Category Archives: chronic pain

“So stay out of my brain / I’m no princess of pain”

– Next to Normal, Tom Kitt & Brian Yorkey

I woke up with this lyric in my head, and coincidentally… in pain.  Luckily pain of the physical variety, not the mental variety of the song.  Not to sound too overwrought, but I identify with the sentiment all too well.

Sometimes pain is good, it means you’re working hard, stretching, loosening muscles and ultimately helping yourself be better.  Perhaps that is the lifelong horseback rider in me speaking there.  I’m used to feeling the burn, and welcome it (most of the time)!  I know I’m really working when I feel it – in my back muscles, in my inner thighs, hopefully not in my arms because that means I’m not riding correctly!  It’s a benchmark for me of trying, of doing my best with what I have to learn and progress.

And then there’s the bad pain.  The “how in the world does walking for a few hours around the shopping center make my feet scream?” pain.  The pain that’s not resolved with braces or over-the-counter medicine.  Only time.  And yet, what do I do with this?  I can’t not do anything because I might have pain afterwards.  (After all, that’s boring.  And I really needed to go to the mall to buy the blue chicken sweater on sale at J. Crew. Priorities, after all).  So I live with it.

Maybe growing up with pain has made me a pain hypocrite?!

Today I’m in pain.  And it really sucks.  Thankfully it’s physical pain which is at least a bit better than emotional pain… but it is still no fun.  Last week I fell down.  It was my fault, I knew better than to think I could balance on one leg, but of course being me I tried to multitask… and promptly did a knee-plant on my bad leg.  Figures.  So it’s been hurting on and off for the last week, don’t know if walking around and doing yoga like I usually do is bad or good for it, but I can’t just sit around… so I’m (perhaps stupidly) forging ahead).

I’ve had chronic pain for as long as I can remember.  I literally can’t think of a time when I didn’t have it.  It’s that weird kind of pain that’s not bad enough to stop you from going about your day to day life, but bad enough so that an hour or so of walking leaves me in excruciating pain.  And something like running is out of the question (well, if I was coordinated enough to do it without face planting myself on the sidewalk…)

This whole internal dialogue got me to thinking about the things I don’t know about other people’s experiences with Moebius.  It’s kind of weird to walk up to a group of people, even if you know them, and announce yourself as being in pain all the time!  I mean, it at once seems very trivial and unnecessary.  I pretty much know that mine is due to how Moebius effects me personally, so I don’t know what good it would do to know that other people do or do not have the same effects? I don’t know!  But I wonder sometimes…