Learning to live with it

I recently read an excerpt from The Pain Chronicles, a book by Melanie Thernstrom, a reporter who experienced chronic neck and arm pain, the treatment of which proved elusive. She described pain this way:

Pain was not like a violent intruder who batters his way in, wreaks havoc and departs. It was more like a sour domestic partner — intimate and ugly; a threatening, dirtying, distracting presence, yet one who refused to move out.

In the past two years, I have progressed to accepting that my back pain, a result of various spinal and joint problems, is not going to go away. The downward course started, I suppose, about seven years ago, when I severed my ACL and couldn’t afford the surgery and rehab to get it repaired. I got a custom-fit brace and continued to play recreational basketball with a group of over-40 women, against my orthopedist’s advice. Basketball is my mental and emotional health activity, and I trained myself not to move in ways that would put torque on my knee. I eliminated driving to the basket, or hustling to get a ball about to go out of bounds. I altered my gait, unconsciously of course, to put less torque on my left leg. But I gave up all the other sports I had enjoyed, tennis and racketball, and swinging a bat at the batting cages; even bowling—anything where I could not control my movements and still participate.

Then two years ago, I had bunion surgery on my left foot, and here is where the perfect storm hit. Walking on the protective boot for a month so severely affected my back that my pre-existing arthritis worsened to degenerative discs, a herniated disc, and a condition in which my verterbrae slip over each other rather than work in concert. (The pain specialist and physical therapist I worked with noted that bunion surgery sends them more patients than they can count.)

And so, now, after pretty fruitless rounds of P.T. and spinal injections of various sorts (let’s focus on this; no, how about there? etc.), I have had to accept that I am just going to have pain: when I vacuum, when I have to stand over a workbench or a sink, when I walk the streets at a festival for an extended period. Special exercises help some. Tylenol and Aleve help. Some custom fit insoles to stabilize my gait seem to be helping. So my rugs and furniture are dustier than they should be.

But I am not prepared to stop playing basketball. I am not going to stop attending festivals, though I have to take my limits into account. I am not going to give in to this “sour domestic partner,” as Thernstrom puts it.