Um, I’m embarrassed here, but WordPress decided I wanted to publish this instead of keeping it as a draft, despite my (I thought) clear button-clicking. And after all this work, naturally, I’m too clobbered to figure out how to back out and fix that. So I won’t advertise this until it’s done. Meanwhile, enjoy reading the beta version, if you want…
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Don’t abandon yourself
As individuals and as a group, we have far too much experience of being abandoned by those who are supposed to care for us and those who, we believed, cared about us. Sooner or later, those of us with invisible disabilities in general, and disruptive neurological and pain diseases particularly, *really* learn who our friends and allies *truly* are — if we have any at all. It’s a brutal lesson.
On top of this, those of us who survive the initial assaults of the disease — not to mention the staggering rounds of betrayals and abandonments — tend to be rather driven. If we weren’t when we started, we sure are by the time we get through those ghastly shivarees. We can keep going by will alone, without the muscle, the memory, or the means to do so. We do it anyway.
In the long run, this is a skill that needs to be used selectively. It gets us through the pinches and punches of life, but we have to learn when to turn that off and take care of ourselves, as we wish others had taken care of us.
The trickiest lesson of all may be, how not to abandon ourselves.
It’s not that hard. It’s difficult, but it’s not hard. The trick is learning to walk fine lines, using our judgment instead of our impulses — which are a LOT more impulsive because of the neurochemistry of relentless pain.
The deck is stacked against us. But we are still in the game.
Here are some notes on the distinctions we have to learn, even when our brains can’t cooperate. The fact that we get as far as we do is astounding, when you think about it.
H/The difference between comfort and care
There are habitual comforts that belonged to our pre-disease life, and care that belongs to the present. I’ve found that care itself has become very comforting, so the work of leaving behind old comforts that suddenly came with a very high price has turned out to be well worth the years of effort. (I rarely even want pastries any more, which is just as well, considering all the problems they trigger in this body… but Epsom baths are wonderful, and berries are delicious!)
H/The difference between rest and sluggishness
There are four pillars to self-care for CRPS and, indeed, most pain diseases: activity, rest, nutrition, and distraction.
We have GOT to move. We have GOT to rest. Neither is optional. But the pain makes it hard to start moving, and once you get comfortable… oh, dear heavens, why get up when it just makes things hurt again? Initiating movement is awful at the time, but maintaining flow of blood and lymph is absolutely crucial for *ongoing* pain control and keeping the damage down.
Putting your feet up between tasks, taking it easy the day before and the day after an appointment or event, and [LINK] having good sleep habits[/] is resting. Resting is good. Resting is helpful. Resting makes you stronger.
H/The difference between doing and overdoing — and undoing
One great advantage that kids with CRPS have is parents. Parents push you when you can’t push yourself. It’s their job. I suspect that two reasons why kids have a better chance at remission is that, for one thing, they have a structured daily routine, which reduces the CNS chaos; and, for another, they have parents helping and coaching and maybe crying with them as they push through the pain to keep moving and
get their activity in, as well as their rest.
One great disadvantage that adults have is less resilience. If we overdo, our bodies go straight to Hell — go to Hell, go directly to Hell, do not pass Go, do not collect $200 (to paraphrase the game Monopoly.)
At worst, we can create a spread or an intensifying of CRPS if we push ourselves too hard, eat the wrong thing, have a procedure, break a bone. We can, by one misjudgment or accident, find ourselves far more disabled and agonized and in need than we already were. Which is unimaginable to a healthy person in the first place.
And yet, we must move… While exhibiting good judgment… With a brain that hasn’t got much judgment-juice at the best of times.
No, it’s not fair! It’s CRPS!
H/The difference between pushing and pacing
Pacing is key. Pacing is how I built up from being able to walk just 100 feet to a couple of miles. Pushing is how I got CRPS in the first place, and it’s insane to do the same thing in the hope of getting different results.
Learning how to pace, when you’re used to pushing, is relentlessly frustrating… but it *can* be done! For me, it’s usually a question of turning my stubbornness towards my own service, instead of the service of my frustration, ADD-driven fixation, or impulsiveness.
Actually, come to think of it, it’s really a question of *remembering* to do that, prioritizing accordingly, and following through on the decision. Easier said than done. This brain doesn’t have much judgment-juice, remember? It’s unspeakably weird to feel myself make the choice to stop doing whatever task I’ve gotten sucked into, realize it’s a good idea, find that I’m totally unable to make the switch, and — here’s the kicker — hear myself say in my head, “I haven’t got enough dopamine,” and simply realize I’m going to be in trouble and that’s all there is to it.
H/The difference between a bad decision, the end of life as you know it, and being dead.
Normally, only one of these is unrecoverable. Remember that. Being dead eliminates aaaaaaaaall your future options. Every last one. This is why I say, with Barrie Rosen, that *only suicide* is failure; everything else is just tactics.
Bad decisions have consequences, as we know better than most. We are often underfunded in what it takes to make those decisions, as my example in the previous section indicates. Bad decisions suck, they’re often costly, and it’s not like we can always help making them, adding a layer of humiliation that isn’t fun.
But they aren’t the end of the world. Not usually. They rarely result in our deaths. Being able to manage or mitigate the consequences and move on with a minimum of fuss is a hugely valuable skill. This brings us to our next topic.
H/The difference between being irresponsible, and forgiving yourself for a mistake.
Forgiving ourselves is key. The neurochemistry of judgment and decision-making takes heavy damage from the neurochemistry of pain *and* the particular neurological re-mapping and re-wiring of CRPS.
That’s not fair!
Would you dis someone with no legs because they couldn’t climb a mountain? No, of course not. You’d be much more likely to offer to help them get their chair up to where they can get a better view.
Between our greater likelihood of dropping a brick, so to speak, and the incredibly high price we pay for every mistake, being able to forgive ourselves is essential to keeping some perspective and keeping ourselves going.
Not forgiving ourselves actually leaves us with *less* judgment-juice (otherwise known as dopamine.) Being critical is hard work, neurologically speaking. Our brains are already overtaxed, in every possible sense of the word; do we really need to strip still more dopamine from this system and work the pain pathways even harder? Probably not, eh?
Being irresponsible boils down to surrendering your own agency. Agency, in this case, means being the active force in your own life. Whose body is it? Yours. Who is it who has this pain and all that goes with it? You. Who is responsible for learning how to manage this body? Who is it who has to find the right treatment and negotiate usefully with your providers? One guess…
Doctors spend a decade just being trained to treat this disease. We don’t have that luxury, even though we have to depend on them to get the care. Since it shows up uniquely in each one of us, we have to become our own best specialists. To quote Ojocion Ingram, a passive patient is a dead patient.
While modern conventional medicine does not take kindly to patients who drive their own care, there’s a reason for that: modern conventional medicine was not designed to create healthy patients, it was designed to create healthy profits. The system does not have your best interests at heart. It’s up to you to manage the system to serve your needs to the extent that it can… and then to find ways to stretch it a little further.
Although others may help us (and isn’t it wonderful when they do?) the final decisions are ours, for better or worse. The law still mostly respects that, if only because it shifts responsibility off the “health care” system.
H/The difference between inner wisdom and inner chaos
I recently lost a friend with CRPS who released her agency to her surgeon, for very logical reasons, but very much against her inner voice. Her voice is now silenced, and we miss her dreadfully.
This raises an interesting conundrum: with or without adequate brain-juice, we have to find ways to make decisions which can have consequences up to, and including, death. Is the logical decision the right one? Or should we listen to our inner voice, even if we can’t find logical reasons to do so? Is it inner wisdom, or yet another anxiety attack? How can we know?
I’m an old triage nurse. I used to say, always go with that inner voice. I’ve seen it be right more often than the best of doctors. There is something inside us that knows more than we can possibly perceive. Sadly, we can’t always hear it clearly, especially when our brains are hotwired and hair-triggered by the constant barrage of weirdness that CRPS creates.
The primitive parts of our brain that monitor risk and reward, hazards and fears, aversion and attraction, are all potentially infected with the disruption and misfiring that CRPS causes. It’s a central disease, so the pain it creates in the body can be reflected and echoed and magnified by the upheaval it creates in the brain. This can make it very hard to know what’s really going on, especially for the person most closely involved.
This is why coloring, meditation/contemplation, relaxation techniques, and inner arts like yoga and qi gong are so useful. They smooth out the chaotic ripples set off by the disease, so we can hear our inner voices a bit more clearly. Sadly, they’re still seen as something absurd (coloring? Really??), out of reach, exotic, or personally irrelevant. My doctors almost never mention them, and if they do, it’s usually clear that it’s something they don’t do themselves — it’s for the patients. And, as every practitioner knows, patients are just a little less than fully human.
That’s one thing I learned from working as a nurse at 6 teaching hospitals. Patients are consistently seen as less than fully human. The training in that regard goes very deep. Knowing that may make it easier to understand why things are the way they are in the modern health care system.
