Have you heard this familiar question from the nurse or Dr. on a recent visit? It is a regular question that is always asked. Dr.'s have been trained to manage pain. Unfortunately, they have gotten really good at it.... too good!
Last year, Landon shadowed a neurosurgeon and watched patient after patient answer this question..... In almost every case, pain pills were administered. It has become the single most asked question of patients. Pain management has become the soup du jour. What Landon saw, in his opinion, was a lot of prescribing to patients that had just become reliant on them as a lifestyle. A lifestyle that had blurred the senses enough to continue the continual partaking of that comfortable "cocktail". He left that day wondering if that was the future he was heading into after med school. My point isn't to judge the medical community or people for that matter....what do I really know? All I do know is that we have an epidemic on our hands a new culture around opioids has been created and very difficult now to overcome. A friend of mine worked on one of the flagship court cases trying to address this issue. Alannis Morrisette may have actually understood irony after all, not because of her song "Ironic" but rather because of "Jagged Little Pill".
I remember when I first was diagnosed with a herniated disk the sciatic pain I was experiencing was very painful and uncomfortable and I welcomed relief greatly. I was also very conscious of the fact that I did not want to stay on them for long. It can't be easy to reconcile, this tension that has edged more dangerously into the realm of real contention - will of mind over body. While the battle rages on now in the courts, I have come to realize that we are all dealing with different kinds of pain. Life has its' own continuum and we are all on that scale somewhere suffering in our own ways.
Losing someone dear can be all-consuming. Losing a friend, or loved one is impossible to sort through without feeling an enormous set of emotions that run the gamut of pain levels.
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We all lose friends.. we lose them in death, to distance and over time. But even though they may be lost, hope is not. The key is to keep them in your heart, and when the time is right, you can pick up the friendship right where you left off. Even the lost find their way home when you leave the light on.
Marie Walz
I have a dear friend in Argentina that lost a son a couple of months ago. I try and think about losing any one of my four kids and I literally lose my mind trying to think about processing that prospect.... It is literally a mindscathing agony.... I can't do it. I hope to never know what she is still going through.....
Is losing a friend to hurt feelings that much different than losing someone to death?
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We call that person who has lost his father, an orphan; and a widower that man who has lost his wife. But that man who has known the immense unhappiness of losing a friend, by what name do we call him? Here every language is silent and holds its peace in impotence.
Joseph Roux
What pain are you experiencing right now? What is your pain on a scale of 1 to 10? Is it on the surface of your skin, pulsating through your nerves, aching in your muscles or is the deep hurt in your heart? I know you are experiencing some level of it right now, in your individual way that no one will probably ever understand... I wish I could help....
It is ever-present and seems to be lurking around corners ready to surprise anyone.
I have been reflecting on the role pain plays in our lives. I think there is more to it than I realized.....
It seems that on one end it the spectrum, at least one of its purposes is to alert of us trouble. It lets us know there is something wrong. The more I have thought about it, I think pain is the great protector in our lives. it keeps us whole, it keeps us safe, it keeps us aware and careful.....This is a good thing.
Here is how I have been processing it:
The ache in my stomach tells me I have eaten something bad.... the ache in my back tells me to lay down, the ache in my hand tells me to let go, the ache in my side tells me to slow down, the ache in my head tells me to sleep, or stop thinking so hard... As for the ache in my heart, at times it reminds me that I have loved and have lost. That I have been misunderstood....or that I just haven't been "seen" yet for all that I truly am. This deep pain could also mean a reflection of a truly amazing season, cosmic and magical but has slowly faded into a faint memory that seems like a whisper....hard to hold onto, like slippery rope. Maybe the pain is "saudade", a strong longing for the nostalgic past that feels like a constant, dull melancholic pain because it will never be reached or lived again...?
There are those moments when it hurts with such intensity that you can't get what you need to out...there are just no words, no vocabulary, no voice. But it is clear inside your heart and only you know how it feels, but just can't describe well enough. The memory stings some and chokes you up.
What about the agony of not knowing, or ignorance...... Is that really bliss? Only to find out "later"....much later that you should have known something sooner....'cause it would have really helped. There is the pain of not being able to go back, to rewind the tape, stop those stupid words from flowing forth...... Or trying to restrain the rising rage of being 'right' with the wrong volume, or to refrain from the choices that led to tears and misery.
There is no nobleness in suffering, but there is purpose in pain....... it seeks us out and we seem to hide from it.... behind corners, in the dark. We soften our minds with amber-colored liquids and little pills from pretty packaged bottles from wrong places....we blur it out, 'cause we are afraid. We can't stand the thought that we could be so human, so fragile and vulnerable. Pain is the ultimate seeker.....and yet when it finds us, we so often cannot accept it's gift of knowledge and truth, no matter how scalding it is. It is the mirror of what has happened, what is happening now and protects us from the future...
One can never know the magnitude of reconciliation unless the gap of loss is too great to understand, unless the pain be too precisely profound.... and true. The agony and ecstasy of pain hitting its' true mark....
I love people who have learned from their pain. They have mastered it. They don't play the useless game of wishing it away, or hoping it will never come, or the dangerous game of "what if" or regret.... Pain always comes to visit, and for too many it seems to linger too long.... So, 'Bravo' to those who bear it so well and have let it guide them towards light instead of fear. We are all watching you and hoping we can be as brave...
"Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding."
"Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its' heart may stand in the sun, so you must know pain." --Gibran
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