Is refusing to accept the pain and disability 'wrong'? Is accepting the limitations and suffering a giving up?
I still do not accept the pain. I write too much, or read too much, or do anything too much that requires me to use my eyes (which is pretty much everything). I notice the pain. I feel it mounting. I say to myself, "it's okay, it's not that bad. I can continue." And continue I do, and them am often actually astounded at the amount of pain there is.
As I read, and write, look through store aisles, sew a hem, merely stand or drive in bright, bright light I fight having to take the codeine.
Since the stimulator 'broke', it often only takes a few minutes into the day before the pain is off and running.
Finding and opening the cereal box, pouring out the cereal, filling the cereal bowl with Cheerios, Total and Shredded Wheat, pouring the milk into the coffee cup and bowl I feel the need for a codeine; to go sit somewhere and hold my eyes stockstill until the pain goes away.
I mention in a church group that it seems wrong to pray for the eye pain to go away, as the touch and worse part of the pain did 13 years ago.
If it was God's Will it would be gone: why pray when the answer has been "No." for so many years.
You do not have to Believe or have Faith. The question remains the same. If the pain has not gone, if no surgery but the first, 30+ years ago, stopped the eye pain, isn't it time to accept it as a reality, a constant, a part of who I am?
Someone, someone very kind and caring, tells me you always have to have hope: you never know what new thing they will come up with that might help. That has always been my hope.
Is it a false hope, a way to keep the life force going, to keep away the horror of reality? I do not know. The stimulator is 100% experimental. It did help, and hopefully will do so again. Fibromyalgia and RSD (CRPS). They used to be thought to be psychological, now they call them real and are developing theories, meds, and therapies.
So what do you do? Do you hang on to what may be false hope - something may be developed at some point in time (or may, one day, turn out to be legitimate hope) or do you accept where you are?
Hmmm, that last sentence was not thought out, just a thought, maybe a Freudian thought.
Maybe the answer is easier then it seems. Maybe, just maybe, the answer is in accepting the here and now as it is, and leaving the future to itself.
My book.
"Fascinating" Stephen S. Hall. writer, N.Y.Times magazine. "Hard to put down." A.C.P.A., American Chronic Pain Association.
Why dies it have to be a dichotomy? I accept where I am in the here and now, giving thanks to God for my many blessings while still having hope, not expectation, that tomorrow might be better. I think you do too but your bigger point is one I wrestled with in the earlier days of chronic pain, when do you internalize the realization that the person you were pre-injury or illness is not whom you are post-injury or illness. At that time things change. For me it was modifying my goals for pt to not losing any more function where it had earlier been regaining prior functioning. Eventually, it meant giving up a most rewarding and satisfying career.
ReplyDeleteGood point. You are right the two can coexist: hope for future help and acceptance of what is.
ReplyDeleteI am sorry that you had to lose your work but it seems that you are dealing with it in a very healthy way.