Everyone knows what pain is, right? The pain of neglect, exclusion, abuse, depression. No? Maybe not. Some people just seem to be at ease, comfortable. So, what's the difference? Is it a genetic predisposition to pain and suffering that plagues some of us? Is it our environment? Nature vs. Nurture re. Pain?
Well, if you nurture your pain, it will surely have it's way with you then throw you down on the floor and make it extremely difficult for you to get up. If it's you're nature to be in pain, can you overcome it?
Some people experience severe physical or emotional pain from the day they're born. Others develop painful conditions during their lives. I don't think that anyone lives entirely free of pain but I know that some suffer much more than others.
In my case, the pain started pretty early. I could never sit in one position for a long time without my joints hurting. And I noticed this when I was a young kid; 7 or 8 maybe. By 9, I had a pretty crippling depression at times. I hated school, though I was good at it, and I often made excuses so I wouldn't have to go. It was the social interaction I wasn't good at. And being smart didn't make it any easier. Actually, it was being a smart-ass that didn't make it easier. Sarcastic I was. I guess it was a defense mechanism. At any rate, until late in Junior High and then High School, my emotional state was shaky at best.
When I was in medical school one of our professors, David White (a brilliant man and incredible physician, rest his soul) took account of my symptoms of lax joints, easy bruisability and fairly prominent scarring from minor wounds and diagnosed me with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. The benign, hypermobile type. Benign my ass. I now have 3 or 4 ruptured discs in my neck (I can't remember) to prove that it's the farthest thing from benign. And bursitis or arthritis in all the rest of my joints to boot. I'm waiting for my head to just fall off 1 day even though there is a titanium plate to hold 2 of the vertebrae in my neck together.
And then my back started to 'go out' when I was 19. The first time it happened I was standing, leaning against a table. It wasn't like I was lifting great weights or anything, I was just standing there. And my back went out; I couldn't move very well. The next time it happened I couldn't move at all. I had to crawl to the bathroom. It was then I found out that my last lumbar vertebra was congenitally fused to my first sacral vertabra on the left but not the right. Ding! My back was fucked. Permanently. I've since asked several surgeons to just fuse the right side but they demure. I don't have enough symptoms. Not that constant pain and suffering and occasionally being stricken so that I can't move at all isn't enough symptoms!
Everyone, I'm sure, has suffered some kind of emotional trauma resulting in pain and suffering so I won't go into that here. Suffice it to say that at times, I am the emo poster adult.
So what pains do you suffer? Could you be rid of them just by changing you're attitude or are you permanently afflicted? How do you deal with pain?
Me, I go as long as possible, take pain meds that make me sick to my stomach and occasionally go to my chiropracter. I've been down so long, it looks like up to me.