Chronic Pain and How to Really LIVE with It

The pain first started in my early childhood. My ankles and my wrists were so weak, they would collapse. In kindergarten, it was a common thing to have two older kids carry me into my class and tell the teacher "Jaenne fell again." I think I was about 8 when the knee pain started. It hurt so much to bend my legs, I was lame and unable to walk. The friendly family physician only looked for diseases that would show up on an x-ray, like osteoarthritis. 

The pain came and went as I got older. In my mid-twenties, I started having severe hand, wrist, ankle and foot pain. Again, I was only x-rayed and told I didn't have arthritis. The throbing pain came back to stay in 1997. All those pain-free years had a name: Remission. I was 35 and had coped with chronic pain for almost 30 years at that point. The migraines started in 1995. I felt like my whole body had become a playground of pain. I wasn't having very much fun.

In all, at the age of 35, my hands, wrists, knees, ankles and feet were in agony. My knees would be the greatest pain of all. It took years of testing to finally be told I had Rheumatoid Arthritis and Fibromyalgia. Migraines were the icing on the cake, so to speak. I started steroid treatment. The steroids, along with a lack of exercise, made my weight balloon. At age 35, I became obese for the first time of my life. Jolly good! The steroids gave way to medications that were immunosuppressants. They dealt with the cause of the disease, but they were also hard on my stomach. Before I was 40, I had lost all the enamel on my front teeth from vomiting. I had several overnight stays at the hospital due to severe electrolyte imbalances. (Vomiting was to blame for that) Happy times!

I am telling you all this, so you will know how dark things became for me. I had so many painful nights where I just wanted to destroy myself to halt the agony. At some point in those harrowing nights, I started drawing. Drawing and painting and creation of anything beautiful became my salvation. Gone were the dark eyes and drawn features my husband saw before work. It was like a weight had been lifted. And he encouraged me to press on. For a while I decoupaged everything in the house. I started drawing and painting. I started working with Paint Shop Pro and doing my own designing. Each little step, took me further and further out of the hole I had fallen into. I literally felt lighter. My pains had color. I could not bear to use warm shades like red, orange or yellow on a pain day. I worked with cool colors because they were soothing. Migraine made my drawings full of blues ,greens and purples, but they also made me make the images with no sharp edges. Everything was soft and rounded because those shapes, to me, caused less eye strain.

You need to know how far I had fallen to see how far you can go. Chronic pain paints everything black in your mind. Everything in your life becomes darkly tinted. You are walking around in a sad state. The small and the large joys will seem far past your reach. The medications to deal with the pain are not a big help. There might be side effects that leave you bleak and depressed. Other side effects might change your appearance in a negative way. Yet other meds give no relief and you begin to feel there is no silver lining to be had from that storm cloud. I've been there. No one I know would say I'm a smiling ray of sunshine, but I know my outlook affected how I dealt with that cold, throbbing ache. I had to retool my life to contain something I could look forward to each day. What is contained here shows you some of the tools I used to make that journey. It is a journey anyone can take. It is entirely a matter of adjusting your own forecast. You may no longer be able to take that hiking tour of Hadrian's Wall but you can broadcast to people throughout the world how cool Hadrian's Wall is. You can create a whole tableau of ideas and images to pass on your enthusiasm. Most importantly, you are improving your view of your life. With all the advances of medicine. Hadrian's Wall can still be in your future the way you wanted it to be. The important thing is that your head is still in the game. Your body can always follow later.

The following is not in my words, but it contains the best advice I could possibly sum up: