The Downside to Powering Through Pain
/By Crystal Lindell
I spent the last few days being incredibly active physically, and using 7-OH to help me power through my pain.
And I’m going to be honest with you: It was FANTASTIC… in the moment.
I got so much stuff done! I felt amazing. And other than the fact that I had to take a bite of a 7-OH tablet every few hours, I got to pretend I was completely healthy!
If you’re unfamiliar with it, 7-OH is an alkaloid that occurs naturally in kratom. When concentrated, it has opioid-like effects that relieve pain and boost energy levels.
I was swimming in wins after I took it.
But, today? Today does not feel fantastic. Today feels like hell.
When I woke up, I realized that all that activity was done with a predatory loan, and now the bill is due.
Every joint hurts, my eyes are extremely dried out, and the bottom of my right foot is swollen because I have been ignoring my bone spur for the last week. I struggled to even stand up out of the bed and walk to the bathroom.
I am also completely exhausted.
Over the years, anti-opioid advocates have started to spread the idea that pain medication is bad because it covers up pain that your body is trying to communicate. For example, if you don’t feel like you can walk on a sprained ankle, it probably means you should not be walking on your sprained ankle.
This has always annoyed me because my most prominent pain – intercostal neuralgia in my ribs – is both unexplained and incurable. It’s not trying to communicate anything at all. It just IS. And the only thing I can do is treat it with pain relievers.
But that makes it easy for me to forget about all the other ways that having Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome impacts my body. My joints are not as strong as other people’s, I seem to get injured more frequently, and just existing causes exhaustion.
The good news is that I can take pain medication to power through all that if I need to. And I have recently found 7-OH to be especially great at helping me do that.
The bad news is that powering through pain and fatigue will eventually catch up with me – an effect that I’m clearly dealing with today.
I definitely do not want anyone to think that I am siding with the anti-opioid crowd about how pain medication is bad because it covers up symptoms. Pain medication is a godsend. And many chronic pain patients – myself included – desperately need to power through because we have no other choice.
When the pain lasts for years, or even decades, you can’t just stay in bed all day “listening to your pain.” The world doesn’t work that way.
But perhaps it is best to admit that there is a limit to just how much we should be using pain relievers to power through. And maybe it is wise to make sure that we don’t go too far past that limit – if only because the bill will eventually come due.
As for me, I will be spending the rest of the day paying for my excesses over the last week with lots of naps and recovery time. Hopefully, I’ll be relatively functional again soon.
I will definitely be using 7-OH again. But next time, I’ll also be taking breaks and listening to my body.
