Gaga…

Lady Gaga recently talked about living in chronic pain. She said she was tired of people saying it was in her head and not taking her seriously. “Chronic pain is no joke”, she said.

When I first started talking to the counselor about my chest pain, she called it chronic pain. I disagreed. I thought of chronic pain as back pain, knee pain, migraines. There are two types of pain. Acute and chronic. Acute is the kind of pain that comes from an injury or event.

Chronic pain is described as pain that lasts for more than 12 weeks. Harvard did a study in 2018 that connected chronic pain to childhood trauma.

Here’s what I know.

I think pain comes in three forms. Acute, chronic, hidden.

Today was a particularly painful day (a 9.5 out of 10) and yet to the world, I looked perfectly healthy. On one hand, I love that. I’m so happy I can live my life for the most part without any real interruption in living. On the other…it’s got a loneliness to it that’s hard to describe. Hidden. Shadows.

But it’s not like I want to wear a t-shirt! So how does it work? What does life look like?

I don’t know yet. But I’m betting it looks a lot like a friend of mine whose daughter had life threatening cancer. In the early days it was a daily battle. An all consuming effort to fight and deal with it all. Even after it was “gone” there were the tests every 3-6 months. Always a weight to carry and yet no one could see it. He must have felt tremendous loneliness. He didn’t wear a t-shirt that said “my daughter has cancer”. But he carried the weight nonetheless.

The CDC says that approximately 11% of the population live in chronic pain and another 8% have experienced childhood trauma. And what are the odds of a 10 year old child getting cancer? .005% of the US population.

When you are in the minority, there is a loneliness that’s real. If you are the 1 in 10 or less group, you experience loneliness. But what if you are the 10% of the population that’s left handed. Do you feel lonely? Probably not. But what if you are the 10% of the population that experienced childhood trauma? You probably do feel lonely. Because it’s hidden.

The shadows create loneliness. A deep deep unmoored feeling.

When my friend met other parents whose child had cancer, he didn’t feel as lonely. When he met other people who were left handed…I don’t think it helped.

I want to change my relationship with pain. As I type, it’s a 9.5. It really hurts. And in the past I hated it, hid it, denied it and got angry with it. But I never understood it. I want to change my relationship with it.