Three Things I Learned About Pain by Jill Gambaro

Listen to your pain. I didn’t even recognize my initial symptoms as pain. I had a strange pulling sensation in the palm of my hand, but I didn’t think ‘I’m in pain, something must be wrong.’ Still, the unusualness of it caught my attention. I didn’t see a doctor right away, I didn’t have health insurance and honestly, I didn’t know what kind of treatment to seek. I waited until the pain got so bad that I had to do something and chose a chiropractor. Turns out, he gave me the wrong treatment, it was all too little too late and I wound up being unable to work for many.

I was lucky enough that my orthopedic surgeon gave me a TENS unit rather than prescribing painkillers. TENS is an electrical stimulation machine that scrambles the pain signals to the brain. But eventually, I needed more and tried Vapassana meditation for pain management. It seems easy to just sit and listen for 20 minutes, but it was terribly difficult. After a few tries, I began to hear my body scream.

Understand what your body is telling you. There was a lot of information contained within those screams—just how much pain I was truly in, what was causing it and that it was not just physical. There were also components of stress, fear, and cognitive impairment. Even worse, the impact of my own perfectionism. That was a very sobering moment. There are three types of pain: peripheral (where the pain is located in a specific site), neuropathic (where the pain comes from nerve damage and is often shooting), and centralized pain (where the pain is diffused and not associated with one location). I had all three, each one requiring a different treatment, but none of my doctors knew that at the time, they just kept throwing spaghetti at the walls.

Working with your pain. I began tracking my pain and then communicating those findings to my healthcare team. I found that being able to discuss my pain in detail also helped friends and family who were also trying to understand my pain because my injury is invisible. Grief is another component of pain that has to be considered. Just as you would with the loss of someone meaningful in your life, you’ll need time to adjust to what the pain heralds long-term.  Whether you’ve hurt your back again, eaten the wrong food again or realize you can’t take on as much as you used to, it's all a loss and mourning that helps maintain your health. The biggest thing I learned from pain is that health is a balance. A moving target that shifts daily, sometimes hourly, requiring a certain amount of treatment from rest to yoga to a doctor's visit. I’m still learning how to do that.

Keywords: carpal tunnel syndrome, chronic pain, fibromyalgia, pain management,