Tag: pain

YO, People in Chronic Pain! Emergency rooms are thine enemy.

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Why?

Dying? Might feel so, yet, only you are in fact – not actually.

Nor are you enduring a “condition” which MUST and can be treated. Say a stroke? Broken nose? Appendicitis?

Nope, merely a humongous (what I call an “uptick”) of your constant pain. None of the above scenarios fit yeh.

Now, should you, IF you, fit into that emergency room method of triage – which is that list, an ORDER by which patients receive care in order of severity of injury or otherwise fixable health crisis – THEN hells bells GET THYSELF to the ER.

But.

Vomiting from extraordinary pain? Body writhing in pain? Tears, mucus, and horror rolling down your face? Lil kids’s eyes wide open staring at you in the ER waiting room. No kid whining “I’ve gotta go bathroom”, cause you already scared the shit outta them?

Pain knows no triage in an emergency room folks.

Pain has zero priority. Insane in every membrane pain causing vomiting causing dehydration, causing worse pain – means a whole hella nothing in that place hope once lived.

Sure, if you crave feeling desperation so badly. Perhaps you are masochistic enough – that you’d like to be purely reactive, outrageously desperate enough…that after those perspective of eons of tortured waiting, you determinedly (however feebly) begin wheeling yourself over to the exit. Exit being a brilliant idea. What with the brilliant idea of tipping over to the pavement, welcoming crushing car wheels..?!?

That type of act got me security attention and a quick IV. Never imagined possible horror moment, brain burned forever remembering my frightening those waiting room children with the intensity of my suffering that refused to let me have any control. Refused to let me hide that horrid visual and vocal manifestation in that waiting time, stretched to centuries (think loud gasps, retching, crying uncontrollably).

Be clear, tisn’t the ER’s fault. Simply, the whole shindig is set up for triaging those people whose medical problems can (hopefully) be “fixed” not merely brought medically into submission.

Alternatives are NECESSARY. YOU must pay attention and take control.

Take a nap. Saying you cannot if a pain uptick is rising, is akin to you thinking you won’t be melted by magma from a fast erupting volcano.

Start meditation on the regular. Meditation is scientifically proven to lower lactic acid in the blood and hemceforth throughout your whole body and brain. Lower your lactic acid, in turn raise your pain, anxiety and panic tolerance. Don’t be defeatist. KNOW this; meditation is the act of bringing your mind back to calm intention, bring it back from those sneaky thoughts – the whole “I’m bad at meditation” is a fundamental miscomprehension of what meditation IS.

Marijuana’s ability to drastically decrease nausea is a major miracle. Plus it lessens symptoms of pain for ever so many causes of pain.

Opiates? NOooooo if you are a true chronic pain sufferer you will get slammed with rebound pain that will hit you worse after a few days; far worse than that pain for which you took it in the first place. SO save any you’ve got for a last gasp attempt to knock yourself out – use em sparingly and rarely to sleep deep and avoid the ER. Do not take on the regular because your pain will only worsen. Hoard enough so you have backup.

Mostly, get your coping skills attuned to your own damn self. Feeling more oogy but want to stay at the party? Uh. No. GO home and sleep. (lil weed helps that there too). Dying to hit that concert? Nap before, nap after. Let the dishes stay dirty and go a day without underwear. Put those responsibilities like doing laundry aside, so you can get your joy on and not pay with the desire to commit suicide.

Use “the google” or whatever search engine and find the zillion legit articles about managing and coping with pain so you stay in a semblance of control of your own self.

You CAN do this.

In solidarity and lack of bullshit,

Renée

ps – Hey, if you are in pain because of an injury, something new and unknown… GO to the ER or Urgent Care – ABSOLUTELY! Just know thyself.

What if Every Person Was Blind?

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Totally different Darwinism, human evolvement but, all of us blind. 

From birth. Imagine society having alternatively developed around convenience to manage without thought or attention to sight..  Akin to our reality, except this key difference of everyone being blind.

 This radically different evolution would have tesulted in no more attention to the “lack” of sight, being the norm, than attention we ourselves pay to ordinary mechanisms utilized to compensate our human “ordinary” physical limitations.. Not possessing sight would result in normalizing certain …conveniences – those things we give little thought to unless unavailable.  A ladder, elevator. Stairs.  Analygize creation of some sort of tool, assistive devise, the purpose of which is to make up for limitations.  

Limitations caused by a factor so common such as height and our civilization’s usage of steps.  Just as petite person in our reality need utilize a step stool to get a platter from some high shelf. 

Can you imagine such a world?  Born blind into a world peopled by blind humans since the earliest of history’s tale??!! 

Of course!  We humans would have crafted such a world making sense to our having lack of sight.

That lack of sight (don’t get confused, we’re talking bout this imaginary sightless world now) necessarily leaving a vacuum, a suction humankind would have filled by necessity and imagination.  Manifested by senses intensified by usage and ordinary living.  Smells, sounds, the touch of a misty breeze, all revealing deductions ordinarily played out in television and movie stories about superheroes – but here in this blog blind world – senses attached to our intelligence instead more developed, naturally evolved, due to focus of an active creative human mind with tools at disposal.

And then I wonder just wonder.  If then, I’d wager for sure, it would be different.  

Wobbles in tone and mixups of words noticed; uneven tempo of footfalls heard; iciness of hand and warmth of brow touched upon greeting…

There would be no “you look (insert positive here)!”.

Tedium and focus to explain not so necessary.  Deductive reasoning doing that job.

(Secret… what a relief it would be.)

Yours in reality and imagination about nevergoingtobesosafetoimagine things, (it is ok to be naughty some times)

Renée

The “ugh” of “ughs” aka feeling ooogy 

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Ever have a day when everything sucks?  Straight outta bed and first off, before reaching the bathroom, ya smash your shinbone into some furniture.  Your wallet decides since you’re in a hurry that it’s a great time to grow legs and goes missing for thirty minutes… 

…and you cannot stop imagining that a mini, muscular, boil and open sore ridden creature is sitting on your head – stabbing each of your eyeballs simultaneously.  Grinning with glee as he flexes his biceps and shoves the knives in up through your head and eyes up until those dern hilts of the knives won’t let the knives go all the way through.

Well likely you’ve not my particular trolls, but your very own that take their own shape and do their own thang.

Point being.  You feel TERRIBLE.  Poop is better, at least poop can fertilize.  You feel worse than poop.

AND THEN…

You interact with someone, a well meaning, kind person.  

The perfect person to give ya a sucker punch, because they got you all vulnerable with their good person way of being.

And it comes.

This here good person gets you with their honest impression and earnest insistence.

They get you by telling yeh “you LOOK great!” (Or “good”; or “young”; or beautiful” etc)

And your entire psyche shrivels past a curtain and into the previously concealed gap in your chest.  The barrage of complimentary comments piercing the pretense you’ve been managing.  That “yeah you feel shitty and look in the mirror and see more shitty and it just doesn’t matter cause you got no choice but to have to go on so you do and so just fuck it” kinda coping.

Here comes this not a liar type person telling you something you feel is abbbbysolutely NOT true… getting you agitated, thinking to yourself, screaming silently, “you liar, I look HORRIBLE!  Don’t you see I’m in hell? And LOOK like it?”

That there is the ugh of ughs.  The ooogy.

That disconnect between how a person perceives themselves and how others perceive the person.

It happens to everybody I know who has at least a few insecure days…

There is added oooogy when living in pain.

Because then emotions are a tad extra raw.  Raw emotions are the ultimate in causing miscommunication.

The rawness blows thoughts along the drift of thinking that somebody telling you how good you look; well they are just either genuinely thinking so….. OR are full of…bullshit.  

Those compliments ain’t true.  You’re discounting my pain.  

You forget. How I look is a but a costume, hiding pain from casual observers.  

Of course logic says they really mean it, this is your issue, another thing to process in therapy.  The journey to separate ones’ sense of self apart from the consistent pain.  To perceive correctly is challenging what with the knives in me eyes.  I do try. And try. And try.

But.

You can’t help it. Not only is this previously trusted person now viewed askew with regard to your trust in gut feelings about whether they get you – you get hit with the devastating conclusion thinking they do not comprehend.

No matter their understanding that you feel damn bad.  You are in a mental space where you are certain you MUST look terrible.

UGH

OOOGY

So how the heckenheck is someone to deal with this, with you who has this issue?

Now mind you, OF COURSE if a person thinks something positive, including about the way they perceive another person looks, go straight on and tell that person those positives.

Only, be mindful.  Recognize the person you are complimenting may be reacting internally really poorly because they feel awful and that transfers into how they feel they look.

Just know.

Be mindful.

Yours in not knowing what the heck, but knowing that being communicative and kind is a good base from which to maybe figure it out,

Renée

Mourning Father’s Day

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What of the fathers who are gone from our lives, not because they passed on, but because we children made a choice?

Pain is pure toxicity in any quantity.  Unrelenting pain drenches a psyche with a constant flood of negativity.

My toxicity capacity is enormous.  Shit-tons, no problem; raining shit, tis okaydoke; swimming in shit using a reed to breath, got it!

This chronic pain shizoki?  Universe record, saturation overload, “DANGER WILL ROBINSON!”.  (google if you don’t know the quote :))

Basically?  Wee bit of room left for tolerating toxic… way wee.

So I’m mourning father’s day.  Mourning what I wish I had.  The way some of you may be wishing your father was still in this plane of existence.  It is all about missing something profound.

Because sure, I could celebrate that I wouldn’t even exist but for his sperm, but I’m also allergic to fronting (aka bullshitting myself)… and truth told I never had anybody “father me”.  As in, there was no “daddy’s girl” positivity nurturing thrown my way in a healthy sense.

Can’t seem to fake it till I make it.  So I sit here in my favorite café, to avoid being home alone where I would never write this – and am motivated at all to write this because I know there are people who can relate in one way or another.

There is comfort in not feeling alone.

Yours in empathy,

Renée

 

living through “I hate you”

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Being a parent is not all you are.  But living with pain a person tends to search for motives, reasons, inspiration … for living with that pain.

Why do you want to live?  Have you thought about this question?  Do you just experience, whatever you may do and have done to you or with you – without wondering?  Wondering about whether there is a point, a reason, a motive that justifies it all?

I suspect anyone stumbling across this blog may well be enaged in self examination of their life.  I for one do not experience the bliss of ignorance without challenge to that deepest question of all, “why am I here”?

Because I must be here for my children.  Plain and simple.  They need me.  It isn’t merely shelter, food, and water that sustains them.  My love demonstrated through actions as wide ranging as my giving a hug, to efforts to guide my children in how they choose to perceive the world, perceive their experiences, and do so in manners that are most emotionally healthy and productive.

Defining myself by my children is forgetting something incredibly important.

I am more than my children.  Peering through the iron filings of chronic fatigue, around the stabbing knives of pain and dodging the violent trolls – I can see that I can make people laugh.  So can you.  I can create.  I can give and receive goodness.

So can you.  You may not feel it some, most, or any of the time.  And here is where you must get deliberate.

We must practice self love.  Remember that we matter and that the pain does not take away from who we are, but certainly makes it hard to remember.

We must be ACTIVE thinkers, DELIBERATE in the direction we allow our thoughts to take.

We must push against the despair, and remember we deserve to live because of ourselves, not merely for others.

Time and again I find myself weighing, am I more burdensome or worthwhile?  That burdensome and worthwhile is based upon my (biased by my own emotions) viewpoint about myself.  How very limited and certain to be inaccurate, for we struggle to see ourselves from any perspective other than our own.

Yet to be as mentally healthy as we can, we must practice self love.  Practice means having to engage in activities purposefully that make us feel good.  This could be meditating, eating a delicious meal, taking a bath.  But it need be soly focused upon treating yourself with loving kindness.

When we love ourselves, we are stronger.  Reality is, we can also be better parents when we don’t hing our worth merely upon our children’s reactions – but necessarily utilize our judgements and insights.

Yours in practicing what seems impossible,

Renée

This is no joke:

Pain-related helplessness was the only predictor for suicidal ideations among the cognitive variables.

Twisted humor a must

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Our kids need spiritual food from us parents.  Smiles, hugs, kisses, laughter and expressions of love, all vital to making sure your child doesn’t become an adult asshole.

All the goodness, that spiritual food, comes from a parent’s core of happy strength.

Pain, especially chronic (never freakin ending, this must be a joke, what the heck!) pain – tends to warp that happy strength core – sucks that goodness from a parent’s soul leaving instead a whirlpool of despair.

Whirlpools of despair won’t be full after feeding on the parent’s happy strength, the next victims are the children.

How to stop from getting sucked deep into that whirlpool of despair?  

Find a funny.  Something that makes you actually, spontaneously, truly – laugh out loud.  

And because you’re in pain, “normal” type humor may just not cut it.

It will likely have to be something ironically twistedly true that is utterly ridiculous in fact so the laughter is hysteria tinged.  Note: cutting down as much hysteria tinge as possible is better when finding humor and your kids are with you.  Hysteria is almost as freaky to our kids as them seeing us suffer.

Actively seeking funny seems phony.  Until the laughter spurts without thinking.  Laughing (and all those natural brain chemicals that laughter releases which make us feel happy) breaks thorny brambles of anger/frustration/sadness, making holes so the funny can also find you.   Of course, it isn’t like buying an ice cream cone and getting instant yum.  Finding funny and helping it find you is WORK.  Because you’re in pain goddamn it, and pain simply sucks.  And on its own, pain is far from funny.

You love your kids though, and that love needs laughter to thrive and be expressed so those kiddos can feel it.  So personal to you, what you find funny, don’t allow meanness to get any hold – leave negativity to the pain (it’s an expert).You, as a thinking parent, make it positive with your funny.  And don’t worry, most likely your funny won’t be mainstream, well yeah, because having chronic pain is not mainstream.

Meet one of my three trolls – all are my constant companions – this big guy pictured up top is probably the one who is most insecure, seemingly wanting the most attention from me.  And we know that insecurity is the root of most evils.

He loves to squish his thumb into my skull trying to pop my eyeballs out.  Imagine that rubber kid toy where you push in the top of the head and the eyes pop out.  Funny right? Well funny enough for me.

I found this big meanie greenie (the three trolls are the “meanie greenies” they don’t deserve individual names) in the “oh my god how am I going to function today I need to get back to sleep” early hours of a morning.  Just fyi, having horror dreams, me waking at the moment of being killed, are wonderful for providing the chance to do random internet searches.  It was while waiting for my heart to find its way back into my chest after the horror dream grabbed it, that I happened upon images of three trolls.

To my great (and admittedly initially hysterical) amusement, I found each troll image to exemplify (to my mind, again this is as personal as can be), my three major categories of pain.

IMG_0785
He is the most disgusting.  He sits on a shoulder and just twists that spike up into my head while going “squeak squeak”; ofttimes he uses a strand of rusty barbed wire, threading it up from my neck and out of my eye.  Twisting with his “squeaking”.  In my imagination I try to shove him off and he just picks his nose and flicks it. Yuck!
IMG_0786
This guy is mischievously unpredictable and enjoys wacking me here, there, everywhere! Just when I think I can anticipate a spot where I’ll have a sharp stab of pain… nope, he gets a totally different spot…. whoooohooooooooo!

 

All three of these jerky fellows are having their fun right now so I’m going to see if I can nap them into calm.

How about you?  Do you look for funny?

Sincerely ours in not giving in,

Renée