Chronic pain and illness require the courage to make tough choices.
Published on January 28, 2013 by Toni Bernhard, J.D. in Turning Straw Into Gold
Suffering from chronic pain or illness—or, as is often the case, both—is hard work. One reason for this is that we must constantly assess and evaluate if we’re managing our health and our relationships skillfully. This requires us to make tough choice after tough choice. Here are five of them that we continually face.
1. Do we keep our health problems private or do we talk openly about them?
If we talk about our health problems, some friends and family members may respond judgmentally or even turn away from us. And even those who don’t turn away may change the way they relate to us. We want to be treated as whole people and as adults, but if we share our health struggles with others, we risk being treated like a shadow of our former selves.
On the other hand, if we keep quiet about our health issues, we risk leading others to misunderstand what we can and cannot do. In addition, by keeping quiet, we’re passing up the possibility of receiving much needed support—both emotional and practical.
If you’re like me, it can be exhausting, both physically and mentally, to continually assess and decide what you will and what you will not share with others about your health.
2. Do we ignore a new symptom or have it checked out by a doctor?
If we raise a new symptom, will our doctor think we’re being oversensitive or that we've become a hypochondriac? On the other hand, a new symptom could be the sign of something serious. I read in one of my chronic illness books about a woman who ignored a new symptom because she decided it was best to assume it was related to her chronic illness. She also said that she waited so long to see her doctor because she “didn’t want to bother him.” The new symptom turned out to be stomach cancer.
What to do when a new symptom appears necessitates making another tough choice: wait or act immediately? We have to listen carefully to our body and decide for ourselves.
3. Should we risk trying alternative and unconventional therapies?
There’s no right or wrong course of action here, but it’s a choice that, for me, has been costly, both to my pocketbook and, at times, to my health. I used to spend hours and hours, using up what little energy I had, combing the Internet for cures. As I wrote about in my piece “Finding the Health Information You Need on the Internet,” anyone can create a website, set up a payment plan, and ask for your credit card number. People spend thousands of dollars on false cures. I know because I've done it.
On the other hand, I’ve also read about people who’ve been helped by alternative or unconventional treatments, so it may not be wise to decide to disregard them entirely. These are tough choices: what to take, what not to take, how to assess the monetary costs, what to tell our doctor about what we’re taking or not taking.
4. Do we push our body to the limit or do we always play it safe?
Sometimes, the desire to be like healthy people is so strong that we can talk ourselves into pushing our body to do what it cannot reasonably do. About two years ago, my granddaughter Camden was visiting. I was so frustrated by always feeling sick when she was here that I decided to “act healthy.” We have a park next door to our house. I took her there for over an hour, helping her with the slides, pushing her on the swings. I was in a defiant mood: “I’m tired of being sick. I’m just going to act as if I’m healthy.” What I got for my effort was a week of payback with exacerbated symptoms.
On the other hand, I find that if I always play it safe, my body gets so used to the strict regime I put it on that I lose my ability to be flexible at all. For example, if I always nap at noon sharp, then if I’m fifteen minutes late one day, I feel like I’m going to collapse on the spot. So I purposefully mix up the exact time I nap so that my body doesn’t become conditioned to following a rigid schedule. That said, my ability to be flexible has its limits: I don’t have the luxury to just skip the nap.
If it’s possible for you, I recommend a middle path of gently challenging your body now and then so that you don’t fall into a fixed pattern of behavior that underestimates what you might be able to do. But, as with the other tough choices, I find this constant assessing and adjusting, assessing and adjusting to be exhausting in itself, both mentally and physically.
5. Should we aggressively fight to regain our health or should we accept our fate?
Constantly fighting to regain our health is also exhausting, physically and mentally. But the alternative of passively accepting that this is the way we’re going to be for the rest of our lives doesn’t feel like a wise choice either. Again, I recommend a middle path. It took me a while to realize that I could acknowledge and accept my health as it is right now, while at the same time continuing to try to regain the health I had before I got sick. These two courses of action aren’t contradictory.
It wasn’t until I began to accept—without aversion—however I happened to feel on any given day, that I was able to begin looking for ways to enjoy my life again. But an integral part of that life is keeping an eye out for new treatments. It can be a challenge to gracefully accept how I feel at the moment, while at the same time continuing to be proactive about my health...but I'm working at it.
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It's hard work to continually assess, evaluate, and choose a course of action while already sick or in pain. My wish for you is that you be as kind to yourself as you possibly can as you struggle with these tough choices.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/turning-straw-gold/201301/5-tough-choices-you-face-when-chronically-ill-or-in-pain
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