Ouch.

*Trigger alert. Self-obsessed sooking ahead.*

Pain is a hard thing to write about. It’s hard to define or describe or quantify because it’s an individual experience. You feel your pain all alone, by yourself. You can’t give someone else a turn of it for a moment, just so they know. And you can sympathise and empathise and be traumatised by someone else’s experiencing of pain, but you have no idea what it feels like. It’s their pain. As distinct from your pain.

A friend of mine used say that her husband had a very high tolerance of pain. She would say this every time he was out of his mind with pain, which was often. But by referring to his tolerance level she always implied that his pain was far more extraordinary and intense by the time he “suffered” it than say the pain of you or I.

I never worked out how she knew this.

But I have lately come to the realisation that I thought that of myself. That I had a high tolerance of pain, that I was every bit as stoic as that anaethetist had told me I was as I laboured to give birth. I can stack up examples and instances to support my claim,  years in accumulation. Bones broken and dislocated and cracked, back injury, migraine, various whacks and cracks and squashings and falls. A life lived. I have endured!

A week or so ago I did something to make my sciatica worse. I didn’t do it on purpose, and I’m not even sure what it was I did. No bell went off in alarm at the moment. But slowly the pain levels increased and it came to pass that I found myself at 2 a.m. clutching the end of my bed in an agony of sorts, groaning and bracing myself before I took another step forwards. That I experienced pain of such intensity that I couldn’t sleep for even two hours at a time, couldn’t concentrate on anything outside the pain, or my attempts to reduce it. Painkillers, prowling, heat-pack, doctor on a Sunday. The pain would on occasion reduce itself, but never go away.

A while ago, in the pain but not this pain, a friend talked about what it must be like for people denied medical care and medicines because of their accident of birth in geography or history. We agreed on the horror of it. We agreed we were, by that same accident, lucky. In this pain, I can’t even think about them, those poor vessels of agony in battlefields and huts and workhouses and torture chambers.  I’m too preoccupied with my pain or the fear of my pain recurring. I’m too busy stuffing down some food only so I can take more painkillers. I’m at the microwave all day long, recharging the heatpack.

This pain? I have no tolerance for this pain. This pain deranges me.

I’d tried some therapies already, back in the weeks when I thought the pain was bad and debilitating and at times unmanageable. They were not the right treatments and sometimes they made it far worse so I had retreated, not healed at all. Just managing. But now needs must in capital letters and so I allowed myself to respond to the tug of serendipity and went to see a highly recommended osteopath.

At last! Someone who seemed to know what he was doing! Someone who could finally explain sciatica to me in a reasonable but concise way. Someone who understood and who had a plan of action which could be laid out for inspection. Someone who saw the light right there at the end of the tunnel and the way to get to it.

Someone who talked of some weeks to go before we reached that light. Someone I knew would be taking some considerable funding to help me get there.

But I’m taking it seriously, this pinning of hope. I’m sticking to the rules, obeying the list. Even the one about the hydrotherapy pool. No matter how wretched I feel walking in my garden and seeing the weeds growing, the pruning that needs to be done, the plants un-planted and un-moved, I do not touch a thing. The fire has well gone out, I can’t be hauling wood. I don’t drive far, or often. The floors in my house are squalid.  Every 20 minutes I change what I am doing and move around some.

And if it works, and I am cured? Saved? Spared?

I will rejoice. I will worship at the altar of osteopathy. I will say it was worth every damn penny, and then some. I will drive, I will garden, I will bend and stretch and sleep with the gayest abandon.

I will vow never to take my health and well-being for granted again. Until I start, again, to take my health and well-being for granted .