People Who Live Without Pain Rarely Think or Care About Those Who Do
/By Ann Marie Gaudon
As I crawl into bed early at night, so grateful for the bed I have, I strategically place two separate heating pads for pain relief. Simultaneously, I strategically place two ice packs for pain relief.
What’s one to do? “A” and “B” require heat for relief, and “C” and “D” require ice for relief.
Such is my life.
What is it like to not have pain? To just go to bed at a regular adult time, slip into your sheets, and drift off? I have no idea, and so I can only imagine this. I would have to go back at least four decades in time and I just cannot remember that far back.
It’s ironic that I am so high maintenance, but not as you might think. I couldn’t be less of a diva. The days of hair, make-up, and stylish clothes are long gone. I care nothing for those things because they don’t do anything to make me feel better.
I putter along with regular haircuts, minimal make-up on days I can manage it, and that’s about it.
I have no fear of what any pain may or may not mean. I do not have a cascade of stress hormones flooding my system daily out of fear. That is not in my life, and is what I have achieved from a healthy dose of self-care and chronic pain management.
What it cannot do, however, is stop a body from deteriorating, stop pain from increasing, or stop the course of disease.
As a young person, I can assure you I never saw this coming. There are other illnesses in my family of origin, but not chronic pain as I have experienced for 40+ years.
Unfortunately, there is not a lot of help out there. Health Canada, which is the Canadian agency responsible for “helping Canadians maintain and improve their health,” claims to ensure that everyone has access to high-quality health services.
But from all that I have read and meetings I have attended, Health Canada remains essentially clueless to the plight of a person in pain. They have always drunk the Kool-Aid of anti-opioid zealots, and believe the endless published rubbish about those medications.
As sickening as that is (no pun intended), I was never able to find anyone with any type of power that actually was a person in pain. That’s a big problem.
Just to be clear, this is not a column about opioids or any other type of medication. It’s about the sheer ugliness of chronic pain. For some of us, the diagnoses just keep rollin’ along. I have officially lost count.
There are two new ones that I can tell you about. One is Baxter’s nerve entrapment, which feels like a razor sliding up into your heel with every step. For a long time, I thought it was a very stubborn case of plantar fasciitis in both feet. However, I have since learned there’s a different diagnosis entirely in my right heel.
The second newer diagnosis is something called costochondritis. No, I hadn’t heard of it either. I thought I was having a massive heart attack when I awoke in the middle of the night in severe chest pain. I resigned myself and just felt ready to go unconscious. However, that didn’t happen.
I was advised over the next three days to go to the emergency department, but having care-avoidant health anxiety, I refused to go.
I was in tremendous pain and could hardly move at all, but on the third day, someone said to me that I might have pneumonia. That word is what got me to the emergency department, because I could not forgive myself if I ever infected someone else.
It wasn’t pneumonia, it wasn’t a heart attack, and it wasn’t a pulmonary embolism. It was costochondritis, which the Mayo Clinic advises can feel much like a heart attack. Now the chest pain comes and goes.
At times I feel angry and sad for myself, but where my heart really lies is for younger people. What’s to become of the young at the beginning of their chronic pain or not quite there yet? I shudder at the thought of it.
I recently had a young client with painful rheumatoid arthritis who was especially suffering with pain in one hip that was causing mobility issues. Practically begging her neurologist for pain relief, the response was: “No one with rheumatoid arthritis should expect to live a pain-free life.”
They were gutted by those words.
Is this what to expect? “Don’t expect to live a pain-free life” when there are scores of medications out there developed for just that? What is wrong with people?
I can tell you my unscientific theory about this. People who do not live in pain rarely think or care about others that do.
Ann Marie Gaudon is a registered social worker and psychotherapist in the Waterloo region of Ontario, Canada with a specialty in chronic pain management. She has been a chronic pain patient for over 40 years and works part-time as her health allows. For more information about Ann Marie's counseling services, visit her website.
