[Serious] The Purpose of Pain

[arewethereyet]

I'll share another anecdote about my relationship to pain.  Some of you guys know that I got fucked up pretty bad just about two decades ago.

For months afterward, I couldn't sleep for more than ten or twenty minutes at a time because it felt like my legs were collapsing under their own weight...which they were.  This didn't make me a better father or husband, and my pain spread pain to others that I loved.  Adding more pain, and pain of different types.

What was it that being a functional insomniac and self medicating addict, for years, whose inability to adequately provide for his family or in fact maintain his family is supposed to have taught me?  The value of a good nights rest?  I learned absolutely nothing from that terrifying experience, because that's not what pain is for, and that's not what pain does.  Pan actively made the situation worse, for everyone, from everyone.  The only points of data I was collecting were that I very much wanted to chop off my legs.  I couldn't avoid them, otherwise - and wouldn't you know it..I did obsess about that for a time, I did sometimes daydream about some freak accident that would take care of my pain problem.

Tons of pt and therapy later, plenty of medications, and it would be hard to make the case that anything about me had improved, or, insomuch as anything had, that it improved because of any of that.  It was as random and pointless a situation at the begging as it was at the end.  That's pain for you, accidental itself, and more often than not, caused by accident.  I suspect that anything we think we might have learned from the experience of pain is just as accidental as the rest of it.

I sympathize and empathize.  I spent years in pain after my mastectomies and reconstruction.  Nerve damage and other issues that were barely controlled with medication.  I slept for years sitting up in a recliner.  A dozen years later and I still have days that simply suck and there's not a damn thing I can do about it.

If I was supposed to learn something, I missed the lesson.  Now I just deal with pain instead of seeking medical help until it's simply not something I can do any more.  That's why I waited so long to have broken ribs checked out a little over a year ago and I am still paying for that.  Pain just became my normal.  Rub some dirt on it and walk it off.  

Luckily I was going through the mastectomy crap back when doctors would actually give you effective pain medications.  If I had to go through it now I am pretty sure I would be looking for a permanent way out.