Hello.
I decided to move my blog to my very own domain name. So for further posts go to.
http://www.quiteakerfuffle.com
thanks!
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
The Iliac Crest
People who are broken way know more about their bodies then people who are not broken. Just think, if you are talking to joe schmo on the street, do you think he could tell you about the tendons of his knee? Nope. It isn't likely. But someone who has had knee surgery, they can tell you all about their injury, the surgery, and what kind of new tendons they have. My sister has three Achilles tendons in her right leg. Do you even know where your Achilles tendon is?
I just happen to know a lot about my iliac crest. This is my favorite bone name. It is also my favorite part of my body, at least for today. (tomorrow I might be in love with my feet.) But today and in truth most days, I love my iliac crest. I like to touch it. To feel it’s curve underneath my fingers. I can grab it with my hand. Do you know where your iliac crest is? I doubt it. Look it up. Then ask yourself, “Do I have a nice iliac crest?”
I actually think everyone has a nice iliac crest, even doctors. I struggle with doctors these days, it's one of the main problems I deal with in managing my pain. I have strong opinions about doctors and the schools of thought that they prescribe to.
For example, doctors who deny people adequate pain medication are assholes. Why would you deny someone a way to live better. Pain is part of life, but it is not something we need to live in daily. Everyone has pain, everyone knows how much it sucks to be in pain. EVERY PERSON. No one can escape it. Pain is a signal that something in our bodies or our emotions are not as they should be. We need to fix the problem so that the pain signals stop.
My question is how can we sit by and let people feel pain day in and day out? It is a societal problem, Americans make judgments about ways that people should handle their pain. Some ways are more acceptable then others. But the bottom line is that people who have to suffer daily shouldn't. There are great ways to manage pain these days, why as a society do we deny those who suffer relief? What really bugs me the most is that when people are dying and are in pain there are doctors who refuse to give them the medications that would ease their passing because of the stigma that is attached to the particular drug. This pisses me off the most. How do we allow this to happen? How!?
Everyone has pain, and everyone has a body. Everyone even has an iliac crest and an Achilles tendons. In fact you have a pair each. Pretty cool, eh?
But people in pain have a hard time loving their bodies because they are too busy taking stock on what hurts them the most that day. Is it muscle, bone, or tendon? Is it a joint? Did you eat something wrong that makes your pain increase? Did you get enough hugs this week to help cope with the pain? We take stock, and as we take stock we learn the names of our broken bits. We learn the names so we can talk to the doctors, physical therapists, and the nurses about it.
This is the mental task of the patient of chronic pain. (And for the task of anyone who has ever been seriously injured or faces a chronic condition of any sort.) This is why it can be so exhausting to be in pain everyday. I want to know about my iliac crest just because it is beautiful and I love it, not because it hurts me everyday.
I just happen to know a lot about my iliac crest. This is my favorite bone name. It is also my favorite part of my body, at least for today. (tomorrow I might be in love with my feet.) But today and in truth most days, I love my iliac crest. I like to touch it. To feel it’s curve underneath my fingers. I can grab it with my hand. Do you know where your iliac crest is? I doubt it. Look it up. Then ask yourself, “Do I have a nice iliac crest?”
I actually think everyone has a nice iliac crest, even doctors. I struggle with doctors these days, it's one of the main problems I deal with in managing my pain. I have strong opinions about doctors and the schools of thought that they prescribe to.
For example, doctors who deny people adequate pain medication are assholes. Why would you deny someone a way to live better. Pain is part of life, but it is not something we need to live in daily. Everyone has pain, everyone knows how much it sucks to be in pain. EVERY PERSON. No one can escape it. Pain is a signal that something in our bodies or our emotions are not as they should be. We need to fix the problem so that the pain signals stop.
My question is how can we sit by and let people feel pain day in and day out? It is a societal problem, Americans make judgments about ways that people should handle their pain. Some ways are more acceptable then others. But the bottom line is that people who have to suffer daily shouldn't. There are great ways to manage pain these days, why as a society do we deny those who suffer relief? What really bugs me the most is that when people are dying and are in pain there are doctors who refuse to give them the medications that would ease their passing because of the stigma that is attached to the particular drug. This pisses me off the most. How do we allow this to happen? How!?
Everyone has pain, and everyone has a body. Everyone even has an iliac crest and an Achilles tendons. In fact you have a pair each. Pretty cool, eh?
But people in pain have a hard time loving their bodies because they are too busy taking stock on what hurts them the most that day. Is it muscle, bone, or tendon? Is it a joint? Did you eat something wrong that makes your pain increase? Did you get enough hugs this week to help cope with the pain? We take stock, and as we take stock we learn the names of our broken bits. We learn the names so we can talk to the doctors, physical therapists, and the nurses about it.
This is the mental task of the patient of chronic pain. (And for the task of anyone who has ever been seriously injured or faces a chronic condition of any sort.) This is why it can be so exhausting to be in pain everyday. I want to know about my iliac crest just because it is beautiful and I love it, not because it hurts me everyday.
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Post 2
When I was diagnosed with Chronic Pain Syndrome I went to the library and looked for books with information about this disease. I only looked for a little while and I found one book that I ended up checking out. I had the book for two weeks before I mustered the courage to actually read any of it.
At first it was hard to read, the emotional impact was too great and I could only read a page or two before my system said “No more!” and I looked for other distractions. You see it’s hard to face the idea that I have something that will be with me for the rest of my life. This is something that people who do not have chronic conditions have a hard time understanding.
I’ve found myself trying to explain the psychology behind my pain to my friends. The conversation will start with me wincing at some pain my body has just told me I have. My friend will pick up on it. I’ll be asked if I am alright. I’ll say I’m fine. Then from there I’ll get suggestions. Have I tried this vitamin, have I tried this form of alternative therapy. Have I heard of this rare disease that maybe I have. Have I gone to this kind of doctor. Always there are suggestions, things I’ve not tried yet that will surely be the answer! If I just try this one thing, then I’ll be fine! (Just so you the reader knows, this type of conversation makes me crazy. Literally crazy. I feel like my pain is all my own personal fault and I’m obviously just not trying hard enough.) After this fun filled part of the conversation the suggestor picks up on the look of annoyance on my face. Then I’m asked what’s wrong. I explain that I don’t always like the suggestions, that it in fact adds to the already heavy psychological burden I carry. And then, after that sort of comment do I try to get someone to understand the psychology behind all of this. (It never really works, but I try.)
So I say, “Imagine that your back hurts all the time. So you go to a doctor and you ask them what is wrong. They say you are fine, your X-rays are clear and so is your MRI. You are young! You are healthy! You are fine! So you go to another doctor to get a second opinion. But she says you are fine too. So you try a chiropractor, and then a physical therapist, and then an energy healer, and then you finally ask your dog because maybe he has a valid opinion. But everyone says you are fine. Only your dog asks you how you are, because really only your dog cares.
After all of that, your back still hurts and because your back hurts you can’t run anymore. You used to run all the time, that was your thing, that was what you did to make you happy. But you can’t do that, your back hurts too much. So you swim, but then that starts to hurt too. You go to the doctor again, you ask for pain medication. They give you some good, hard drugs. Then after months of that, you become physically dependent. But people decide to call you a drug addict instead, because they don’t seem to know the difference between physical dependency and addiction. And there is a difference.
The dugs help. You can exercise again, you can sleep again, you can actually do your job. It only helps a little, but hey, you will take what you can get. All the time that your back hurts, your entire world is changing. You have to rearrange your life to fit your backache. You workout at certain times when you are in the least amount of pain, you don’t go out with friends because it hurts, you don’t travel as much because it hurts, sex even hurts! (This is a real rip off because sex releases a lot of endorphins, which are our bodies natural pain killers, exercise does too.) But you can’t do all these things like you used to, because your back hurts. All of these facts make you very, very sad. You have to change your identity, you have to rearrange how you think about yourself. Your identity is threatened by the constant pain in your back. You cry a lot.”
At this point who I am talking to seems to be getting it. There is a change in their face, they seem to have some small idea, a small grain of rice idea, about what you go through. But I’m sure that after 20 minutes their brain is distracted and they go on to think about other things. Their bodies work after all. They get aches and pains of course, they get sick, they get hurt, but more often then not, their bodies bounce back to the original healthy forms. Mine doesn’t.
I try to explain myself, but I know that it is really futile. I actually don’t do it all that often. I explain every once in a while, mostly to shut people up. I do it when I am fed up with their suggestions, when I am tired of hearing things I’ve already heard. Most of the suggestions I get now are ones that someone else told me months ago. There are really only so many things you can do for chronic pain.
All of this is a digression from what I initially started to talk about. I’ve gone on a long tangent. But it’s related. My point is that there is a very heavy emotional toll that is extracted on a daily basis for those who live with pain. I’ve felt this weight a lot. So much of my time in denial was avoiding the weight of my disease. I didn’t want to acknowledge how heavy it was, so I ignored it, I bargained, I thought if I just tried this one thing, then I’d be fine. Slowly though I started to allow the acceptance to creep into my brain. I slowly added the weight, I walked around with it on a daily basis and found that I could carry the burden. But I still struggle, of course, I’ll always struggle. I have full faith that as time goes on and I find ways to manage and reduce my pain I’ll struggle less, but I am accepting that I will struggle forever, at least in some small way.
One reason I’ll struggle is because I’m never once able to escape the pain. I am reminded daily that my body is different, that it doesn’t know how to interpret pain. My favorite ways to escape temporarily is via comedy. I watch a lot of comedy. This helps me escape, but I can never get away completely. The monologue that I give to my friends is an effort to get them to understand that there is no escape, but I don’t think that translates very well. Unless a person has dealt with something like this, there is really no way to fully understand. I do appreciate empathy, I do get a lot of that, but not many people in my life actually understand. A few do, and I connect well with them. I can vent to them, I can tell them of how I am hurting and they get it. But most people don’t, and so I don’t talk about it. I have holed up inside my pain because no one wants to hear a whiner. That is one of the things that was talked about in the book I got from the library. No one complains, because no one wants to hear it.
Silence though is killer. Psychology has taught me that bottling up emotions is not good. Eastern philosophy has taught me that it makes illness worse. This is where this blog comes in. Somehow I view the internet is a safe place to vent. I can write all that I want and put it out into the cyberspace and it is not viewed a whining. At least, that is my thinking. If someone doesn’t want to read my venting, they don’t have to. I think that is the beauty of blogging and of journaling. (Which is really what my blog is, an on-line journal.)
These are my thoughts for the day. I was going to write about something completely different, but this is what came out. Oh well. I’ll write about the differences between drug addiction and drug dependency another day.
Thank you for reading. I appreciate it.
At first it was hard to read, the emotional impact was too great and I could only read a page or two before my system said “No more!” and I looked for other distractions. You see it’s hard to face the idea that I have something that will be with me for the rest of my life. This is something that people who do not have chronic conditions have a hard time understanding.
I’ve found myself trying to explain the psychology behind my pain to my friends. The conversation will start with me wincing at some pain my body has just told me I have. My friend will pick up on it. I’ll be asked if I am alright. I’ll say I’m fine. Then from there I’ll get suggestions. Have I tried this vitamin, have I tried this form of alternative therapy. Have I heard of this rare disease that maybe I have. Have I gone to this kind of doctor. Always there are suggestions, things I’ve not tried yet that will surely be the answer! If I just try this one thing, then I’ll be fine! (Just so you the reader knows, this type of conversation makes me crazy. Literally crazy. I feel like my pain is all my own personal fault and I’m obviously just not trying hard enough.) After this fun filled part of the conversation the suggestor picks up on the look of annoyance on my face. Then I’m asked what’s wrong. I explain that I don’t always like the suggestions, that it in fact adds to the already heavy psychological burden I carry. And then, after that sort of comment do I try to get someone to understand the psychology behind all of this. (It never really works, but I try.)
So I say, “Imagine that your back hurts all the time. So you go to a doctor and you ask them what is wrong. They say you are fine, your X-rays are clear and so is your MRI. You are young! You are healthy! You are fine! So you go to another doctor to get a second opinion. But she says you are fine too. So you try a chiropractor, and then a physical therapist, and then an energy healer, and then you finally ask your dog because maybe he has a valid opinion. But everyone says you are fine. Only your dog asks you how you are, because really only your dog cares.
After all of that, your back still hurts and because your back hurts you can’t run anymore. You used to run all the time, that was your thing, that was what you did to make you happy. But you can’t do that, your back hurts too much. So you swim, but then that starts to hurt too. You go to the doctor again, you ask for pain medication. They give you some good, hard drugs. Then after months of that, you become physically dependent. But people decide to call you a drug addict instead, because they don’t seem to know the difference between physical dependency and addiction. And there is a difference.
The dugs help. You can exercise again, you can sleep again, you can actually do your job. It only helps a little, but hey, you will take what you can get. All the time that your back hurts, your entire world is changing. You have to rearrange your life to fit your backache. You workout at certain times when you are in the least amount of pain, you don’t go out with friends because it hurts, you don’t travel as much because it hurts, sex even hurts! (This is a real rip off because sex releases a lot of endorphins, which are our bodies natural pain killers, exercise does too.) But you can’t do all these things like you used to, because your back hurts. All of these facts make you very, very sad. You have to change your identity, you have to rearrange how you think about yourself. Your identity is threatened by the constant pain in your back. You cry a lot.”
At this point who I am talking to seems to be getting it. There is a change in their face, they seem to have some small idea, a small grain of rice idea, about what you go through. But I’m sure that after 20 minutes their brain is distracted and they go on to think about other things. Their bodies work after all. They get aches and pains of course, they get sick, they get hurt, but more often then not, their bodies bounce back to the original healthy forms. Mine doesn’t.
I try to explain myself, but I know that it is really futile. I actually don’t do it all that often. I explain every once in a while, mostly to shut people up. I do it when I am fed up with their suggestions, when I am tired of hearing things I’ve already heard. Most of the suggestions I get now are ones that someone else told me months ago. There are really only so many things you can do for chronic pain.
All of this is a digression from what I initially started to talk about. I’ve gone on a long tangent. But it’s related. My point is that there is a very heavy emotional toll that is extracted on a daily basis for those who live with pain. I’ve felt this weight a lot. So much of my time in denial was avoiding the weight of my disease. I didn’t want to acknowledge how heavy it was, so I ignored it, I bargained, I thought if I just tried this one thing, then I’d be fine. Slowly though I started to allow the acceptance to creep into my brain. I slowly added the weight, I walked around with it on a daily basis and found that I could carry the burden. But I still struggle, of course, I’ll always struggle. I have full faith that as time goes on and I find ways to manage and reduce my pain I’ll struggle less, but I am accepting that I will struggle forever, at least in some small way.
One reason I’ll struggle is because I’m never once able to escape the pain. I am reminded daily that my body is different, that it doesn’t know how to interpret pain. My favorite ways to escape temporarily is via comedy. I watch a lot of comedy. This helps me escape, but I can never get away completely. The monologue that I give to my friends is an effort to get them to understand that there is no escape, but I don’t think that translates very well. Unless a person has dealt with something like this, there is really no way to fully understand. I do appreciate empathy, I do get a lot of that, but not many people in my life actually understand. A few do, and I connect well with them. I can vent to them, I can tell them of how I am hurting and they get it. But most people don’t, and so I don’t talk about it. I have holed up inside my pain because no one wants to hear a whiner. That is one of the things that was talked about in the book I got from the library. No one complains, because no one wants to hear it.
Silence though is killer. Psychology has taught me that bottling up emotions is not good. Eastern philosophy has taught me that it makes illness worse. This is where this blog comes in. Somehow I view the internet is a safe place to vent. I can write all that I want and put it out into the cyberspace and it is not viewed a whining. At least, that is my thinking. If someone doesn’t want to read my venting, they don’t have to. I think that is the beauty of blogging and of journaling. (Which is really what my blog is, an on-line journal.)
These are my thoughts for the day. I was going to write about something completely different, but this is what came out. Oh well. I’ll write about the differences between drug addiction and drug dependency another day.
Thank you for reading. I appreciate it.
Friday, April 17, 2009
Post 1.
I’ve been called a drug addict. I’ve been told it’s all in my head. I’ve also heard that I should stop looking for attention or I just need to keep looking, there is a reason I just haven’t found yet. My mom was 100% convinced that I had Lyme Disease, my doctor gave me anti-depressants. (He was also the one who insinuated that I was just looking for drugs.) But the bottom line is that I am in pain. Always. I have been for 8 years. I’m only 24.
I decided to start this blog because I needed an outlet. Writing has always been something I have turned to when I need to vent, when I need to find comfort, when I need to pull within myself and find answers. I also use it to hold myself accountable.
I was diagnosed with Fibromyalgia in August 2007. In April 2009 I was told that I have Chronic Pain Syndrome. I like the second diagnosis better, it seems to fit. My understanding of what these words mean is that my body doesn’t know how to interpret pain. My central nervous system and my brain have rewired my body in such a way that everything is interpreted as a painful event, when it shouldn’t be. To make matters worse, I have a very low threshold of pain. I’ve had this since I was a little kid. I used to crumple at the slightest amount of pain, or so my mom tells me.
Western medicine doesn’t have a very good understanding of what Chronic Pain Syndrome is. There is no biological or physiological reason for why my body screams in protest everyday. My blood work is beautiful, my blood pressure is consistently low and normal. I am lean and in decent shape. I workout, I eat right, I get plenty of sleep, I only get sick once a year, I have all my limbs. And yet all my limbs, all my body hurts all the time. Pain is the constant in my life.
Psychologically I am fine. Like every human being on this planet I’ve had my ups and my downs. I’ve been on anti-depressants while I dealt with an abnormal relationship with food, otherwise called Binge-Only Bulimia. From 16-20 years of age I hated my body, from time to time I wanted it to cease to exist so that I didn’t have to deal with it anymore. But I moved on from there, I let go of that sort of thinking and at 21 I found a way to love my own skin. I was very proud of myself for getting to that point. After years of therapy and lots of rejections from men that I adored, I was finally at a place where I stood tall and found myself attractive. I was comfortable in my own skin and I was finally happy. All the while though my back hurt, me knees hurt, my wrists hurt when I typed too much. I ignored these things. I chalked them up to my dislocated patella, my curved spine, my being a college student and being on my computer too much. But at 22 I was getting worse and I didn’t have any idea why.
I switched my exercise routines. I started to swim instead of walk, I did Pilates to strengthen my core in an effort to help my achy back. I stretched more. I got worse. Pain started to infect my sleep. I tossed and turned all night. I woke up feeling like a freight train had hit me after I’d slept for 9 hours. I started to be more aware of the body I was living in. I started to hate myself once again, which really, really pissed me off. After all the work I’d done to love myself, hating my body was not what I wanted. But that is what happened.
I remember the day I snapped, I remember the day that I came out of denial long enough to make an appointment with a doctor. I was sitting on the floor of my room stretching. I had one leg out, one leg in with the pad of my foot resting on my thigh. I was leaning out trying to touch my toes. And all of a sudden the pain in my hamstring got so bad I was forced into tears. I cried and wondered aloud for the first time “Why does it hurt all the time?”
I went to the doctor, I told her all that I knew, she gave me a diagnosis of Fibromyalgia and sent me home with painkillers. I’ve been on them ever since. The next year I was in full blown denial. I thought that there was some other answer to my pain, and I tried to find it within the confounds of non-Western medicine. I tried Acupuncture, Rolfing, Physical Therapy, Yoga, Pilates and Chiropractic. All of these gave me pain relief for about 24 hours maximum, and then it was back to business as usual.
I’ve come out of denial, finally, a year and a half after I initially acknowledged that something was wrong with me. I don’t really know what acceptance is yet. I’m trying to face what the parameters of this disease really is. I know that it will be with me for life, a fact that I don’t want to believe, but I am starting to. I know that my diet has a big role in how my body feels. Wheat, dairy and processed sugar are all things I need to avoid. But you try cutting out the main food groups that you grew up eating or that everyone else around you eats. I am also haunted by my eating disorder days when I start to tell myself there are foods that I cannot eat. I still don’t sleep well, but there are drugs that help me with that. I exercise, mostly in water. I have found a love for Aqua Jogging. Which is a seriously old lady thing to do, but I don’t care anymore. I love to glide through the water. If I believed in past lives I think I would have been a fish or maybe a dolphin or a penguin. I love penguins.
Part of being in the stage of acceptance is coming up with a plan, a goal, an idea of how to cope daily with the struggles of chronic pain. This is where the blog comes in…or so I hope. I’m terrible at consistency. I am a binger in life. I binge on food, I binge on exercise, I binge on friendships. Now I am trying to change that. Part of my idea of getting better and living a life without physical pain is being consistent. With my diet, with my exercise, with everything really. I always do better when I have something or someone to hold me accountable. I am a child of my culture, which means that years of being a student has programmed in me a need to “turn in assignments”. This blog is my homework assignment. (I just hope that I can be consistent with it!)
I don’t know if anyone will actually read this, but I don’t really care. I am doing this for me. Maybe it will help me get better, maybe it will help me cope psychologically, maybe it will help others out there who wake up in pain everyday, just like me.
All I really know is that I want to get better. I don’t know yet what better means, but I’m gonna try. And that’s all that we really can do, right? We have to try.
I decided to start this blog because I needed an outlet. Writing has always been something I have turned to when I need to vent, when I need to find comfort, when I need to pull within myself and find answers. I also use it to hold myself accountable.
I was diagnosed with Fibromyalgia in August 2007. In April 2009 I was told that I have Chronic Pain Syndrome. I like the second diagnosis better, it seems to fit. My understanding of what these words mean is that my body doesn’t know how to interpret pain. My central nervous system and my brain have rewired my body in such a way that everything is interpreted as a painful event, when it shouldn’t be. To make matters worse, I have a very low threshold of pain. I’ve had this since I was a little kid. I used to crumple at the slightest amount of pain, or so my mom tells me.
Western medicine doesn’t have a very good understanding of what Chronic Pain Syndrome is. There is no biological or physiological reason for why my body screams in protest everyday. My blood work is beautiful, my blood pressure is consistently low and normal. I am lean and in decent shape. I workout, I eat right, I get plenty of sleep, I only get sick once a year, I have all my limbs. And yet all my limbs, all my body hurts all the time. Pain is the constant in my life.
Psychologically I am fine. Like every human being on this planet I’ve had my ups and my downs. I’ve been on anti-depressants while I dealt with an abnormal relationship with food, otherwise called Binge-Only Bulimia. From 16-20 years of age I hated my body, from time to time I wanted it to cease to exist so that I didn’t have to deal with it anymore. But I moved on from there, I let go of that sort of thinking and at 21 I found a way to love my own skin. I was very proud of myself for getting to that point. After years of therapy and lots of rejections from men that I adored, I was finally at a place where I stood tall and found myself attractive. I was comfortable in my own skin and I was finally happy. All the while though my back hurt, me knees hurt, my wrists hurt when I typed too much. I ignored these things. I chalked them up to my dislocated patella, my curved spine, my being a college student and being on my computer too much. But at 22 I was getting worse and I didn’t have any idea why.
I switched my exercise routines. I started to swim instead of walk, I did Pilates to strengthen my core in an effort to help my achy back. I stretched more. I got worse. Pain started to infect my sleep. I tossed and turned all night. I woke up feeling like a freight train had hit me after I’d slept for 9 hours. I started to be more aware of the body I was living in. I started to hate myself once again, which really, really pissed me off. After all the work I’d done to love myself, hating my body was not what I wanted. But that is what happened.
I remember the day I snapped, I remember the day that I came out of denial long enough to make an appointment with a doctor. I was sitting on the floor of my room stretching. I had one leg out, one leg in with the pad of my foot resting on my thigh. I was leaning out trying to touch my toes. And all of a sudden the pain in my hamstring got so bad I was forced into tears. I cried and wondered aloud for the first time “Why does it hurt all the time?”
I went to the doctor, I told her all that I knew, she gave me a diagnosis of Fibromyalgia and sent me home with painkillers. I’ve been on them ever since. The next year I was in full blown denial. I thought that there was some other answer to my pain, and I tried to find it within the confounds of non-Western medicine. I tried Acupuncture, Rolfing, Physical Therapy, Yoga, Pilates and Chiropractic. All of these gave me pain relief for about 24 hours maximum, and then it was back to business as usual.
I’ve come out of denial, finally, a year and a half after I initially acknowledged that something was wrong with me. I don’t really know what acceptance is yet. I’m trying to face what the parameters of this disease really is. I know that it will be with me for life, a fact that I don’t want to believe, but I am starting to. I know that my diet has a big role in how my body feels. Wheat, dairy and processed sugar are all things I need to avoid. But you try cutting out the main food groups that you grew up eating or that everyone else around you eats. I am also haunted by my eating disorder days when I start to tell myself there are foods that I cannot eat. I still don’t sleep well, but there are drugs that help me with that. I exercise, mostly in water. I have found a love for Aqua Jogging. Which is a seriously old lady thing to do, but I don’t care anymore. I love to glide through the water. If I believed in past lives I think I would have been a fish or maybe a dolphin or a penguin. I love penguins.
Part of being in the stage of acceptance is coming up with a plan, a goal, an idea of how to cope daily with the struggles of chronic pain. This is where the blog comes in…or so I hope. I’m terrible at consistency. I am a binger in life. I binge on food, I binge on exercise, I binge on friendships. Now I am trying to change that. Part of my idea of getting better and living a life without physical pain is being consistent. With my diet, with my exercise, with everything really. I always do better when I have something or someone to hold me accountable. I am a child of my culture, which means that years of being a student has programmed in me a need to “turn in assignments”. This blog is my homework assignment. (I just hope that I can be consistent with it!)
I don’t know if anyone will actually read this, but I don’t really care. I am doing this for me. Maybe it will help me get better, maybe it will help me cope psychologically, maybe it will help others out there who wake up in pain everyday, just like me.
All I really know is that I want to get better. I don’t know yet what better means, but I’m gonna try. And that’s all that we really can do, right? We have to try.
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