It’s a common misapprehension to think that accepting the chronic aspect of your pain is the same thing as giving up hope that you’ll ever get better. Contrary to what you might think, accepting that your pain is chronic is the first step in actually getting better. It opens up a whole new way of getting better, a way that takes into account the realities of your pain condition. It’s a new and more realistic way to have hope. Acceptance that your pain is chronic is the first step in pursuing the rehabilitation model of care. Rehabilitation is hard work. It also takes time. You don’t do it if you think that a cure is just around the corner. Once you recognize, though, that your chronic pain really is chronic, it becomes your life-saver – or life-retriever. You start to get your life back. You learn how to self-manage your pain and you practice it to the point that you move on with the rest of your life. Your life doesnt have to be entirely about chronic pain and your illness(es). Patients can keep their life on hold when they insist on finding hope only in a cure. They seek out appointment after appointment, attempting to find the right specialist who will know what to do to make their pain go away. Oftentimes, they seek out surgeries or interventions that seem as if they might be a cure, but arent. Each time they seek out a new specialist, there is hope. Each time, though, it gets dashed because there really is no cure for chronic pain. Chronic pain really is chronic. What if, though, at the end of the day, the hope is really a false hope? It can become a vicious cycle that leads to depression and oftentimes more pain. Hope is found with each new procedure, but each procedure fails to cure the pain and so hope is dashed. If hope is defined by finding a cure, and if there really is no cure, then you are left helpless – and hopeless. Maybe it’s best to find a new way to have hope. You find it by accepting that chronic pain really is chronic. You accept that you are not going to get better by finding a cure. Rather, you accept that you are going to get better by learning to self-manage it. You learn how to make healthy changes in your life that, when done over time, reduce your symptoms and reduce the impact that chronic pain has on your life. In fact, you get so damn good at managing your chronic pain that it is no longer holding center stage and much-missed aspects of live may be allowed to return. There may even be blissful moments when you are immersed in a sunset or a poem perhaps and you sense that elusive stillness within and feel gratitude for simply being alive, here, now, living anyway, in spite of your pain.
Posted on: Mon, 02 Dec 2013 14:25:05 +0000
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