December 7, 2004

• What pain is…
  and what it isn’t –

  Pain is, “a negative response to a positive stimulus.”  That is
  how a physiology professor defined pain to a class that included one of
  my fellow “fibromites”, a nurse with whom I started an email
  correspondence after we “met” on a fibromyalgia bulletin board
  site.  She had remembered that class when I related the painswitch
  technique on the board.  Her prof meant that what we feel are
  neurological signals without which our body would be in grave danger,
  but our fear and tension turn them into a negative experience.

  For me, pain used to be scary.  It  might have been even
  scarier for me than it is for many kids, since I’d been told I didn’t
  have long to live.  Every pain turned into something potentially
  lethal, in my young mind.  Since my mother and my doctors shared
  those fears, my pain then became a way to get attention and
  sympathy.  I don’t remember ever faking pain just to get attention
  or sympathy.  I never had to.  There was always something
  that hurt.  I also never had to exaggerate how much it hurt. 
  If I concentrated on it, and let my fear amplify it, it would hurt more.

  After a while, pain became for me an excuse.  It got me a doctor’s
  excuse from phys.ed. in school after the year that my F in PE brought
  down my otherwise A and B grades to a below average GPA.  It was
  always a handy excuse for getting out of anything I didn’t want to
  do.  When it kept me from doing some things I really wanted to do,
  I felt sorry for myself and let the pain be my exuse for my
  self-pity.  Poor me!  Why me?  Pathetic and disgusting,
  I was.

  Then, through the wonders of medicine, pain became a reason to take
  drugs.  At first the drugs were prescribed for me.  Then I
  found other drugs that not only took away my pain, but also relieved my
  chronic fatigue and gave me energy to spare.  The drugs always
  wore off and the pain and fatigue came back in waves worse than what
  had gone before.  Other physical symptoms of my disordered
  biochemistry brought other drugs to treat them.  Depression that
  came in the wake of my amphetamine highs never got any drug treatment,
  however.  Perhaps I was fortunate in having gotten all that
  bullshit done and over with before the waves of antidepressants hit the
  market.

  I still have that “positive stimulus” that most of you would call
  pain.  Only when it is a new one, sharp, sudden and unexpected, do
  I judge a sensation to be pain.  And then I stop and ask myself
  what it is I’m really feeling.  Pain is just a judgement we lay on
  our sensations, I know.  Through the power of my mind, I could
  make it feel pleasurable, but that would be foolish.  So I simply
  cease judging and start paying attention, looking for the subtle
  messages in the signal.

  I used the word, “fibromite,” above, to denote a person with fibromyalgia.  That’s Devin Starlanyl‘s
  word.  I like it even though it seems to define a person by her
  disease, which is something I don’t like.  At least it doesn’t
  call her a “victim” or a “sufferer”.   “Pain is part of
  life.  Suffering is optional.”  That is attributed to the
  Buddha, and is as wise as any words I’ve ever heard.  One of the
  cliches often kicked around at NA meetings is that there are no
  victims, only volunteers.  It may not be universally true, but in
  that context and for many of us who would take on the role of victim to
  give ourselves an excuse for otherwise inexcusable behavior, it is true
  enough.

  What pain is not, for me at this time, is an excuse for anything
  (except possibly a blog).  I may stop in a supermarket, sit down
  on the floor and take off my boot to massage away a muscle spasm, but
  the pain isn’t my excuse for such aberrant behavior.  Relieving
  pain and preventing damage are my reasons.  With good reasons, who
  needs excuses?  Similarly, if sensations in my hands and arms tell
  me I should put down the game controller or the book I’m holding, or
  stop and shake out my hands and stretch them before I go on typing, I
  do it.  What I don’t do is tell myself it hurts, get all tense and
  worried about it and let it escalate.  And I don’t take drugs to
  make the sensations go away.

  Drugs don’t take the sensations away, anyway.  One of the clinical
  characteristics of this disease, myalgic encephalomyelopathy, AKA
  “firbromyalgia,” is that it doesn’t yield to painkillers.  I went
  through the available pharmacopaeia of analgesics in my youth,
  developed allergies to many of them, addictions to some — and fuck
  that “chemical dependency” bullshit, an addiction is an addiction even
  if it’s prescribed by a doctor — to the point that when I had surgery
  seventeen years ago, the only drug left that I could take was a
  Schedule II narcotic, Dilaudid:  hydromorphone.  It didn’t
  take my pain away.  It just took away my ability to care about the
  pain or anything else.  THAT was scary!  And that was the
  last time I took anything stronger than an NSAID.  I even use them
  quite sparingly, because I certainly don’t need leaky gut syndrome on
  top of all my other problems.

  As I see it, what I need most is to keep my wits about me.  When
  the symptom de jour is the “rheumy eyes” (one of the old common names
  for this disease is “rheumatism”) and I can’t see clearly, or when the
  fibro-fog moves in and I can’t think straight, or when I’m stumbling
  and fumbling, or twitching and jerking, I don’t see where any of that
  will be helped by adding the handicap of a narcotized brain. 
  Since neural sensation (AKA “pain”) is always there, while the other
  symptoms come and go — the only way the pain comes and goes is that it
  comes in one place when it goes from another — my best course seems to
  be to make friends with the sensations.  Pain, in that context, is
  my friend.  It tells me when I need to sit down, or stretch, or
  get warm or cool off or just stop doing whatever it is I’m doing until
  the sensation eases.  As long as I keep paying attention, I have
  nothing to fear from my body’s sensations.  That leaves me better
  equipped to deal with other stuff.  And I have some stuff to deal
  with now.  ‘Bye.
  

  • 6:57 pm
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