My pain condition has a circadian rhythm of its own design.
I used to think pain spikes correlated with increased stress or shifts in the weather or travel. And that if I could only control for these variables, I could control the pain. Over the fifteen years I have been living with pain and studying its habits, I now conclude that its vicissitudes are of its own making; or are so multifactorial that any search for a root cause is like trying to find a snow flake in a blizzard.
Pain spikes and declines are just as likely to be connected to the chocolate bar I inhaled three months ago or to a butterfly belching in China. In other words, I don't really have a clue about why the pain rises and subsides or what gravitational pull it is responding to.
Right now, I am in a period of wellness, of absence of pain. Hurray!
The tricky part is that I still have the habits my illness taught me. These habits include:
- Not making plans to socialize
- Not buying advance tickets to a concert or play
- Not exerting scarce energy on cooking or house cleaning
- Not making travel plans
- Accepting only shorter term work projects
- Relying on my sweetie to run errands
- Relying on my sweetie to comfort me
- Relying on my sweetie to hold the hope of healing
- Relying on my sweetie to be the bridge to the outside world
- Relying on my sweetie...
- Relying on my sweetie...
This is neither healthy (for either of us), nor sustainable. I have been trying to kick the habit of excessive self protection and spousal dependency. I have been positive self talking myself into more risky behaviors like:
- Walking alone the endless aisles of the new Wegmans super-store that just opened in my neighborhood
- Tangling with my health insurance provider to get them to pay their fair share of an out-of-network expense
- Making a dinner reservation three weeks away
- Saying, "I can," before I say, "I can't."
- Doing whatever I can do to make my sweetie's day a little sweeter
