Battling Chronic Nerve Pain – Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

So I screwed up. Against my better judgment, I took my doctor’s advice and tried another med to combat the chronic nerve pain in my esophagus. I had been doing better lately without any meds at all, but couldn’t get over the hump, and was hoping one last try with some meds would get me there. Oops. Within a few days the pain got much, much worse, and a whole new round of spasms started up. It didn’t erase all of my gains, but probably set me back a month.

These days I’m on two major journeys: becoming a writer and battling chronic pain. One is an effort to create while the other is to overcome an obstacle, yet both feel like a process of two steps forward, one step back. For the pain, there will be a few hours where I’m humming along, thinking things are getting better, when whamo! A bolt of lightning shocks me between the shoulder blades, causing my knees to buckle, and my palms to sweat. Then my mind starts racing, contemplating every step I took that day. Did I eat something different? Did I push it too far trying to get a little exercise? Is this because I didn’t sleep much last night? Is this from stress, worrying about the kids? There’s never any real answer for it, but every time the pain strikes, it’s like getting pushed down a hill, hoping you don’t roll all the way back to the bottom.

Writing can be like that. Sometimes the words come naturally and effortlessly, and then there are times when you are halted for forty-five minutes because of one word that’s upsetting the flow of an entire paragraph. You loved that word and you hate to lose it, but it jumbles everything up and you have to let it go. Now you’re reworking the entire paragraph, and sometimes an entire page. Worse is when you finish writing something and realize that everything you just wrote contradicts what you said in the previous chapter, causing you to scrap those pages and rewrite the whole damn thing. And so it goes, two steps forward, one step back, until you finally finish what you started.

Really, most of life’s challenges work like this. To get better at something you have to keep working on it, and when things don’t go your way, you just have to recalibrate. But as long as you move forward, and avoid analysis paralysis, you’ll be ok. If every writer never shared a word before they felt it was absolutely perfect, nothing would ever get shared. If I never got out of my chair, because even walking around sometimes causes pain, what progress could I ever hope to gain? And there have been days when I was terrified to get out of my chair.

Chronic pain has made me feel things I never felt before: emotionally feeble, pathetic, and certainly humbled. But with every step forward, my mind gets a little stronger about how to deal with it, and I’m recovering more quickly from each attack, mentally speaking. Similarly, the more I write, the better I’m getting at letting go of the words I don’t need, and not sweating it if every line isn’t exactly like I want it to be. You just have to keep going and the more you practice, the easier it becomes to find a groove that works for you.

We’ve all got battles, and days that make us feel like we’re not getting anywhere. But as long as we keep trying to make the steps, it eventually gets easier to take two steps forward when we get knocked back one.