Ouch
I suppose now is as good a time as any to post on a subject which, by and large, I keep as quiet as I can about.
People who know me well, or spend any serious amount of time with me, will know that I suffer from chronic back pain. It actually fucking sucks. From a bystander’s point of view the worst part about it is that what triggers my pain to move from the baseline to the stratosphere is not easy to understand. Some days I can manage to stand at work all day with barely a twinge and other days I can hardly manage to get through a shower without excruciating agony. By and large I’m best when either sitting down or walking slowly. By and large I’m worst when I’m standing still. But it varies. I can be standing somewhere, completely pain free, when the tiniest of knocks, sometimes barely even a brush, from someone walking past will push me instantly to the edge of existence. Like I said, it fucking sucks. I try not to dwell on it too much because there are aspects of most people’s lives which fucking suck. I’m not special or unique, I’m just a bit broken in an annoying way.
There’s an extent to which I can manage my life to reduce the pain, i.e. by not doing anything, and there’s also an extent to which painkillers can extend what I can do. But for the most part, if you see me, there’s about a 75% chance that I’m experiencing pain somewhere between 4 and 8 on a scale of 1 to 10 (where 1 is barely perceptible and 10 is someone repeatedly ramming needles simultaneously into every part of your body) at that moment in time.
On a personal level, the worst thing about it us that it severely limits what I can do. I can’t exercise, I can’t spend too long in a bar or club where I can’t sit down, I can’t deliver anywhere near the amount of Lib Dem literature I should be able to, I can’t do as much in the garden as I’d like to do - in other words, I can’t do many of the things I want.
It has been checked out by a number of doctors. The ultimate diagnosis seems to be ‘it’s probably arthritis - nothing we can do - keep taking the tablets - sucks to be you’. For a while in the early days, back when I was 22 and it all started to get debilitating, I got a little relief from chiropractic manipulation. But never really enough to warrant the cost.
The only saving grace of this is that, mostly, it doesn’t affect my sleeping. When I’m in the middle of a particularly bad attack or when I’ve dared to do something extraordinary like ‘plant a row of seeds’ then it’ll wake me up when I try to move. But by and large, sleep is relatively pain free.
There’s no great conclusion to this post. No great insight into society which I have gleaned (although I could tell you a thing or two about attitudes towards ‘invisible’ disabilities that would shock you). But from time to time, usually when the pain gets to a 9.5, I feel the need to let the world know that I’m in pain and I really wish I wasn’t.
Thanks for reading, if you did. Now you know that little bit more about me.
