Pain and progress

Even I am bored with posts about my back hurting (I can’t sit around all day reading books now, so I have less blog fuel), but I have learnt a couple of things about being in pain, which might forever (hopefully) increase my sympathies with those suffer from these things chronically.

1) It’s tiring. Really tiring. On a normal day in my life, if I don’t go for a jog or do some form of reasonably rigorous exercise, I don’t often sleep very well. But having injured myself and being forced to lie about all day for a few days, I kept dozing off to sleep and wondering how I could possibly then sleep at night. But I did. I came into this with something of a sleep deficit, so perhaps I had some catching up to do, but all the same. After the exertion of just getting to work on Tuesday, I was so tired when I got home I had to just go off to bed early.

2) It’s amazing how good you are to yourself when you are trying to avoid pain (except when you decide to walk a long way to work, that is). I have been sitting up properly (how I should always sit) and getting down to pick things up properly. Pain serves its purpose. As anyone would know who read Phillip Yancey’s book (is it Where is God when it Hurts?) that details the work of Dr Paul Brand with leprosy patients, being able to feel pain is a great blessing to prevent further injury to yourself. If your body stops feeling pain and giving you that feedback, you are in big trouble.

I came back in to work today, and it was so, so much better than Tuesday, so I am thankful for that. I felt like I’d turned a corner yesterday because getting out of bed was so much better than Tuesday morning. And this morning it was good. While it was my pelvis twisting that was the issue, apparently it’s the injury to the disc in between that will take the time, and up to six weeks to return to normal. On Tuesday morning I was wondering what on earth I had done to myself and if life would ever be normal again. But today I can see myself hopefully pulling out of this in a lot less than six weeks. Then I really am going to keep up with the stretching.