Living with Chronic Pain is no picnic. Intractable pain day after day wears down the body, the mind and the spirit and it can be extremely difficult finding anything good in the experience, but I have found a few things I wanted to share with you. Remember, these are my own personal thoughts.
- If you’re a spiritual person, it can deepen your faith. Now, in all honesty, Chronic Pain with no resolution can have the opposite effect and have you turning away from your Higher Power because you haven’t been healed, but I tend to think in the positives anyway. I believe that having Chronic Pain helps you to draw closer to your Higher Power as you find something…anything… to cling to when times are bad. God is an excellent listener and doesn’t mind if you yell at Him – He already knows you’re doing it, so what’s the point of pretending. Go ahead and be angry at Him. Yell, rant, rave, swear…do whatever makes you feel better. He can handle it. And then when you’re done, take a moment to thank Him for listening to you without judgement.
- You develop inner strength. Nobody develops inner strength like a person who lives with Chronic Pain. As the hours and days and years go by and nothing about your physical situation changes, there is resilience. It’s the necessary component that allows you to pick yourself back up after setbacks and keep going. To say to the world “I’m not done yet”. It’s the part of you that refuses to give up when others might say “it’s too hard”. Only you can determine your own resilience and whether or not you can keep going, but so far, you’ve had a pretty excellent track record to keep going. You are brave.
- Patience really is a virtue. In a world where everything needs to be had RIGHTNOW!! patience seems to be an old-fashioned quality. A person with Chronic Pain learns about patience very quickly – an oxymoron if ever there was one. You wait for appointments, you wait for doctors, you wait for your pain to subside, you wait for tests, you wait for results, you wait to feel better, you wait for answers, you wait, you wait, you wait. Depending on how complex your situation is, there may be several doctors involved in your care, so you wait for all of them to coordinate their schedules to see you and treat you. You wait endless hours for flare-ups to subside. For sleep to come. For pain to stop. For nausea to disappear. For bones to heal. And in all of this, you learn patience because you have no other choice.
- You finally have time to… When you’re feeling up to it, you finally have time to do those small things that you never had time for earlier: watch a favourite show on TV, read a favourite book, phone a friend for a chat, go for a massage, get your hair cut, organize the junk drawer, clean up the hobby room, work on a craft, write a letter to send via snail mail, look up a simple recipe to try that isn’t exhausting, order some flowers, send a love note to your spouse, go through your kid’s baby books or old photos, play a computer game, take an online course, go to an exercise class…the list is as endless as your imagination.
- You’re forced to slow down your pace. If you’re anything like me, most people with Chronic Pain or an Invisible Illness probably were Type A Personalities at some point in their lives – always on the go, go, go. If you were a doer who was always busy before, you’ve been given a gift to slow down and appreciate life around you. I became fully disabled in October 2009 but probably should have gone on disability about 2 years sooner. I had to really push through those last 2 years, to the point that I often lost the thread of a conversation right in the middle – I wouldn’t have a clue what we were talking about. I couldn’t manage more than one task at a time when I was famous for my multi-tasking abilities and I would jeopardize safety in firefighting drills by not remembering the steps to take to get out safely. By taking Disability and being forced to slow down, I was able to regain those skills again, in a more family oriented situation.
What gifts would you add to this list that you’ve received since experiencing Chronic Pain or Invisible Illness? Does this list ring true for you? Leave a comment below and share your thoughts.
There Is Always Hope
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