Living with Chronic Pain by Dr Dawn Macintyre

Author:Dr Dawn Macintyre
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781922265890
Publisher: Big Sky Publishing

9

I’M BEGINNING TO

UNDERSTAND

If one is master of one thing and understands one thing well, one has at the same time, insight into and understanding of many things.

Vincent Van Gogh

A lot of people have asked me what I did to ‘get better’. That question stumped me for a while because there wasn’t any particular moment, no magic bullet. Or at least I thought there wasn’t. Oh, and by the way, I’m not ‘better’. But I am definitely managing my pain better. Most of the time!

Certainly, the fact that my ‘condition’ was real and validated was a major turning point, and my continued work with Sharon helped me understand how pain actually invades our body and our mind; how our muscles and our cells hold memories that may no longer be useful in the current situation. I now know what ‘it’s all in your head’ actually means. Used correctly, sensitively and in context, it’s not a derogatory statement, but a fact. Our brains receive messages via the spinal cord, which is the tunnel, the gateway for sensory signals. The brain regulates how much pain we feel in two main ways. There can be an increase in inflammation messages via a chemical reaction which is called neurogenic information, and the pathways that filter pain start to degrade if pain is experienced for more than three to four weeks. After that, the brain becomes overly plastic, affecting the functional connectivity and the accuracy of the neurogenic information, the pain message.

In my case, I experienced both nociceptive pain and neuropathic pain. Put simply, the former is due to actual spinal damage and arthritis, the latter is damage to the nerves. In other words, neuropathic pain is pain caused by changes in the central nervous system which occur long after the physical damage is healed and is a major cause of my chronic pain. Even when there is no new physical damage, my central nervous system responds to my thoughts and the environment, becomes excited and sends messages to my brain that are interpreted as pain. And it is therefore real. This is often referred to as Central Nervous System Sensitisation.

So, understanding this, the logic was to do something about these pain messages. But how?

Even though I had been told this, I didn’t know what to do with the information as I was always so exhausted, had so much brain fog that going down any new, exploratory path was too much of an effort for my fuzzy brain to handle. My short-term memory was terrible, often swearing blind that something hadn’t happened, or someone hadn’t said what they were adamant they had told me. It was like seeing a faint light in the distance, a beckoning glow at the end of a dangerous tunnel full of unknown spaces, out of reach, yet my only hope. But I had been disappointed so many times before by suggestions of how to cure my condition, I admit that I was close to feeling defeated, to not believing, not trusting,

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