It’s finally starting to happen, I think. Yesterday was the first day that the soft muscle tissue around my spine started to hold, and rather than getting electrocuted with nerve pain all over, I just feel really sore on my insides, if that makes any sense. This is also the first day I’m not nervous about something happening that might reverse all my gains. Finally, whatever it is I’m doing seems to be working, and the good feelings that come from that, I believe, will help propel me over the finish line. Fingers crossed.
One of the most difficult things to do when battling chronic nerve pain is celebrating the million tiny gains along the way. I can’t tell you how important it has been to give myself positive affirmation that I’m making progress when the lightning in my body tries to tell me otherwise. Pain causes doubt, which leads to stress and more circulatory inflammation, potentially negating the progress you’ve made. Talking to myself, breathing calmly, and reminding myself that I’ve moved the needle, has all been extraordinarily important for continued healing. It all sounds like some sort of wishy-washy meditative gobbledygook, but keeping a positive mindset in the face of complete uncertainty, certainly helps. And yeah, I talk to myself, what of it? You couldn’t figure that out by the fact I’m blogging?
I don’t know how much longer I have to go. For months and months it has felt like I’m so close, but then a nerve heals and I find out there were a bunch of other nerves waiting their turn. So it goes. In some ways, even if the pain does eventually stop, this battle will never be over, because going forward I’ll have to be damn careful about managing my health and making sure the allergic reaction that damaged my organs never happens again. But that’s ok. It’s no different than anything else in life. You learn as you go and make adjustments along the way, and you continue to battle until you breathe your last breath. It doesn’t matter if the challenges you face are about your health, your financial situation, or your emotional well-being. You just have to keep going. You fall. You get up. You adjust. You live. That’s life. But oh how I’m gonna live when the pain stops!
The trickiest part to manage during all of this is figuring out how to keep living while waiting for my health to return. When this all ends, I have no doubts regarding the sustained euphoria I will experience when I can have a normal day again, but as my wife is constantly reminding me, what happens in the meantime? I can’t just take a timeout from life while waiting for my body to recover. I can take it easy, sure, but I can’t check-out. There is too much to do and before you know it, life will pass me by, pain or no pain. And there’s always the possibility the pain will never go away. What then?
Learning to live with chronic pain has been an exercise in humility beyond anything I ever imagined. Trying to put on a good face and live, work, be a good father and husband, and do the things I dreamed my whole life about doing, all while getting continuously zapped, has been something else. The only thing more painful than the pain itself is knowing how different things could be for my family if this could only end and stop limiting my ability to be the full me. But until that day comes, they can at least get a partial me. When I only had 1% to give, I gave that. Now I’m closer to 70% and I’m going to give all of that. Hopefully soon I can give my family the full hundo.
Life can knock you down in so many ways, and a lot of us tend to turn inwards when that happens. When my health crisis began, I turned further and further inward as everything that happened to me in the hospitals only hurt me more and more. The worry and fear of losing my life drove me to self-protect and the pain created so much noise in my head that it was hard to see what good was left in my life. But my wife said something very important to me back then that helped me begin my healing journey. I was really struggling at the time because I had lost a dramatic amount of weight as I couldn’t eat anything because of the damage to my nervous system. Not even water. Still can’t drink water for some reason, but I digress. Anyway, I was stressing out about how my body was no longer functioning, and she said, “yes, but it is.” Then she pointed out that despite the overload to my system, my body did what it needed to do in order to protect my heart and my kidneys, and keep me alive. So while something is clearly dysfunctional with my body, there’s also something about it that is fighting like hell to counteract the problem.
The human body is amazing. Inside each of us are forces at play that are constantly working to balance out risks to our health and keep us running. While focusing on the good in my life (e.g., my family and friends) helped pull me out of the doldrums, focusing on what was good in my body helped pull me towards a healing mindset. Just like staying positive in your personal relationships helps heal emotional wounds, for those of you that are battling a health issue, I swear to you, focusing on what is still good about your body (i.e., what still works) can really help you heal what’s wrong with it. Or at least ease the pain of what’s wrong with it. Focus on the good.
