I have several chronic pain conditions like migraine headaches and IBS. I often joke with my husband that if I were to get Covid, I wouldn’t know because I already have some of the symptoms like shortness of breath due to my asthma. Living with chronic pain isn’t easy or fun, and it isn’t something that I would ever wish on my worst enemy.
From what I understand in the literature I have read, it is sort of like a form of PTSD. My body was put through so much stress when I was younger that now my nervous system has gone haywire. It is essentially broken and hyperactive. There’s not much I can do about it, except learn to live with it.
Now all this past week, I was having bad stomach cramps. They were really painful. They were the type that would send most people to the doctor or even the ER. I just thought they were a side effect of a medication I took and ignored them. It wasn’t until I realized that they had lasted seven days that I began to suspect that I was sick because the medication must be through my system already. I probably have a mild stomach flu and I will be fine, but having chronic pain made me dismiss my own pain this week.
There are three implications. First, because of chronic pain, when there’s a new pain that comes on for no reason and I don’t know when it is going to go away, that pain hurts more simply because I don’t know when it is going to go away. Second, all my young life, my mother treated me like I was some kind of hypochondriac and dismissed me if I was sick. Now I tend to dismiss my own illnesses because I have chronic pain. Finally, due to chronic pain, if I have pain that I have had before, like stomach cramps or head pain, I have gotten used to it. It means I have developed a tolerance for some types of pain. That’s kind of scary.
The pain I felt this week would have sent me to the ER when I was in my thirties. Now, I just endure it. Maybe it’s because I know it will go away. The migraine pain I have used to send me to the minor emergency clinic when it was really painful, now I don’t go because of the expense and because of Covid. I just wait it out hoping that the pain will go away in a few hours.
Maybe it is a sign of maturity realizing that the state of pain is constantly changing, maybe I have given up and learned to just live with it, maybe I have learned to give it up to God, or maybe it is something else. I’m not sure, but I do know that something’s different.
My faith saved me. May God’s peace reside in all of our hearts.
