m 42 now, and a few years ago I started letting my gray roots grow out.
After being surrounded by so much death, I saw them now as my silver trophy. My prize for making it to my 40s — a privilege that some of my late friends never got to experience.
How lucky am I to have lived long enough to have gray hair?
How lucky am I to be old enough for wrinkles? To have reached the age where I’m now slowly losing my ability to read small print? To be alive to complain about how hard it is to stand up, now that my body is aging.
How fortunate am I? How fantastic for me.
I can only hope that I make it much, much longer. Maybe another 42 years, if I’m truly lucky. But if not, I have faced my own mortality. I can see clearly just how fragile it is. And I’m okay with that.
I will spend my days baking, caring for loved ones, and writing. I will focus on all the things I would be focused on if I had ever gotten to have one of those somber doctor office conversations about my health. All the things that everyone realizes truly matter in life — right when they are about to run out of life themselves.
So even if I’m not OK, I will be OK.
