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Huge Pain Relief
Last February, I got a brand new spinal cord stimulator that offers me a huge amount of pain relief. I could suddenly work all day. I could go to my kid’s graduation. I could feel the outsides of my feet!
But in my heart of hearts, what I really wanted was to stop seeing my pain doc.
Before I go on, I want to acknowledge two things: 1) It took years to find a pain doc who trusts me as a reporter of my own experience, and it was mostly luck that got me there; and 2) even though I found a good provider, I hated having to haul myself to the clinic every 28 days to pee in a cup and be reminded that the synthetic opioid I took had the potential to be extremely addictive.
To be clear, I believe opioids should be dispensed with care and caution. At the same time, it is well-documented that people like me who use the drugs under clinical supervision are less at risk for disordered use than those who purchase the drugs illegally. And after close to a decade of use, every 28 days was feeling excessive.1
But I digress. The point is that the minute I realized my stimulator helped, I began weaning myself off the meds and never looked back, thrilled with my results. Prior to the stimulator, even on the meds, I was living daily life between a pain level of 5-6. After the stimulator, most days were more like a 3-4; I could use ibuprofen and ice to control the pain, and I felt incredibly free. Drug-free, clinic-free, doctor-free.
Back to the Clinic
And then six weeks ago, I got a call from Abbey, the sales rep of the simulator company, asking where I’d been. Apparently, I am supposed to be seen in the clinic periodically in order to adjust my stimulator’s program. She left me a message, and I didn’t call her back. I still wasn’t ready to go back to the doctor’s office (medical trauma is real).
Then she called again, and I reluctantly made an appointment to go see her. It’s not her fault. Abbey is a lovely person who really took the time to get to know me. I just didn’t want to go to the office for what I assumed would be a perfunctory 20-minute visit, where I’d tell her how great everything was, she’d say, “That’s nice,” and we’d go our separate ways.
Needless to say, I was super-duper wrong. Abbey was glad to hear I felt better, but convinced I wasn’t getting the best results. She placed a little remote hoozeewhatsis near my implanted battery pack and started typing away on her fancy tablet.
“Where do you feel that?” she asked.
“It’s tingling on the outside of my right leg,” I answered.
“Hmmm,” click, click, click on her keyboard.
One minute there’d be sparkles in my right thigh and the next, creepy crawlies on my left calf. It was a deeply weird experience. She explained she wanted to give me “stim pants,” where I could feel the sensation of the stimulator working all up and down my entire legs, in my lumbar spine, and then even up to my lower ribs.
It took nearly 90 minutes, but we finally adjusted me into some seriously beautiful stim-pants.
A Revelation
Gobsmacked, astonished, amazed, delighted—a thesaurus’ worth of words could scarcely touch my emotions.
See, I have spent so long in pain, tried so many different modalities for treatment (barked up a forest’s worth of trees, meditated over every crystal, had major surgery, regenerative injections, 40 zillion different physical therapists) that I could not even imagine an improvement on the initial relief the stimulator offered. I had gone ahead and denied myself nearly a year’s worth of even more and better pain relief. If Abbey hadn’t reached out, I might have never learned that.
How on earth did I let that happen? This is not a rhetorical question; it’s called learned helplessness, “when an individual continuously faces a negative, uncontrollable situation and stops trying to change their circumstances, even when they have the ability to do so.”
Chronic Pain and Learned Helplessness
Learned Helplessness Essential Reads
This is not my inner critic pointing a finger. I don’t blame myself or anyone else with chronic illness for this experience. Learned helplessness is a logical result of trying so hard for so long and becoming utterly exhausted. Sometimes getting traumatized. Sometimes just needing a break from more trying. That’s all valid.
And the truth is that someday this stimulator may stop working, and I’ll have to find other trees to bark up, other garden paths to follow. And sometimes I’ll be a chronic illness warrior, and sometimes I’ll hide.
In the meantime, I’m sitting here with less pain than I’d ever imagined possible. And I’m putting in a calendar reminder to call Abbey back in three months to see if it can get even better.
