Dealing with Chronic Pain

In these long months I have been on a journey, and found what scares me the most. Most importantly, I have found how I best cope with these things, and how to hit them head on and deal with the situation as it happens. Last year I suffered a severely ruptured disc in my lower lumbar region. I remember the night well. 3 large glasses of my favorite tipple, red wine and a nice lie down. I was out of shape, overweight, quite possibly in the worst shape of my life. The sheer amount of crap I used to eat and drink is terrifying to look back on. But hey, I thought I was happy.

So, there I was trying to get out of bed when I lost all feeling down my left leg, right the way to my foot and beyond. But my back, that still had a lot of feeling, all of it bad.

The pain was absolutely indescribable, but that's not much help here is it, so I will try and give you something to relate to. Imagine someone threading a wire from the bottom of your spine to the end of your little toe. Then throw 30000 volts down it and heat it to about 4000c. Add to the mix sheer and absolute panic as you fall to the bed, unable to control any of your lower limbs or extremities. It was at this point that I started to hyperventilate.

Thankfully the paramedics were quick. Doubly so with the morphine they gave me. That took the edge off just enough for me to barely stumble into the back of the ambulance. Lying there, I started to notice waves of pain rushing over me, over and above the excruciating agony I was already experiencing.

What I had experienced was a sudden rupture of a disc, most likely caused by years of not exercising, eating and drinking too much, and being over weight. I had abused my body to the point of collapse. The soft, squishy bit was now pressing directly onto a nerve, and would continue to do so until operated on.

At the emergency department, the diagnosis was swift. The small inconvenience of a finger up the bottom to check sphincter control was a small price to pay to make sure I wasn't in danger of lasting incontinence. Only after some kind of epidural directly into the spine was I released to go home and sleep it off. It lasted 35 minutes give or take.

Still, they gave me enough drugs of various kinds to outfit a small hospital. Shame none of it worked a damn more that 1/2 and hour at a time. It would be 5 more months before I could sleep properly again. I did however become intimately familiar with all night TV, gotta love those late night documentaries about stuff you never realized you wanted to know!

So, in that time my search for a job was put on hold, I had to walk with a stick and knee brace, and life generally sucked from one drugged out day to another. I went back to school, and studied for a while, but it was tough with all those pills rattling around.

So we come to the operation. I was so lucky at this point, not only was the surgeon a good friends brother-in-law, but also an expert in keyhole surgery and hoped to give it a try with me.

I am happy to say that he was fantastic! I was only in hospital 3 days from start to finish, lots of lovely morphine, and attentive staff.

After the operation came lots of physiotherapy, lots of hard work, lots of eating the right stuff, cutting out most of the alcohol and EXERCISE (shudder)! Though I will never get the feeling back in my left foot fully, I have enough to be OK. I will always have varying degrees of back pain, and need a special thingee (don't know what else to call it) to sit on, but fundamentally I am as good as I am going to get. Hell, I even started jogging this week after dropping one and a half stone (10kg in European money).

So, the title of this meandering page was how learning to deal with pain, and I haven't really said much on that yet. This experience taught me a lot. I learnt what I had in life was precious, and at such a young age, could be taken away so easily (I was only 35 when it happened). I learnt more about diet, exercise, my mental ability to function under extreme pain, not to put things off, and that those things that scare us, in this case the operation, are often best confronted head on.

But the biggest lessen I learnt was this, and as a reward for reading this far, I will share it here with you.

If a nice doctor person offers you lots of painkillers, use them.

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