With life starting to return to normal in our household I find myself still looking backward shaking my head and having to deal with the reality that I was NOT dealing with my reality prior to surgery. I still hold fast to the fact I never hid my pain from friends and loved ones… but I did hide it from myself.
The more I get to know others with persistent pain, the more I get out with my friends and resume life, and the more I realize what a huge pit I was trapped in. As I explain my surgery and the conditions that brought me there I find friends and strangers alike saying things that make me pause. I was just trying to make it to the next step, the next minute, the next day…. there was no energy or time for anything else. I wonder now, why didn’t I use a walker, why didn’t I get a picker-upper stick, WHY didn’t I say yes any of the thousands of times my husband asked if he could carry me up the stairs?
Pride and stubbornness – is the only answer I can come to. I honestly don’t remember that stairs were hard for me. I really don’t – I mean I don’t remember them being harder than anything else. But then everything was hard- and because it was all hard it was impossible to distinguish what was normal pain and what caused “more” pain. I knew something had to change, and I knew I had given my all in therapy and every other method I tried… I knew surgery was the only answer left for me. So why is so hard to look back and hear the comments from my friends, my family, my PT, and strangers? Here are a few that have struck me over the last 5 months.
” You wouldn’t accept my help, you needed to do it for yourself, but it was so hard to watch you be in that much pain walking up the stairs with one leg straight dragging it behind you.”
” I don’t know how you lived in pain like that ALL the time… I feel it a few days every few years and can’t take it.”
” It just looked like you didn’t have much of a life.”
” I don’t know how you did it that long.”
” Did you really have to choose to do just one thing a day? And you chose to spend that one thing with me…”
“Why did you keep pushing through… why didn’t you just stop and give up?”
” You have more passion than anyone I have ever met.”
I have learned that I need to ask for help more when life gets hard. I have learned that I love people deeply and that I will go to the ends of the earth for them. I have learned that I need to accept my limitations. I have learned that I love my family and would not be the woman I am without them.
I have learned that I AM stubborn, passionate, and committed, and that combination of things is the reason I am going to fight for everyone else out there that has pain like this. I will fight to shed light on this dark cavern we are stuck in until it is no longer dark. Just like recovery, it will be baby steps, but I’ll get there, we all will. It’s too important not to.
Original publish date: June 25th, 2011
