PAIN MANAGEMENT? IT’S NOT ALL ABOUT YOU

Pain management are more than two words, two random words.

It’s a lifestyle, an affliction, and a path to addiction.

If it is you in pain, then that’s a major part of your day.

Every. Day.

But what if it’s not you? Let’s start with you, but first me.

My experience with pain management started early. Why?

I had an older brother. It got better when my younger brother showed up.

Call it trickle down pain management.

I also had two uncles and a Grandpa who used a razor strop.

When I stayed at my grandparents, and the boys got out of hand in high school, the howling began.

Grandpa took them to the basement with his razor strop to straighten things out.

I’d never heard such a racket. Then the next day everything was normal.

Seemed strange to me since Grandpa was ordinarily very kind and gentle.

I suspect Grandma and he had a talk about how to handle their misbehaving boys.

Was it a lesson on temporary pain management?

There was little howling at my house, which I was glad for.

The same Grandpa gifted my Mom a club made from a tree branch with a pitch ball as a joke.

It was funny until my Mom used it on my high school truck. She had a good swing.

Personal Pain Management Started Early

I broke my collar bone before making it to kindergarten at Roosevelt Grade School.

As small kids we played a game called Swinging Statue. You’re heard of it?

That’s where a bigger kid takes smaller ones by the arm and swings them in circle and lets go.

The kid needs to freeze in the position they land in.

My older brother was the big kid. He swung me out of the yard and I landed on the sidewalk.

Specifically, I landed on the curb and broke my collar bone.

Was it painful? Ask around. I broke it again in sixth grade to match the finger I broke in fourth grade.

Call me fragile. Or just a regular active boy with bad luck on broken bones.

Playing sports included the usual bumps and bruises of competition.

My shoulder popped during sophomore year football; my ankles got cut by a too tight tape job and got infected.

It was hard running around on two puffy feet, but I lasted the whole season.

Was it painful? It was cripplingly painful. But that’s football.

When It’s Someone Else Managing Their Pain

If you know someone who has had neck cancer, don’t tell them about the really, really, bad sore throat you once had.

Do that and expect a patient listener.

If they’re not patient, then they learned nothing from their entire ordeal.

You know someone who’s had a heart attack?

Don’t tell them about the muscle cramp that almost killed you.

In both cases the afflicted person has had to deal with an element of trauma.

The neck person had to endure radiation and chemo; the heart person needed to calm down.

But that’s only the beginning.

For some, PTSD kicks in. They fear exerting themselves to avoid an elevated heart rate; they fear swallowing anything in case it sticks in their throat.

For the sporty types in the audience, we know the feeling of being short of breath, catching a second wind, and pushing the limits.

We might take a walk, a long walk, then a little longer, and ignore the pain of our toenails turning black and blood pooling around underneath.

Or ignore the toe blister that turns into raw meat that takes a month to heal.

Active people want to stay active? That’s their excuse. And it works until they start breaking down and need rescuing.

So, know your limits. Pain management can veer into the irresponsible and stupid and have outcomes no one wants.

Psychic Pain Management?

From Psychology Today:

You cannot control most of the major influences on your life, but you have absolute control over what they mean to you.

If you control the meaning of events in your life by creating as much value as you can, you will have a sense of purpose and personal power.

If you control it by devaluing yourself or others, you create a chronic sense of powerlessness, characterized by roller-coaster rides of adrenalin-driven resentment that crash into depressed moods.

Preoccupation with the causes of emotional pain tends to push us deeper into pain and bitterness; interpreting its meaning reveals motivation to heal and improve and moves us toward a brighter future.

I like having a sense of purpose and the personal power to think I can make things happen.

Toward that end I work to forgive anyone their trespasses without turning into a doormat.

Is this the best way forward? By recognizing that everyone is affected differently by a common problem?

For example, take the former president and his diehard followers.

He was a man who said, “I could shoot a man on 5th Ave and not lose any supporters”

Or, he could go man-bitch and urge them to storm the Capitol and postpone the 2020 election results because the Big Man didn’t like the results.

And that’s what they did, along with his promise that he would pay their legal bills, which he didn’t.

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Following their leader landed many of them in jail, and he still has a following?

I see psychic pain before, during, and after their arrests and trials.

What has created this mental health issue?

Two words: Emotional Manipulation.

When a rich man with a hairdresser on staff tells a poor man working to make a better life that the reason he is poor is not his fault, but the fault of politicians voting for laws that work against them, he sinks the hook.

Then, when he tell them he alone can fix the problem, they are his for life.

They send money where he says to send money; they buy his likeness in trading cards; and they forgive him his trespasses on decency and law.

He’s forgiven for groping women because stars can do whatever they want.

He’s forgiven for the ignorance he displayed during the Covid pandemic.

Hiring a porn actress for sex while his third wife recovers from delivering his fifth child? Forgiven.

Call it shared psychic pain with his followers. They love him, he loves them, and neither know what it means.

But only one side pays the consequences.

Pain management in all of its iterations asks one thing: How are YOU doing?

The boomerpdx blog asks baby boomers and millennials the same question.

You are reading a blogger writing about pain management from the inside.

Leave a comment on how your life has been changed by pain, yours and people you know.

Have you helped anyone during their struggle? Readers want to know.

So do I.