How many of you consider pain or hardships as blessings?

While pain, hardships, disability, or inability are not things we’ve asked for in our lives, they can, if we let them, teach us, help us better when the next crisis comes a long. They also teach us compassion, even if we were already compassionate people. Sometimes compassion comes in the form of understanding someone like us, who shares our illnesses, but what about compassion for those who aren’t us? Those who’s illnesses perhaps are different?

I’ve been blessed. So blessed that I know what it is to be homeless and I’m not speaking of homeless in another person’s home. Are you really homeless if someone else puts a roof over your head? You may not have your own home, but someone else has given you theirs, therefore how homeless are you?

All those things we take advantage of yet aren’t necessities. Hot water, heat, air. These are not things that cause me stress they can however reduce my ability to progress in pain because it’s take effort that most in pain can’t or won’t achieve. For quite some times there wasn’t any working toilets either. Imagine that. It was easy enough to accomplish, so you potty in something else.

I learned so many different ways to feed us, bathe us, heat us and cool us. Mostly these are things our world takes for granted.

I consider them being lessons. And I imagine what it was like 200 years ago. Living off the land, cooking with coals, or wood, fetching water from a stream and heating it for those things we needed. And with that, I’ve learned.

I know that if our world is ever compromised, or if, can I be funny now? The zombie apocalypse happens, if marshal law is ever enforced, or if it just gets harder and harder in America, I will survive.

I’ll survive right along with those who shelter in coves, underground, on the river, in the mountains, on the streets. Will you?

It seems that I’m harsh sometimes, I know. The perception of most is that I’m without compassion and that I don’t understand you. On the contrary I do and that is why I won’t go silent about the things that can really help you, save you, assist you.

Look, I don’t care about your pain medication or how much you need it, I care about you being able to live without it when that day comes for you. I don’t care about what you have, or how your life is over because of it, I care about how it is possible to live with it, if you want to.

Easy for me to say, right? We live in a society that believes that someone else is responsible for our lives, our pain relief, our live or give up. No one is not really.

There was a lady who attended the Gohl Method program with me the second time. She’s a nurse. She has CRPS. She was born into a country that the only way to get food was to stand in a line, food controlled by the government, a country that America isn’t, not yet.

The lady came here and she thrived in education.

Yet we put down all the immigrants because they are somehow less than us. Funny thing is that they are grateful to be able to buy their own food, from their own earnings, they are prouder Americans than most Americans are because they know a different type of suffering.

The lady has CRPS, gets her MLT treatment again, and she goes on with her life. We can though, we can’t go on with our lives because we expect healthcare to somehow do the work for us we should be doing ourselves and for ourselves.

Facebook isn’t good for me and I’ll leave that down for a bit still. The things I post are taken as offensive and then I get defensive. Facebook is both a save from isolation for some and it causes further isolation for others.

I think that twitter, or blogging is better for me. I didn’t run away and even though it may seem as such to some and while I had tried to tell myself I wouldn’t deactivate it again and instead simply not log in, for me, it is my better choice for an optimal break.

The same day that I deactivated I attended a training webinar.  I’m still a Medtronic Patient Ambassador. Stronger Than Pain INC isn’t mine, I’m only apart of it for my son.

My wishes are bigger. They are for life not for inability to live life or stay in it.

I don’t believe it’s any physicians job to change my life. They can assist me, but I have to make that difference. Heart disease, diabetes 2, multiple other illnesses that people end up with whether primary or secondary are for us to change. I don’t believe that physicians prescribe opioids just to prescribe them. I’ve been denied for alternative care too. I believe that if addiction, misuse or overdose occurs that we chose to do that to ourselves. If a medicine is prescribed every 8 hours then taking it again 2 hours later is leading to your own destructive behavior. I believe that in part, some documented opioid related overdoses were in fact suicides. While my faith is low for western medicine it’s not because of a push for or lack of prescribing opioid analgesics.

Pain? I can’t reverse much of my own musculoskelatal disorders, some of which caused to worsen by not doing more for myself.  (If this offends you, you’ll understand better when you realize much of what you ended up with wasn’t a direct result of your original diagnosis, but what you let happen to yourself as a result. How dare I say “what you let happen?”) I know you want to tell me how you never asked for it. You’re right, you didn’t, but you need to find your way even in pain, or…

Godspeed. 

It’s enough because …

And my faith is enough because…

And because if I don’t for me,

No one else will,

Nor should they have to.

Gratitude.