How much is the pain we feel amplified by our attitude? I was taught as a kid that if you had pain that wasn’t of the order of a broken arm or a burst appendix, you dealt with it and didn’t talk about it. There was no kvetching or gnashing of teeth around the dinner table. My mother, who raised for four kids on her own in the 1950’s, had migraine headaches and simply retired to her bed, took some kind of medication, lowered the shades, shut the door, and suffered through it. It was never a topic of conversation.
Well, I’m breaking that rule. I’m kvetching. I, like many of you, experience discomfort much of the time from what most people would deem “minor” distress – chronic aches and pains, usually intermittent or fitful. They aren’t minor to me. Like:
- When I awake and get up and start moving around, maybe three days out of seven, I get a sudden attack of nausea that can occasionally end in throwing up. More often than not, as I am reaching for a bowl, it settles down. My guess is that lying flat on my back for 8-9 hours at night leads to a build-up of stomach acid. What I eat doesn’t seem to matter.
- I have intermittent neuropathic spasms beneath my paralysis line, especially in the buttocks and thigh areas. Nothing as intense as many people with paralysis and MS, but still maddening. I go through long periods without this and then it flares up and lasts for days. It comes in various forms, sometimes feeling like I urgently have to go to the bathroom, other times like I’m sitting on a giant pin cushion or just a burning sensation. No medication seems to provide relief. I just wait it out.
- My shoulders hurt pretty much of the time, despite being over a year after major shoulder surgery and a steady diet of stretching and resistance training with a PT. Twenty-six years in a manual chair takes its toll. A heat pack in the morning, ice pack at night help mitigate the dull pain but never eliminates it. Correct posture gives momentary relief. In particular, my left shoulder, which underwent the surgery, is still dicey. If I continue to stretch and strengthen it religiously, the aching will certainly ease. Hope springs eternal.
- I get a lot of headaches, mostly from a stiff back and neck muscles, I think. That’s probably par for any 77-year-old man who sits 14 hours a day.