Archives for posts with tag: arthritis pain
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Who Ordered This??

July 7, 2015 //
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This morning I woke in pain; my arthritis has flared up after many days of not bothering me much at all. The hot dry days offer relief…but…it’s still hot. It’s still dry. I am in pain. I slowly rose, patient with the stiffness of my spine. This is a morning for music and dance, cool breezes be damned. I peer through the patio blinds and notice with some surprise that already the days are shortening and dawn is coming later…did I wake ahead of the alarm? I double-check. It went off. It woke me. I no longer remember hearing it. Pain is a distraction.

I start the day with Usher, and coffee. Facebook tells me my computer is infected with malware. I glare at the page with skepticism and irritation. Why is Facebook telling me what to do? I log out with a promise to myself to let my traveling partner know; I trust him, and his skills, more than any app or browser warning. Hell – the warning probably is the malware, requesting permission to get started. For the moment I find myself in contemplation of all that is unclean and vile about the internet, and my head aches with the weight of the suspicion, and distrust. The pain, again, is a distraction.

I reach for my coffee, and burn my tongue, then spill it in my lap for the added delight of hot coffee held to tender flesh by coffee soaked jeans. Seriously? Who the hell ordered this day? I snarl at myself, managing to knock over my chair as I get up, too quickly, to change clothes. The chair falls on my foot. Great. The top I wanted to wear doesn’t go with the pair of jeans I just put on. The top I’d wear instead is in the laundry. I break a nail reaching for an acceptable alternative. Are you fucking kidding me? What is up with today?

Pain is no joke. The unexpected return of significant arthritis pain this morning easily throws me off, which would be, perhaps, just a little amusing in the face of words like ‘chronic’ and ‘long-term’ – if I were in any mood whatever to laugh about it. Right now I just hurt. I hurt and I’m sort of mad at the day right now. Don’t say it. I know what works. There are practices to practice and it’s time for that. I get it. Pardon me while I take a few minutes to take care of me.

Yes, yes. I know.

Yes, yes. I know.

1. I took my medication on time, and it’ll take another 30-40 minutes to be fully effective. It only addresses the symptom: pain. There is more to do to put the day back on track.

2. Medical cannabis helps by potentiating the Rx pain reliever – and it will take the edge off my quickly deteriorating mood, and wipe the snarl off my face promptly…and make yoga easier.

3. Putting the rest of the morning aside, yoga is next, and I take my time with a long sequence of postures that lengthen and gently flex my spine, easing the pain where the pain lives. The headache begins to diminish.

4. Then, meditation – this is an Rx that goes straight to the brain, literally, and is a first/last/always step for me these days…although, sometimes, like a child resisting bedtime I fight the necessity irritably for no good reason.

5. Coffee. I take my time making a really first-rate cup of coffee for myself, and sit down to enjoy it, feeling very much that the morning has been ‘reset’.

It is once again a morning filled with music and I am smiling and sipping my coffee as contentedly as if I woke up on an entirely different morning. Choices, verbs, patience and self-compassion, and the willingness to accept that the potential to improve a poor experience exists…and practicing practices for the win. 🙂

Enjoying other moments.

Enjoying other moments.

The morning moves on, time passes, I sit quietly enjoying pictures of a walk with the wanderer after work, yesterday. If I spend more time thinking about the rough start to the morning, lingering on uncomfortable sensations, unpleasant emotions, or the difficulties themselves, than I do savoring the delights of other moments with similar depth and clarity, over time my negative bias will increase, and my ‘background experience’ will become more negative as well. I take this understanding very seriously, and commit to enjoying my coffee and thinking about the evening behind me. I linger over the recollection of finally taking a photograph of a dragonfly.

He's there, really. (I have no idea why I like dragonflies so very much, but I do.)

He’s there, really. (I have no idea why I like dragonflies so very much, but I do.)

I think, too, about the later conversation with my traveling partner, and the feeling of connection and warmth in spite of the physical distance. That takes my thoughts all sorts of lovely places, thinking about love, Love, and loving. At this point there is no hint of the morning’s challenges remaining in my experience of the moment, and I find myself ready to move on with the day.

Am I achieving emotional self-sufficiency? Do I need to ask this question now? Living the experience is, perhaps, enough.

Beautiful.

Beautiful.

Today is a good day for practicing practices, using verbs, and having my own experience – if it’s mine, I can change it. 🙂

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Categories Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, Love, Mindfulness, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Summer, The Art of Being, The Big 5

The Happily Ever After Myth

February 20, 2015 //
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I love fairy tales, and stories with a strong heroine, who faces a challenge, learns a lesson, and grows to become someone wonderful. I like a happy ending. I read a lot of ‘happily ever after’ endings over the years, and at some point ‘happily ever after’ became an implicit goal. That’s especially maddening because that is basically the least attainable goal ever imagined. I enjoy feeling happy. I find ‘joy’, ‘delight’, and all manner of pleasant happiness-related, happiness-producing quite wonderful and worth experiencing. I didn’t have much success making the whole point of existence getting to some difficult to define ‘happily ever after’ place. Quite the contrary, I think making ‘happily ever after’ something to chase resulted in a lot of personal unhappiness.

I don’t actually understand why happiness seems so much more common now that I’m not chasing it…but it does tend to be the experience I am having.

Unfolding like spring flowers.

The loveliness of simply being.

I am okay right now. It wasn’t my best evening. I enjoyed the day in relative physical comfort. By the time I arrived home, after a chilly drizzly commute, I was in pain and irritable. If I could fold time, I would put this moment, here, adjacent to my arrival, and perhaps enjoy myself and my family more, being in a better mood, and less pain. I’m not complaining, and I don’t recall being unpleasant, just in pain and perhaps too tired to be more considerate with my phrasing; I know it takes a lot to hurt my traveling partner’s feelings, and I know I succeeded. I will make amends in the morning, learn from the experience and move on. It’s okay to treat myself with great care, even though I feel badly about the evening going a bit sideways, and I have spent the evening gently, managing my pain, watching South Park, and writing. It was my intention to do these things when I arrived home hurting so much, and it’s pretty satisfying to find that good self-care has indeed helped a lot, although I am still in too much pain to be able to sleep just yet; yoga will help with that a lot, and meditation afterward is a nice way to finish the day.

Every time something works out just a bit better, I take time to really appreciate it, notice it, and hold onto the experience for some minutes. I ‘let it soak in’. I make a point of continuing those practices, and even investing more time in those that are regularly part of some new moment of personal success. In the most difficult moments, I am sometimes very briefly so bitter and hurt that I am unsure these things really matter, or that I am actually making progress day-to-day. The doubts are incredibly painful, and I am very relieved each time I get past that moment, to this place when ‘I am okay right now’, and able to enjoy the moment of progress, or resilience, or emotional safety – successes, all.

Stormy sky, quiet evening.

Stormy sky, quiet evening.

I feel more vulnerable sharing successes, than I do ‘failures’, or learning experiences. Vulnerable is okay, too. It’s a nice evening.

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Categories Brain Injury, Love, Mindfulness, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, The Big 5

Please Serve My Fail Sauce On The Side

January 16, 2015 //
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I’m quietly contemplating my evening’s ‘crash landing’ and wondering why? The house is quiet, but it isn’t late and I don’t know that anyone is sleeping. I know I am not.

It wasn’t a bad evening, quietly hanging out and watching videos of this and that. Calm. Pleasant. Eventually ‘good nights’ were exchanged. I am feeling very mortal waiting for the test results from my biopsy. I find myself ‘trying to be brave’ like the small girl I once was and hoping to let it go until I get the results – any other choice seems silly in the abstract. I am so very human.

Stormy weather...

Stormy weather…

I hurt tonight. I’ve got a terrible headache, probably stress or fatigue. My arthritis hurts. How is it I hurt this badly and still want romance? It’s frustrating. I’m not exactly approachable; I am fragile, reactive, and emotional. That’s really where it all breaks down – in one simple question, and in an instant of contemplation, “How are you doing?”. “Well, shit, I was mostly fine until you asked, actually…” but I never manage to say that. I blurt out the details of how I am doing – however that happens to be, and with the force of whatever emotion is bound up in it all – and it tumbles forth in words…and emotions, in no particular order, and with full real-time intensity.  It must suck on this whole other level to live around this injury, and the chaos and damage I wade through every day – I just don’t have the same perspective on it. How can I?

I don’t know what I’m to learn here. There’s something to be learned, I’m sure of that. It’s late, and these tears don’t matter a tinker’s damn to the massive ills of the world. This is some minor league suffering, right here, and there’s a chill calm part of me that recognizes the subtle difference between the simple sorrow, itself, and the wave of suffering that follows, self-inflicted. Part of me feels foolish to be so storm-tossed, like an adolescent girl; the thought reminds me it’s only been a bit more than a week since I started on the medication I was given – hormones. There are so many moving pieces to this whole ‘taking care of me’ thing. I feel like a dick for having a minor meltdown when I was unwittingly on the brink of being handed a few moments of connection, contact, and affection that I sorely needed at the end of a difficult week.

Sitting here quietly in the darkness, I also feel: sympathetic, compassionate, warm – understanding. What did I expect with the hormones, the headache, the fatigue at the end of a long day, hurting well beyond what my Rx handles, and waiting for test results? I sit calmly, wondering what to do to take care of me most skillfully, and with greatest love. Sleep, soon, probably…

There’s a new day, tomorrow. Love is pretty ‘forgive-y’ (if that’s even a word)…but choices have consequences, I’ve hurt someone dear to me, and tonight I am alone. Perhaps the dawn will come and find me smiling…certainly there’s enough love to go around if only I am open to it. There are verbs involved.

...I still have so far to go.

…I still have so far to go.

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Categories Anxiety, Brain Injury, Healthy Living, Hormone Hell, Love, Menopause, Mindfulness, pain, Perspective, Relationships, The Big 5, women

Well, Here’s a Thought…

December 2, 2014 //
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Yesterday was cold – winter-cold, as in to say ‘it’s winter’. Yep. It’s generally the time of year for winter holidays in the northern hemisphere. I went to work bundled up in weather appropriate garb, and still felt stiff and cold by the time I got to the office. By the end of the day, I was in a nearly unmanageable amount of pain, and chose to bring my evening to an early close after a hot shower. I didn’t get to sleep any earlier, really, but I also didn’t treat anyone poorly. This morning I wake, stiff and hurting. Winter often brings more pain, and I find myself aware that my own awareness of that isn’t helping…I set that thought aside and reach for another, and my coffee.

On my way in to the office yesterday, I explored the recent significant increase in my anxiety level (work related), and used a variety of new tools and skills to take a look at more closely than I have. I used perspective to give myself an improved sense of scale and recognized it isn’t actually as severe as it once was. I used walking meditation to remain engaged in the moment, and aware of my emotional experience without judgement, and the seeming profundity of the feelings diminished considerably. I used body scan practices to sort out the emotions from the sensations, which tends to change the sense of an emotion from being very significant, to simply being, further alleviating the anxiety. I used cognitive practices I learned using SuperBetter – like a ‘reality check’ – to decrease my tendency to escalate internally based on untested assumptions, and each practice I practiced took me a step further from being anxious. The root cause was clear and obvious as soon as my heart was calm and my thinking was clear; it’s really just work anxiety. Hardly noteworthy; I’m sure everyone has occasional anxiety about work, career, employment…something in that area.

Work anxiety isn’t pleasant, and it does keep me up at night and messes with my sleep…but…what if my messed up sleep is actually causing the anxiety? What if it isn’t ‘real’ at all? Thoughts…emotions…both rather astonishingly lacking in substance…maybe I shouldn’t be so ready to attribute cause and effect, or be haphazard about assigning relative importance? As I walked I allowed myself to consider the extreme…what if ‘the worst’ happened? I startled myself to laugh out loud when I realized I was – even now – holding on to ‘losing my job’ as some  pinnacle of misery, some worst case scenario. It isn’t. My employment, what I do for a living, may well be the very least important, significant, or defining quality about me as a human being; its damned near irrelevant…particularly because of the person I am, and the values I hold, and what I hold most dear about myself, and life. Work? It’s a characteristic, and changeable. I’m a human primate; I’m adaptable. The loss of any one job doesn’t have more significance than any other change – unless I allow it to.  I felt a bit of vertigo as my values kicked my anxiety in the nuts. The work day was just fine – other than the pain I’m in.

It's all about perspective. What we choose to look at changes what we see.

It’s all about perspective. What we choose to look at changes what we see.

I woke this morning, stiff, and with a headache. The air feels too dry. I’m a bit cross. I do what I can to set clear expectations and boundaries with regard to mornings; it takes about an hour for my medication to be fully effective, for my brain to really come back online, and for my stiff joints to regain some mobility.  I take active steps to avoid interacting with people until I can more easily and reliably treat them well. Funny how often – even in the face of that very clear, very specific expectation and boundary setting – some human primate or another will crowd me, or try to have reasoned dialogue about…well, damned near anything. I’m just not ready. My traveling partner knows me well. He too is a human primate, and the recipient of some of my boundary and expectation setting. Tip for other free-range human primates: if you are going to step across that line, arriving with a hot tasty latte is an excellent success strategy. LOL My Americano was tasty, and hot… but there’s nothing ‘creamy’ about an Americano. As it turns out, I find ‘creamy’ an extraordinary delight in the morning. I still hurt. I still have this headache. Now I also have this tasty latte, and a really charming funny guy to hang out with before work!

Today is a good day to take things as they come. Today is a good day to be adaptable, flexible, and to make the best assumptions of others, where assumptions must be made at all. Today is a good day to change the world.

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Categories Anxiety, Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, Love, Mindfulness, pain, Perspective, Relationships, Turning 50, winter

Fog, Pain, and Solitude

November 8, 2014 //
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I’ve got a solo weekend. The morning, so far, as been still and quiet…and strange. I didn’t sleep well, but I don’t feel fatigued. I tossed and turned wakefully much of the night, and managed to use the entire area of a king size bed alone…every corner, every side, diagonally, crosswise, splayed like a starfish, curled up like a hedgehog, with pillows, without pillows, blankets, no blankets… which is most peculiar since I generally sleep in just one or two positions throughout a given night, sometimes laying flat on my back throughout, rarely rolling over (it’s a remnant of domestic violence, and nights when any movement might give away that I wasn’t sleeping, or remind my spouse I was there, at all). I sometimes wake in the morning to find that the covers are not even a little disturbed from the night’s sleep, just turned down at the corner from getting up, looking like a dog-eared book page. So…yeah. I didn’t sleep well. I didn’t want to wake early, and went to bed tired, sleepy, and ready to just sleep until waking caught up with me.

As it turns out, waking caught up with me around 2:38 am. I had some fun cat naps between then, and when I finally gave up and got out of bed, around 5:00 am. No nightmares. I feel reasonably well-rested and satisfied with the comfortable knowledge that I can nap later, if I care to. I took my time with my yoga. I had to. I’m stiff this morning and the pain of my arthritis, which is in my spine, is indescribably vast and commanding of my attention. This morning my spine feels like a rigid column of pain, on which my head sits; a first for me, I think, to have continuous arthritis pain from the vertebrae just above the line of my hips, to the second vertebrae above my shoulders. I keep finding room in my experience to be somewhat impressed by the completeness of it. I suppose that’s better than laying in bed crying because it hurts. I don’t really want to waste precious mortal time that way.

Droplets of mist gather everywhere on a foggy morning, each one a tiny universe for life I can't see...or perhaps a miniature gazing ball on the world I can see. I suppose it depends on my perspective.

Droplets of mist gather everywhere on a foggy morning, each one a tiny universe for life I can’t see…or perhaps a miniature gazing ball on the world I can see. I suppose it depends on my perspective.

It’s another foggy morning. I love fog as a metaphor for the unknown, the unseen, the mystery of potential, and choices yet to be made. I enjoy walking in the fog.  I enjoy the whimsy of imagining that as I walk I create the world around me; each step I take revealing some new detail, what is beyond view slowly emerging. Yep. Almost 52, still daydreaming everywhere I go. lol. 🙂 It’s a quality of self that I value a great deal; it has held the power to make the tragic and painful endurable, and it has kept me going long after I would have quit without it.

Tears unexpectedly begin pouring down my face… arthritis pain? No, it’s just old trauma, old hurts; there are things lurking in the darkness that I never really stop crying over. These days I don’t fight the tears that come when my heart is touched by my own hurts; I keep a safe space for myself, in my own heart, to comfort me, to show myself compassion, to recognize that it has indeed been a lot to go through, a lot to survive, and to recognize that these honest tears are no sign of weakness or failure. In a sense they are a strange celebration of strength; I am here, and that’s a pretty big deal, considering what I have overcome. I only need, in this moment, to be kind to myself and let the tears fall without stress, without anger, gently supporting myself on the strengths I have. Tears pass. There’s plenty to cry over, but it doesn’t need drama – only love.

Autumn is a season of change, a good time to break patterns.

Autumn is a season of change, a good time to break patterns.

Today is a good day to take care of me. Today is a good day to be fully present, and engaged in the moment, even if all I do is flip through a holiday catalog, answer my email, or have a coffee in the chilly autumn garden watching the dawn unfold beyond the fog. Today is a good day to appreciate how far I’ve come, and how good things are right now in spite of pain. Today is a good day to make choices that create the world I really want to live in. How about you? What do you think… shall we change the world?

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Categories autumn, Brain Injury, grief, Love, Metaphors, Mindfulness, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, Sleepless Nights, The Big 5, Words
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