Browsing Tag

pain

Guest Posts, chronic pain, Writing & The Body

Unnatural State

April 13, 2022
pain

2016-present

I first noticed the pain in my leg when I was four months pregnant with my first son. “Sciatica,” everyone told me. After all, it was a plausible enough explanation. Even my OB/GYN kind of shrugged and said, “Eh. Nothing you can do about it. ”

But after a vigorous round of Google hunting, I privately ruled it out and didn’t bring it up to the doctor again.

The sciatic nerve runs down the leg. This pain was incredibly localized, deep within in the hip joint, almost at the groin, but not quite. It’s a nebulous spot that is so buried it feels like it shouldn’t exist. In fact, it was right where I had injured myself eight years earlier, stretching too fast and popping a tendon. Somehow, for some reason (most likely the avocado-sized lump in my uterus), the tendon was hurting again. I couldn’t sleep on my side, couldn’t walk comfortably. It felt like if I stretched, the tendon would snap, and I would become an actual Gumby.

The pain went away almost immediately after I delivered my first son. Poof. My body was accessible to me again. I could sleep on my back. I could sleep on my side. Bliss.

Sadly, after my second delivery, the pain made its home in my hip socket permanent. It revives itself when I do too much. Too much walking. Too much squatting. Too much sitting. Too much feeling.

This was two and a half years ago. Now, I accommodate the pain. Keep weight off the hip. Strengthen the surrounding muscles. Don’t push myself too hard.

My life is an exercise in accommodation.

February 2021

The pandemic has dissolved so much from my life.

Work. I had some at first and it drizzled away, as if there were a crack in the floor of my career and all teaching assignments just slid down.

All the ordinary happenings in a life are gone. Spontaneous trips to get ice cream, pop into a shop, play at the park. Vanished.

My friendships have shifted, melted, and scattered away. Texts are fragmentary check-ins.

How are you doing?

Hanging in there.

Same.

Can’t wait to see you again.

Miss you.

Love you.

Some friends already do things with other people, make plans, and see each other at a distance. I try to do it a few times, but each time my kids struggle with the idea of personal space, spilling all over each other like the four and two they are. Unshackled in their innocence, unbound by science. It is my job to keep them safe, to keep my immunocompromised husband safe, so I stop making plans with people. Eventually, people stop asking me.

I am equal parts sad and relieved.

The world contracts significantly. These boys who became my world when they were born are now, quite literally, my world. They occupy my every waking—and sleeping—moment. I sleep with the youngest one, who sneaks into bed as I am in deep sleep every single night. I don’t notice he’s there until I awaken next to his warm, lavender-chamomile scented hair. I tote him around like an extra limb, as he needs a little more of me than my eldest did. More holding, more snuggles. His twenty pounds has enlarged over the course of the year, and now it is like permanently lugging around a squishy, wiggly set of dumbbells.

And the talking. Dear god in heaven, the talking.

Mama, can you get me some more ketchup?

Mama, he took away my medical kit!

Mama, he pushed me!

Mama, I want some chocolate milk.

Mama, did you know that T-rex is my favorite dino?

Mama, this is not the right toast! I said I wanted jelly toast!

The litany of name repetition wears on me. Being forever needed.

What do I need?

1982-present

I am no stranger to pain. In fact, we are often friends. If something does not hurt on my body, if something is not malfunctioning, then I find myself shifting my weight uneasily, stretching out, testing its limits. Chronic childhood tonsilitis. Chronic rhinitis. Chronic knee pain from worn away cartilage. A respectable inventory of broken bones. Aching pre-arthritic joints. Chronic recurrent virus, or whatever the medical community is now calling long-term recovery from a rare virus they know nothing about. Childbirth, twice. DTs—cool alcoholic lingo for delirium tremens—otherwise known as detoxing. Abuse.

I could go on, but it gets boring, all listed out like that. Pain is unremarkable and unremitting. How it affects you is what makes it interesting.

2018-2019

The next pain like this—unexpected, arriving without warning nor acute injury—came to me after my second son, in my left arm, at the shoulder/bicep intersection. I clearly lift too much weight, too often. This is a stress injury from balancing babies on my left hip without ceasing. I sit them there while I cook, make phone calls, walk around the house picking up tiny kid crap. Discarded shoes. Duplo Legos. Cheese-It fragments. I lift the car seat to-and-from the car, to-and-from the stroller, to-and-from the shopping cart.

“Stop lifting the babies! You’ll just keep reinjuring it!” my husband scolds with care and frustration crumpled together in his brow, knowing I will not listen to him.

Who else will carry them all day? They are babies, both under three at this point. One a living, breathing football-sized lump who cannot move around unaided, and one still not potty trained. I am taking an unpaid semester off teaching, so the answer is me. I will carry them all day.

December 2020-March 2021

This year, the year of the pandemic, there are some new pains in the mix. I sprained my ankle and/or broke my foot. I am too chicken shit to go to the ER and get an X-ray, so I wait three weeks before visiting my primary care physician, tail between my legs and brace on my ankle.

“You think you broke your foot, and you waited three weeks to seek medical help?” the doctor asked, trying to hide his incredulity. I really don’t like my doctor.

“I mean, the sprained ankle is bothering me most,” I add, as if that makes one iota of difference in the situation.

In fact, this is the second time I have sprained my ankle, and the second time I ignored it.

February 2021

It is starting to get ridiculous, though. For the past few weeks, I have noticed pain in my elbows. It gradually, steadily worsened until I couldn’t lift my coffee cup with my left hand anymore.

“I can’t lift my coffee cup,” I say one morning, surprised by my arm’s inability to power through. It’s just a bit of pain, right?

“For god’s sake, go to the doctor,” my husband says, eyes on his phone. This is not the first time he has said this.

I don’t usually complain about my pain. I point it out, like pointing out a Volkswagen Thing or a building with Art Deco friezes. Unusual, but certainly nothing to pause life over.

“This is why we have insurance,” he reminds me. I actually need reminding, because I forget this all the time. For most of my life, insurance was strictly aspirational.

2020-2021

Clearly, I am fraying at the edges. Not just at home, not just in my body. With so much in real life suspended, I have come to rely a lot on my online friendships. Then, a few people I think of as good friends stop interacting with me. They just…disappear. What are these relationships, that I think about and am invested in for so much of every day?  Honestly, I am not sure. I care deeply about a lot of these people. Do they care about me? A specific interaction with one person leads me to say no, but the follow up interactions from a dozen friends asking if I’m okay lead me to say yes. The data is unclear.

My time online is now fraught. Are my friends going to be fighting? Am I going to be able to remove myself emotionally from this? Will I obsess about someone who is ignoring me? Will someone say something that hurts my feelings? Will I feel left out alone, ostracized, wrong, unaccomplished, stupid? Will my anxiety prevent me from being present with my children (again)?

I am rapidly approaching middle age, and suddenly notice that I am spiraling, as if this were high school, with the power to provoke tears and agony over my social status. This realization drills into my very core. I started drinking to stifle feelings like this, impulses like this. The way I twist myself into pretzels to gain people’s approval. The way I enter into everyone’s problems and embody them. The way I agonize about the wrongness of everything about me.

Though I don’t leave the house much anymore, don’t see anyone beyond my immediate family, I remove myself from Facebook.

1982-present

A few years ago, I found out I have hypermobility. I can do the splits and bend my arms in unusual ways. This causes a host of joint and muscle problems I won’t go into, but the chronic knee pain has been the hardest to deal with over the years. From stress and misalignment, my bones pull my cartilage out of place. The only ways I can alleviate the pain is to build supportive muscles in my legs and force myself to walk with my legs straight. This feels unnatural, but also relieving. As if being myself is an unnatural state that needs correcting.

February 2021

“Tennis elbow,” the doctor said almost immediately when I pointed out the location of this pain, new pain. “When the muscles are overworked but underdeveloped, the tendons get strained.”

Goddammit. Tennis elbow? From what? Wiping butts and lifting babies?

Oh.

March 2021

By the sixth week of wearing the ankle brace, my ankle is decidedly not better. I up my physical therapy routine, the one recommended in the pamphlets my doctor thrust at me. In addition to tracing the alphabet, caps and no caps, with my foot, I now add some stretching and lifting exercises. What I do not decide to do is go back to the doctor.

The absence of my once-daily walk is beginning to wear my edges even further. Physical exercise helps keep the madness at bay, behind the bars of its cage. Recovering addicts have little in the way of traditional coping mechanisms, after all. I stretch out obsessively, like a rubber doll.

I write a lot more. I stay off Facebook. Do my friends even notice my absence? I wonder what I’ve missed. I try to sit with the discomfort, like the therapists and mindfulness gurus instruct.

This is uncomfortable. It is okay to be uncomfortable. This will pass.

This is the first time I have ever tried this in my life. Letting myself be uncomfortable. It sort of works. I hate it.

April 2021

“Mama, hode me. Hode me,” my littlest says, big brown eyes and chubby cheeks my undoing, as always. I relent, picking him up, and immediately regret it as my forearms burn. But I don’t put him down. How much can I carry before my arms fall off, the ragged seams finally giving way and disintegrating?

March 2021

I speak to so few people my voice starts hurting after reading to my kids that night.

April 2021

Here I sit, wrapped ankle shoved uncomfortably into shoes not designed to accommodate a walking brace, arm wrapped in another brace that supports the weary tendons. I lift my coffee with my other hand, which also hurts, but not as much. I don’t get up when the kids call for me because I can tell they’re just bickering. I pick up a book and ignore my loneliness.

March 2021

“The ankle looks fine,” the doctor said, when I come back in for a follow up to the x-ray I finally got around to getting. “No break. Just a sprain. Is it bothering you?”

“Not really, not anymore,” I lie. It just comes out of my mouth, unbidden. Reflexive.

What is a little pain?

In truth, it was throbbing because I tried my luck without the brace today. After eight hours of excessive care, gingerly stepping over piles of Magna-tiles and spilled ketchup, the ankle was protesting. It was protesting motherhood. It was decrying its lack of support. It was renouncing this goddamned pandemic.

The doctor didn’t ask about my tennis elbow, and I didn’t bring it up. What I was really there for was a referral to a therapist. I could handle the physical pain, which was fading, anyway, what with the help from physical therapy exercises. And who ever died from tennis elbow, anyway?

February 2021

Scrolling on Facebook for a minute, I check in so that my account doesn’t disappear forever, and realize there is nothing there for me. I don’t belong there—right now, at least. I won’t until I am able to weave myself back together. A sturdier, more complete version of myself. I have no expectations for when this will be.

March 2021

The pandemic is ending, according to everyone. One day our hospitals were spilling over with COVID patients and exhausted healthcare workers, and a few weeks later L.A. County is opening up indoor dining again. I have half a dose of the vaccine. It is positively surreal: a miracle through and through. This is almost too much to cope with, and I randomly cry at the sight of a favorite restaurant welcoming diners or kids at the high school playing team sports. The thought of resuming my old life, though?

I don’t want to go back. I am fundamentally different now. I can’t go back.

I sit with these prickly feelings. I let myself cry and I let myself feel the pain. I bathe in this discomfort.

It will pass. No pain is permanent.

It changes shape and we build walls around it, accommodating it, crushing it, suffocating it, allowing us to move on with life even as it controls so much of what we do. It can become part of us, shaping who we grow into like strange casts. And if we have the patience, we can listen to what it is telling us about ourselves.

Are you listening?

I am, now.

Natalie DeYoung is a writer from the Los Angeles area. A winner of Blogher’s Voice of the Year twice, Natalie DeYoung was also invited to read her selected essay for the keynote at Blogher 2016, as well as perform as a guest judge for Blogher 2017. She has been has been a freelance writer and contributing editor at YeahWrite since 2013. An adjunct professor of English, she is currently working on a memoir about her experience with recovery from addiction.

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Guest Posts, chronic pain

Dear Pain

October 6, 2020
pain

By Diana M. Hernández
That’s you, looming over my thoughts

My movements

My day

My life

I hate you

I really do

People say, “think positive.”

Have they known this pain?

Would they still shit rainbows

If they woke up to this every day?

For years and counting

I’ve hit rock bottom

Times where I thought it would be best

To end it all.

I’m no longer in that dark place

But DAMN I get really frustrated

I have really good weeks

I get a taste of what my life was

Then I’m hit

Days of never-ending

Pulsating

Throbbing

Stabbing

Torture

Radiating from my back

Up to the top of my head

Bleeding into my mood

Blurring it all

I don’t think I’ve hated anyone

As much as I do you

But wait

My son hates you the most

He’s growing up

Knowing pain

Seeing pain

Daily

On the face of his mother

On the body of his mother

He stopped asking me to play

A long time ago

“Momma…

When you die…”

He’ll frequently wonder

Out loud

He is six years old

He should not worry about death

His family drawings

Depict me in bed

“Will you be healthy one day?”

“So that we can play?”

I want with all my heart

To tell him that I will

But I would be lying

So, I nod my head and smile

“You look so beautiful…”

“When you smile…”

I realize then

My child

Isn’t used to seeing me smile

He grew up

Seeing pain every day

On his mother

Dear Pain

Fuck you to eternity

Diana M. Hernández is a mother and graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin where she is specializing in Historic Preservation. She is from Missouri City, Texas and currently holds an M.A. in Spanish Language, Literature and Culture from the University of Houston. 

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Guest Posts, chronic pain, Hope

The Shame of Pain

October 24, 2019
pain

By Francesca Louise Grossman

I have tried 46 different times to launch myself out of chronic pain. I know this because every time I try something, I write down what I have done, what it feels like, what it costs, whether it’s covered and how worth it is in a small purple book. No one knows I do this. I scribble in it like I’m confessing to my sixth grade diary. In it is the same kind of anxiety about the future that I had in sixth grade, just not about Andy Apstein and whether he was going to kiss me or ignore me. Instead, it is about the treatment or therapy I try, and whether this one will be the one to finally help.

I opened the book the other day to pen a possible 47th.

The book is chronological, of course, but I put it in alphabetical order for clarity. I flipped through.

It starts:

Acupressure: December 2010 – Feb 2010 – dull pressure, not much change, $120/hr not covered – not worth it

Acupuncture – July 2002 (on and off) until March 2018 – sometimes painful, usually calming, blood flow, lasts less than a day but is relief $75/15 mins – sometimes covered – worth it but has to be ongoing

Acetaminophen – When needed – does nothing – over the counter – $9.89 a bottle of extra strength – not worth it

Bioelectric Therapy – October 2016-April 2016 – possibly dulls pain a little – for about an hour $165/hr at office – not covered by insurance

Cupping – February 2014 – one time, hurt like hell, not worth it. $85/30 mins – not covered by insurance.

Codeine – March 2009 – April 2009 – numb, good, not a long term option – covered by insurance $20 copay

Craniosacral Therapy – September 2000 – October 2001 – When in conjunction with other body work  – Myofascial etc – decent relief but dizzy – lasts a couple of days maybe $200/session – sometimes covered by insurance

Cryotherapy – June 2018-October 2018 – feels great right after, like putting ice on a knee. Lasts a couple of hours, heart races. $60/3 min session. Not covered by insurance

And on and on—and on.

The book is 24 years old. The same age as my chronic pain, more than half my lifetime, all of my adulthood, eons.

This book exists because all this time I have had a continuous faith that there is a valve for this pain; that I can escape it, or, more accurately, it can escape me. For all these years I have I known this to be true. I will find it. I will heal. I am a warrior, a survivor; tough, strong, and able. People have told me that pain is weakness leaving the body in all different scenarios, with all different motivations. I don’t have this recorded as studiously but I wish I did.

I have other lists I don’t love revisiting, but help to explain the pain. In my twenties I was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, an illness of the intestines that leads to violent pain and an urgent need to empty your bowels. I developed Colitis later, a more general type of the disease that bloats my stomach to look four months pregnant. I have had surgeries for my stomach, some of which were determined later to be unnecessary. I had thyroid cancer through out my twenties, finally treated when the tumor on my neck was the size of a ping-pong ball. I developed arthritis along the way, both as a peripheral malady and also it’s own disease. My body is gouged from piles of polyps removed from my insides, and (usually) benign tumors removed from my outsides. My neck doesn’t turn all the way to the right. My hips need forty-five minutes before letting me walk in the morning. I have an unidentified liver problem that swells without notice and bends me in two. If the saying is to be believed, there’s a lot of weakness in there, and it seems to be stuck.

*

When I was twenty-nine, I had surgery to remove my thyroid. The overnight nurse was a doozie of a lady.  Opera singer large, big calloused hands that vice-gripped onto my shoulders. Thighs thick as trunks that she used to pin me against the side of the bed so she could administer my catheter without “so much squirming.” She was brutal and brutish. A small silver peace sign sunk deep into her cleavage, drowning in flesh.

She had a hard time getting the catheter in, and as she struggled, she noticed my twisted face.

Pain is weakness leaving the body, my love, she said, repeating it over and over like a command until I could actually pee.

This is an extreme example, but at least once a year, often as much as once a month, this phrase earworms into my psyche. Related to illness and chronic pain or not, this saying has appeared like a subtitle again and again at the bottom of the screen of my life. When I was a weak child? A coach. A teenager who could not stomach even occasional beers? A boyfriend. A young woman unable to go to a bar without scoping out the bathroom situation ahead of time? A roommate. A thyroid cancer patient: a nurse. Doctors, PA’s, med techs. Physical therapists, friends, masseuses, acupuncturists, pharmacists, bosses, guy on the street.

*

I went to the doctor a few weeks ago and a delicate med tech took my vitals. She asked the normal questions, made the normal small talk, took the normal introductory tests. Her thin fingers flew across the keyboard, recording my responses. She asked me if I had any pain.

I wasn’t sure I heard her correctly.

“You mean right now?”

“Yes,” she smiled softly.

“Nothing acute,” I said.

“So no pain?”

“No. I mean, yes, I have pain, the same pain I have all the time.”

“What would you rate it, 1-10?”

How do you rate pain on a scale made for people with no pain?

“I don’t know, 4?”

She nodded and her hands took off. That was the wrong answer. I knew this, I knew that anything under 5 wasn’t worth her noting, that saying 4 was like saying I had a dull headache, or a splinter in my toe. But what should I have said? 7? Wouldn’t that be alarmist? Especially when that pain had been a relative constant for over twenty years? Especially when I knew from decades of experience that the litany of potential remedies for that pain were not going to help?

*

My husband stepped on a quarter inch wire sticking out of the ground near the beach in Fire Island this summer. The metal went a good inch into his flesh, and when he pulled it out blood sprayed mercilessly all over the sand and sidewalk. He howled. He made noises that I have never heard him make before and I have been with him through a lot of painful things. He was pale and sweaty, teeth gritting, eyes rolling back, that kind of pain.

Later that night, his foot gauzed up and iced, still throbbing, he looked at me and said “I’m so sorry you are in pain all the time.”

I didn’t know how to respond. This wasn’t about me, he was the one in pain, and yet a part of me felt smug at his discomfort. Now you know how I feel, was a momentary thought, I’ll admit it, and not one I’m not proud of.

But it got me thinking about pain and the way people relate to it. It is very hard to relate to pain if you aren’t in pain. Which is why I have such a hard time with the 1-10 scale.

Instead, for chronic pain patients, they should ask what kind of sharp thing is in your foot. Splinter? Pushpin? Nail? Quarter inch wire? Razor blade? Glass shard? Burning glass shard?

Nail. I would have said. Occasionally glass shard.

But instead I said 4 and she smiled.

*

I have fought against my pain and weakness for a very long time. I have tried, often unsuccessfully, to be like my friends. In my twenties I tried to stay out all night, I tried to ski, I tried to walk down the street without doubling over. I worked, I played, I drank, I sat as still as I could so that no one would notice the aftershocks. In my thirties I had children, pregnancy an event that paused my pain for a while so that when it came back it felt like a tsunami. Like many mothers of babies I didn’t sleep and then I had severe postpartum depression; I found having small children so physically demanding I came undone. I’m forty-one now and I am very often a prisoner in my house. My stomach bleeds, my liver pulsates, my head spins. Not all the time, but enough.

From my teens until today, this minute, and all those in the foreseeable future, there is pain. At least nail in foot pain. Sometimes glass shard. Never pushpin. A splinter would be welcome. In fact, when I think back on my childhood and that which was difficult – most sports, endurance, gym class, partying, anything else that required my body to function – I think it’s possible that I have been in pain all my life. Back then I never considered that my resting state was anything less than normal, but now I know better. Most people do not live with nails in their feet.

I hurt. I hurt in the morning when I turn over to get up. When I walk, when I carry groceries, when I turn my head to the right to reverse in the car. My stomach burns, my joints swell, my liver rejects everything I eat and drink.

I don’t talk about pain very often. I tell myself it is because people don’t want to hear me complain but it is more than that, I can admit that. I’m ashamed of my pain. I’m ashamed of my weakness.

What is it about pain that is so shameful?

We live in a culture in which wellness equals strength. People my age do cross fit and triathlons, women have babies without drugs, are lauded for their tight abs, their thick skin, their ability to play tough. I have never been strong like this. I have tried, but I have failed. I was never scrappy. I don’t think I will ever be. I am soft. My belly, the place of much of my pain, is squishy. Distended, bloated, doughy, depending on the day. I’m sensitive. I cry at pop songs.

Our society’s greatest hero story is about overcoming obstacles. We love a fighter. We love an underdog who comes out on top. We love triumph and happily ever endings. We love to fix a hoarder, intervene and send someone to rehab, remodel a decrepit house. We love treatment. We love survival. We love hope.

But hope is complicated. After all of these tries, this list of 46 different treatments and therapies, I no longer have hope that things will get better. I have hope that things will not get worse, which is not the same thing. I have a hope that feels a lot more like mercy than it does like faith.

When I ask myself this question about weakness and shame I hear a quiet hum suggesting a better question: why am I fighting so hard?

In my experience, pain is not weakness leaving the body. I realize this is a trope, and any mantra is nothing more than a slogan. But slogans have power. They convince. And I’ll admit I have always believed this – that the suffering I endure might one day let me free.

When I was pregnant and exhausted, a friend of mine told me that of course I was tired, I was making a person in there. Though not the same, pain sometimes feels like that too. Of course I’m tired, I’m fighting against myself all the time, trying to quell the pain so that I can live my otherwise fortunate life.

I’m not delusional about this. I know I live a charmed life in almost every way. I am educated, from a family that loves me – even when I behave idiotically. I am not from a country ravaged by war. I have a husband who cares for me, does not abuse me, even dotes on me sometimes. I have two healthy children whom I adore. I am from a privileged minority, I have more than I deserve. I can walk, breathe and think to exist in my daily life. I can afford therapy, eastern medicine, treatment outside of insurance sometimes, to do part time work. I can try 46 things. In short; I’m lucky. Unfairly so. And yet.

Here’s the whole list, abbreviated to just the titles:

Acupuncture, acupressure, acetaminophen, alcohol, aleve, aromatherapy, bioelectric, CBD creams and oils, cupping, chiropractic, chanting, codeine, cranial sacral therapy, cryotherapy, dairy free, hallucinations, gluten free, guided breathing, fasting, fentanyl, flotation, ibuprofen, oxycontin, marijuana, massage, meditation, myofascial, quell, reflexology, radiation, salt baths, saunas, steroids, sugar free, sodium free, sound bathing, surgery, swimming, percocet, physical therapy, psychotherapy, psychiatry, praying, vicodin, xanax, yoga.

Everything helps a little. Nothing helps enough to be worth the life altering work and piles of money it takes to keep it up.

Here’s a truth: the things that actually take the pain away feel a lot like addiction. They don’t remove the pain, that’s the trick. They numb. And they are delicious. But they don’t last and they unleash other pain, often more severe that the original. It’s never worth doubling the pain tomorrow to have numbness today, no matter how attractive the reprieve.

So the pain is there. It’s always there and most likely it will always be there. I don’t know how it got in. Maybe the pain was waiting for me when I came into this world. Maybe it comes from my ancestors, my DNA, my parents’ tragedies, my childhood bullies, or little or big assaults. Maybe I am sensitive to the world for some reason, and it simply hurts to be here. As woo-wooey as that sounds, that’s the one that feels the most accurate, the most likely.

I think it’s actually softness that makes us strong. It’s not skin made of iron. It’s showing the underbelly. It’s not bracing for the storm, it’s putting a kite up in the wind. It’s the willingness to see the world as a series of experiences some of which are going to hurt like crazy and the ability to just keep going anyway. It’s vulnerability. It’s asking for forgiveness. From ourselves as much as from others. It’s mercy.

Mercy is an open palm. It’s the meaty bit. Curling your hand so that your knuckles face the world is so much easier. But a fist to heart feels quite a lot different from a palm to heart, resting square on your breastbone, staying there, the heel of it pulsing the same rhythm as the heartbeat on your chest, marching your body along in a long trek to some sort of quiet absolution.

My husband’s foot healed in a few days. He stopped limping. The knowledge that he would get better permeated and defined the experience – the faith that this would be over soon.

Therein lies the difference between acute and chronic pain, of course: in how we define hope.

So what kind of hope can I have? What if I looked at my years and piles of pain and perceived weakness not as a failure but as a step towards becoming who I am? What if I forgave myself the years of fighting myself and sank into the deep cool water of acceptance? How would it feel down there?

I do not mean that I should give up. I’ll try things if they look promising. 47, 48, that’s fine. But what if instead of fighting so hard I allowed the pain to be part of me? What if, for a while, instead of the restrictive eating and the therapy and the medicine and the exercise and the planning and the trying (and the failing), what if I just stopped? Even if it hurt? Even if the pain never left? Could I recalibrate to “0”? Could I see that as the most radical act? Doing nothing at all?

For now I’ll put the little purple book in the drawer. I’ll cap the pen and sit quietly. I’ll let what’s in me stay put. I’ll put my feet up, expecting and accepting the pulse of the nail that might be forever lodged there.

Francesca Louise Grossman is a writer and writing instructor based in Newton, MA. Her work includes contributions to The New York Times, Brain, Child Magazine, Word Riot, Drunken Boat Literary Magazine, xojane, Kids in the House, Ed Week/Teacher among others. She is currently working on a memoir and a novel. 

 

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Guest Posts, No Bullshit Motherhood, parenting

When Mommy Hurts

June 23, 2017
pain

By Carrie Kempisty

I sit draped in a thin, blue sheet. Waiting. Chill bumps cover my bare legs and feet dangling from the crinkle-papered exam table. The tests have been run; I’ve been poked and prodded. My brain spins in circles of anticipation, like an airplane without clearance to land. The sudden, mysterious, physical pain that has been slowly crippling my body may, after today, have a name. Up to now, I’d mentally escaped inside a self-protecting, impenetrable bubble that’s been relentlessly bombarded on all sides. Fears, potential disaster, over reaction, denial, and sadness have all threatened to burst through the protective barrier.

My two young children used to ask me if I could play. Now they ask if I hurt, which I vehemently deny. This seemingly overnight change in my physical well-being has been frightening for all of us. I am an active, fit, energetic stay-at-home mom. I don’t often skip days of going to the gym to lift weights, run, or swim laps. In recent years, I’ve enjoyed a healthy dose of competition in running, biking, and swimming events. I was a personal fitness trainer for over ten years before I became a mother. It was hard enough to admit my pain to my athletic husband. How can I admit to my children that their mother has suddenly become less than the energized, non-stop, cheer and activity leader they’ve always known? Where’s the line between protecting them from witnessing my pain and outright lying to them? Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, No Bullshit Motherhood, parenting

The Lesson Leaving Taught. (No Bullshit Motherhood Series.)

October 8, 2016

Note from Founder Jen Pastiloff: This is part of my new series called No Bullshit Motherhood. Raw, real, 100% bullshit free. If you have something to submit click the submissions tab at the top. You can follow us online at @NoBullshitMotherhood on Instagram and @NoBSMotherhood on Twitter. Search #NoBullshitMotherhood online for more.

By Chris J. Rice

My ten-year-old son stood beside his father in the front yard of my now empty house. My son had a scowl on his face. Looked away from my packed car, down at the ground.

Dark-eyed boy with a skeptical furrowed brow.

“Come here,” I said. Called him over to my driver-side window.

He stuck his head in for a kiss, and I whispered in his ear: “You’re going to miss me. And that’s okay. It’s okay to have a dream. Never forget that.”

He nodded as if he understood. “Bye,” he said, then turned around and ran back to stand with his father.

I put my Datsun in reverse and took off. Moved to Los Angeles to attend graduate school. And I didn’t take my child along. I left him with his dad for the duration. I told them both it would only be a few years, though I knew it would be more.

I sensed it would be forever.

A formal acceptance letter came in the mail and I made a decision. Put my books in the post, my paint box in the trunk of my yellow Datsun B210, and drove headlong into whatever came next. Sold most of my stuff in a big yard sale: the vintage clothes I thought I’d never wear again, the leather couch and chair I’d bought dirt cheap off a moving neighbor.

I didn’t have much left after the divorce.

I said it. My ex said it too. I love you. But he didn’t mean it. And for the longest time I didn’t get that. Just picked up the slack. Made things happen. That’s how it was. Okay. Just okay. He would get angry. Couldn’t seem to manage. Fury popped up like every other emotion. Yelling. Disparaging—things like that.

I missed my son like mad. We talked by phone regularly. I flew back on holidays. He came to visit on spring break, and for a few weeks every summer.

Seven years passed. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, courage

To Be Beautiful You Have to Suffer

August 21, 2016
dance

By Liane Kupferberg Carter

I was dragged to Ruth Skaller’s Ballet Studio for Girls the year I was seven. I had never expressed any interest in dancing. But earlier that year, I’d had surgery on my eyes, and someone suggested that dancing might help my coordination.

Ruth Skaller was a tall, olive-skinned woman of indeterminate age, whose classes were filled with giggling girls she whipped into line with the snap of her voice. Through a series of barre exercises, we would sweep our Capezio slippers over the polished pale wood floors, plié, rond de jambe, relèvé, to the strains of haunting, melancholy piano music on the Victrola that only years later would I recognize as Chopin. Mrs. Skaller would stand before the mirror, lower face cupped thoughtfully in her hand, humming as she turned out muscled legs beneath her skirt drapery until she had choreographed our next steps. We would line up, and then, like drifting dandelion fluff — or lumbering elephants — cross the room on the diagonal, spinning and spotting, pirouetting our way dizzily across the studio.

Often the next class would arrive while we were in progress. Taller, lankier girls would perch on the painted radiators, or sweep into the dressing room behind the studio, a gray affair of cubbies and wrought iron bars over narrow dusty windows that faced an unpaved alley. Swinging rectangular black plastic ballet boxes with pink Barbie-faced ballerinas painted on the front, they would click open the vinyl snaps to remove leotard and tights, then open cunning spaces at the bottom which concealed the soft shoes, or, for the lucky ones, pale pink satin toe shoes with wooden toe blocks. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Health, Women

Endo

June 21, 2016
pain

By Janet Frishberg

Age 12: In the afternoons when I’m bleeding, I double over as I stagger home up the hill. I hold onto a telephone pole on the way to the white-walled apartment where my mom and I live, where I can sit on the toilet and cry, trying to imagine myself out of my body, writhing on the carpeted floor, wanting to find a place of comfort. I slouch at the computer console, my feet resting on its grey plastic side, crying and playing games to distract me from the pain. It feels like my insides are a room and someone is peeling off the wallpaper very slowly, with a straight-edge razor. In the quiet apartment, alone, I know I can scream or groan as loud as I want; everyone is at work. My mom and I go to doctors, more than two, less than five. They say, “That’s part of being a woman.” And, “Sometimes menstruation is painful. You’ll get used to it.”

The pain overwrites the past. It becomes difficult to remember my body from before my body is in pain. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Surviving

What The Body Remembers

April 17, 2016
rape

Trigger Warning: This essay discusses abuse and rape.

By Claudia Smith

For Meihua, my daughter

When I was small, Jesus was more than love, more than an important figure to me.  He was the soul of everything. I could not imagine my world without him any more than I could envision a world without rain, sun, clouds, or earth.

A picture of Jesus hung over my grandmother’s dresser; he wore a cream robe falling in a way that only suggested a body, light shooting from his barbed valentine heart. He was so very beautiful; his hair was light brown, his beard split into a small heart as well. It was difficult to read the expression in his eyes and over the years, I saw many feelings in them. Gentle forgiveness, calm resignation, even lust. If he was in pain, he seemed to have transcended.I preferred this image to the crucifix that hung in church. I can’t say when I began to understand that suffering was his love, or at least the proof that was needed for me to understand the depths of his love.

Years later, when I was no longer Catholic, when I wasn’t sure if I was anything, I still prayed when I was afraid. I would say the Act of Contrition, Hail Mary, and whatever else I could remember, even after my understanding of Jesus had complicated and when asked, would call myself a “lapsed Catholic.” I liked that. It left things open. When I prayed, I imagined the eyes of the Jesus in that classic Sacred Heart picture, not the Jesus nailed to a cross. That image sort of pissed me off. Why should I trust him more because he was tortured? Wasn’t his love infinite? What was the torture for anyway? Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, cancer

The Shape of Legs and Love

March 30, 2016
cancer

By Isabel Abbott

This is what we do now. It is late, and I am in bed, and the lights have long been flicked off along with the day’s clothes which pile in the chair or a trail from front door to white sheets. I am in bed, and I am listening to the sounds outside, locating each one and giving it a name.  (Feral cat, two cars passing, a back screen door banging, a low hum of talking while a cigarette is smoked.)

I am listening and I am naming.
I am wanting to sleep.
I am hurting.

There is the slight adjustment, the shift from one side to the next, my left hip a glaring road sign pointing toward the placement of origin for pain. And so this is what we, me and my legs, do now. We lay here, in bed, and at night, unable to sleep, I begin to envision the bones inside, the lock and socket, the strong and soft, the words I imagine are engraved on them, transcribed from all the years I’ve spent walking through the world and street and unmarked alley. All the skin and muscle and bone, the extension and the wrapping around her, the running and running through the woods and the cuts into skin that bled out poison and suffering, the tethering to this earth and the curve of calf when feet slip inside shoes that take me home. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, chronic pain, Surviving

My Moveable Feast

March 14, 2016
pain

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.  —Ernest Hemingway

By Vicki Gundrum

A Moveable Feast is the only book of Hemingway’s I’ve read, and I’m nourished by the idea of memories. I know it’s more than Paris—it’s driving the ambulance in the Spanish Civil War, catching swordfish in the Gulf of Mexico, gazing on the Snows of Kilimanjaro, swimming in your Key West pool with your gay friend Tennessee.

I’ve lived a life like that, moving up, around and through the world like a hawk on an updraft. It was good and scary, and I collected three concussions.

***

My neurologist watched my face change into a Picasso. An eye shrunk and moved, a puzzle piece that should no longer fit, but face tectonic plates shifted to accommodate. My left eye teared. My doctor stared. She said, I’m watching you have a cluster headache. It’s not hemiplegic is it?

I told her I felt the pain behind my left eye but that the headache would become full bore on all parts of my head and face. She said she’d never before watched a cluster headache form. I didn’t say congratulations but I could tell she was excited. She grabbed me by my shoulders and led me to a room with a mirror in it so I could also see the transformation in my face, a reflection of the cluster in bloom. There, do you see your tiny eye there? Or was it my pupil that fascinated.

She rendered her diagnosis with the pride of competence: You are having both transformed cluster headache and transformed migraine, chronic and daily. I asked what transformed meant.

It means you don’t need a trigger.

Oh, I thought my trigger list was merely huge and unavoidable.

My doctor injected nerve blocks behind each eye and prescribed prednisone to break the cluster of clusters—for I’d had a Spring of them. I made another appointment with her but it never happened because she quit the HMO for private practice. Continue Reading…