Passport Stamped for the Land of Pain: Learning to Live in a Foreign Land

The following post originally ran on the Pain Action Alliance to Implement a National Strategy’s (PAINS) website.
For many years, my passport was stamped in the land of the well, but a poor response to oral surgery in 2013 cancelled that document, leaving me in the land of the sick, the suffering, the other. While I was a well-one, I’d hear stories from that other country—and listen as best I could when others told tales of their visits– but I did not know what it truly meant to live there all the time.
Learning to live in another country is hard work. There are unfamiliar customs to understand, a language to learn, awkward situations, foods and beds and places that do not quite feel like home. The currency may not convert.
Once you become a chronic pain patient, as I have, you discover how much of your life is no longer your own. Your body is still yours, but it has tenants who are squatters there, who come and go as they please, who have no respect for your rules and boundaries, who break the furniture and vomit on your carpet. Even when you figure out how to lock the doors or kick them out, they will always creep back in.
Some of the tenants should know better: the ones who shame and stigmatize you, for instance, for not “sucking it up” or “dealing with it,” or who suggest you become more like a U.S. Marine, and know that “pain is fear leaving the body.” Some of the tenants belong to federal regulatory agencies and law enforcement, so concerned abou...

Source: Disruptive Women in Health Care - October 22, 2014 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: dw at disruptivewomen.net Tags: Chronic Conditions Consumer Health Care Women's Health Source Type: blogs