I’ve been absent for a while, and this will explain why. I wrote it during the week before my surgery, and I’m now four days post-op. I thought maybe I’d come back to it and write a second part with the perspective of acute pain versus chronic, but I’m still too drained to find anything interesting to say about that. So I’m just gonna toss this up here on the ol’ blog and then get back to the real content everyone comes here for—Veronica Mars takes and recaps of old dumb movies. 

The way I learned that I had chronic pain, at the age of 44, is someone asked me if I had chronic pain and I said, “No.”

Sure, I’d been in physical therapy for most of the previous four years for my hip, my back, my knee, and my foot. I’d had a major surgery to correct my hip dysplasia on one side because my hip hurt badly enough that I couldn’t walk or stand for more than a few minutes at a time. I spent twelve months re-learning how to walk.

So yeah, something always hurt. But in my head it didn't qualify as "chronic." I was just a wimp.

But as soon as the “no” was out of my mouth, I thought, wait, what am I saying? Of COURSE I’m in chronic pain. 

For nearly 20 years, I thought that I had insomnia because of anxiety. I’d wake up in the middle of the night and ruminate, unable to go back to sleep for hours. I had prescriptions for Xanax and Ambien, and on top of those I used melatonin, just to try to sleep through the night.

Then, on one of those nights when I was awake and ruminating, I noticed my shoulder was hurting. I took an ibuprofen, and I was back to sleep within twenty minutes. After that, when I woke up in the middle of the night I would check all over my body to see if anything was hurting. Turns out, something always was. I’d take an ibuprofen and go back to sleep.

I wasn’t awake because I was ruminating; I was ruminating because I was awake, and I was awake because I was in pain. It was so constant that it didn’t even rise to the level of conscious awareness. Like a scent your nose has habituated to, I was tuning it out.

Flash forward eighteen months or so. Thanks to that, "oh, huh, maybe I DO have chronic pain" epiphany, I’m now being seen for joint hypermobility syndrome, small fiber neuropathy, tachycardia and chronic fatigue syndrome. I was put on low dose naltrexone for the SFN. In high doses, naltrexone is an opiate blocker, but at low doses it’s an anti-inflammatory.

Suddenly I'm sleeping through the night. The really bad joints, where the arthritis has eaten away most of the cartilage, still hurt, but less. The background aches are virtually gone.

That’s all well and good, but this week, I had to go off my low-dose naltrexone, and all other anti-inflammatories, in preparation for my knee surgery. The pain came walloping back, and Jesus Christ no wonder I was so fucking tired all the time. It’s exhausting to be in pain all day. Plus I don’t sleep. All night long I toss and turn, trying to find a position in which one joint or another doesn’t feel like it’s on fire.

This is how much pain I was living with, and ignoring/denying, for years. For that, I have to thank every adult who ever told child-me that I wasn’t really in pain, stop being a baby, toughen up, stop whining. There were a lot of them — my teachers, coaches, camp counselors, even doctors and occasionally my parents. Great job, everybody!

But I don’t take it personally. That was the era I grew up in. Kids weren’t fully human in the 1980s. We were just complicated pets (and people didn't even treat their pets well back then, either).

Anyway. Pain sucks! Check out my post-surgical bruises. (I covered up my gnarly incision for those of you with weak stomachs.) In another week I get to start re-learning how to walk again!