Paths and Passages to Conquering Chronic Pain

It has been more than seven years since a surgery where they sawed my face in half from under my nose and cheekbones all the way past my back teeth. They also sawed my lower jaw on the left and right side, wired it shut and moved everything forward along with my tongue to enlarge my airway. It was a horrific surgery that has saved my life, but there have also been some very painful and grueling complications. Also in the last 18 years, I have had 1/3 of my right lung removed and three very painful surgeries on my neck and cervical spine. I live with the nerve damage from all these surgeries with little feeling in parts of my face, lips, and gums including my jaw and maxilla. I have nerve damage in most of my neck, arms and hands, and also complications in my right side from the ribs they removed for the lung surgery. I have six “L”-shaped metal plates and thirty-six screws in my face. I also have a Neuro-Stimulator, which is about two and one quarter feet of thin coated cable leading from a large hockey puck shaped battery implanted in my hip, which runs up along my spine where the electrodes on the cables end extend up against my spinal cord and brain stem. This helps me by sending constant electrical pulses which blocks about twenty percent of my neck pain before it reaches my brain. Each day I spend in near constant pain while dealing with severe equilibrium issues and adjusting to the experiences of extensive nerve damage. Besides pain, I've had to deal with depression, anger, despair, and learn how to come to terms with my condition every second of every day. I've had many moments of drama, trauma, and turmoil just like everyone else whose health changes suddenly. I have spent many days complaining about what physical pain has taken from my life. But, in these years I have learned to not let the pain rule me and that includes complaining about it. The negativity of ill health and the difficulties in life are hard enough to live through, but these changes do not define us, it is how we lift ourselves because of them which defines us. I know that there are many people who are or who have been faced with much worse health issues than I have. I know that there are also many people who have lives that have gone from one day being normal to the next day being torn apart by ill health. Their lives changed so quickly that they became controlled by their pain. I know that I did. I also know that there are people who barely show any signs of physical pain, people who have learned how to mentally live with pain for the necessity of survival and not for much else. Life without inner happiness and peace is motion without direction. Sometimes we need to go nowhere many times before we can learn to find a new direction. More often than not, the toughest roads to our healing, to our happiness, and to our inner peace, are the ones which we refuse to admit that we are already walking upon. No matter who you are, we all have to find our own ways for dealing with pain or to be ruled by it. Many of us have to learn first-hand that while living with your pain you are still able to enjoy your life and have many moments of happiness and joy. When my joy became stronger than my pain, it became my way of life. Acute ill health issues are ones which happen suddenly, such as an asthma attack, whiplash, or a broken bone. Chronic health conditions are the result of long developing conditions such as heart disease, cancer, asthma, and any type of arthritis. However, many acute conditions may have physical and or psychological complications which may become chronic. The words “Chronic Pain” are only words to most people, but for those of us who live with it, chronic pain is a way of life that can mean isolation, chaos, and fear, or it can mean a life of gratitude, blessings, and happiness. The mindset and the frequencies that you live in, the parts of your psyche which you face to learn about yourself from, and the perspectives that you will come to see yourself differently from, are all affected by your own choices to live in your pain or to find your very personal ways to live a happy life with it. Chronic pain can be your downfall and destruction, or it can be your awakening saving grace to find and to accept your power for your own healing. Chronic pain means it is constant and ongoing, but that doesn't mean that I allow it to be the constant negative which controls my moods and emotions. First, I had to learn to live with the pain, then I learned how to conquer it. When I began changing the way that I thought about the pain that was plaguing me, the ways that I reacted to other negativities in my life and how I let them affect me also changed. Changing the way that you think about your pain and ill health comes from the strength, the will, and the resolve which is in all of us. Living in debilitating pain I have lost many years of my life focused on the pain. I have spent what seemed like a lifetime planted on the sofa or in bed just trying to have the slightest moments when the agony might subside. I lived in fear of my pain. I was in distress for my physical independence, and I was devastated by the many changes and losses that ill health had forced into my life. For me that wasn't living, it wasn't who I was or who I wanted to be. I would rather worry less about my pain and its negativities and think much more about how I affect myself, and in doing so, I find freedom. This is a choice that we all have and once you make that choice, you stop being a victim of your ill health, and you become a warrior for your own happiness. I know what it feels like to watch life go by without having the ability to be a part of it. To go from one day being physically, emotionally, and mentally able to do just about anything that I wanted to do without ever having a thought or feeling of physical pain; To one day becoming physically, emotionally, and mentally unable to participate in what I always imagined and believed to be the only way to live a normal life. It has been a lesson in survival, of humbleness, of spiritual growth, and of heartfelt and soul filling gratitude. My physical pain has become the motivation and the foundation of my strength, of my inner peace, and for my realizing the greatness of the largest and the smallest of blessings in my life. My physical pain is constantly fluctuating in intensity, but this pain no longer rules my emotions, my happiness, or my center of peace. Just because you have to live your life with pain, doesn’t mean that you have to live a painful life. If you choose to hold your happiness and blessings above your pain, you will grow in happiness and gratitude beyond your pain. Healing brings you opportunities to grow in ways that you may have never expected. Every pain, trauma, drama, and health issue in your life has something to teach you about yourself. The lesson of healing is to face yourself and to realize the different perspectives of your reactions to your pain and to the negativities which it brings into your life. In doing so you awaken healing, you find gratitude, you diminish the control which your ego has over you, you grow greater from your fears and from your ailments, and you learn to hold a place of peace within yourself. How fast you can run or how high your spirit can fly, the greatness of the magic and the medicine that you create and share in this life, and how bright you shine your light, are all your decisions to make, you just have to decide to make them. Just because your pain doesn’t totally go away doesn’t mean that you have to be lost in it. By realizing and awakening to your connections beyond your physical self, you come to learn that healing isn’t about erasing your pain, but instead healing is learning to embrace all the precious gifts that your pain brings you to find within yourself. Our pain is real, but we all have the power to choose to conquer ourselves in it.