Stress? Me? stressed? Nah I’m not stressed, not one bit ! What’s Stress? At the beginning of my journey had someone told me that stress and pain were related I would have told them to go pound salt and put that in the pile along with mindfulness. I have learned that I need to approach everything on my journey with an open mind and the curiosity of a child without all the biases of the outside world. I need to explore everything that will put ME in a better place. The outside world be damned !!! If that means journaling, counseling, sleep therapy, physio, chiro, massage, CBT therapy, mindfulness, sticking pins in a voodoo doll of myself for relief. Then so be it! I do it for me and myself and my pain relief. I also do it for my family and you. So that when you are confronted with me you see the better side of me. Not to say you cannot see the bad side but I prefer leaving that to the professionals to try and help keep that monster in check. So I need to go back to the days of when the flare ups were almost constant when we were learning to control what in this blog or journal I have named the flare bear. Back in those days we had to explore what made the flare bear worse? I know the pain scale like the back of my hand, at this point so if i’m telling someone it’s between a 7 and 8 but not an 8 yet it’s almost like 7 ¾ that’s how precise I can get. Before it was like ahh maybe a 6 i dunno maybe 7? Now I’m like spot on ! At least the pain meter is working like a finely tuned machine (regrettably). So as we were figuring out what physical things were causing me pain. I also noticed that when I read an article on pain…i seemed to be in more pain. Why? Because I was thinking about it. We noticed that when I went away camping that pain was reduced , because you are relaxing and less stressed. The second I went back to work and the eyes of judgement were upon me (yup I had several in my early days) stress went up to 10 and pain went up to 10. I came home and relaxed a bit it all went down to a 7 and so it went. The stress and pain roller coaster go hand in hand. One day my physio asked me have you tried meditation? In my closed mindset I looked at him as if he had several heads. He said I do it for stuff that I am going thru and I find it helps. So there I was at physio and my take home exercise was laying down and mentally trying to open a damn door!! Guess what? Opening that damn door in my brain caused me the same pain as opening it physically!! WTF!!! So we opened and closed the door in my head and stopped before it hurt and then we did 5 min deep breathing and so on and so forth and the guy got me hooked because I found myself relaxing a bit more and for that moment in time I could get some pain relief. I did it for about 2 years consistently everyday and fell out of practice with it. It didn’t matter who was here where I was when that time of day came. I excused myself and did it. I also went to a few sessions of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT therapy) . It helped me too. That is where the seed of this journal came to fruition and now I can’t stop writing in it ! Darn therapists!!! LOL Bottom line if it relieves your stress in whatever way shape or form then do it. Who cares what people say? What matters is that it’s helping you and making your stress and pain levels go down. Which means a happier you in the end, and who doesn’t want to be a happier, more positive person?
Recently my new physio asked me do you think that stress and pain are related ? I looked at him and without hesitation said 1 000000000000000000000000000 %
Photo Credits: WendellandCarolyn
Earlier when I was talking about the relationship of pain and stress, I referred to the ‘eyes of judgment’ there and how my level of pain could go up to a 10 at work. I am going to make a huge generalization here however I know it happens everywhere so I’m going there. The minute anyone goes to work and comes back from a prolonged illness and the employer by law is pulling out accommodations, in my case it was more breaks to walk around, software so that I could try and talk to the computer and it would type stuff for me, a graduated back to work schedule, wireless headset, a better mouse you name it if needed it I had it. Like I said they were really great with everything that dr’s or physio suggested it was there at my desk as soon as possible. My supervisor even went out of his way, if he thought of something that might work he’d get it if it worked great if not oh well he knew it was trial and error.. In this way I wish everyone’s employer to be so accommodating. However the one thing an employer cannot change for the employee is the ‘eyes of judgment’. The nanosecond I walked into the room everyone was watching you friend and foe assessing. Everyone knew I went in for surgery on my neck they could see the scar gleaming off the front of it but before she went for surgery she looked like there was nothing wrong with her and now still she came back with a scar and only a few people knew the whole story in fact I told only 5 in confidence and I knew they would keep it under lock and key but the rest oh well…..keep in mind this was a union shop so supposedly we were all brothers and sisters here?! Right! The one scenario that sticks out the most was when my supervisor was away and one of the senior people from another department and also a union rep came into our department. I knew she came by to watch me but having no “power” over me I didn’t care, but why are you watching me? She did that for over 30min. I was allowed to do a lot of walking around as needed so I proceeded to do so. That same day another girl younger in seniority than me was away from her desk doing other stuff and didn’t like the fact that I was moving around all the time. So she yelled across the department floor using my name “what are you doing walking around all the time?”. Everyone knew I was allowed to move around; it was none of her business. The next day I reported it to the supervisor ….i didn’t care that it was a union shop and it should have been reported to the union rep. It’s harassment plain and simple and when you are trying to recover from illness it’s totally unnecessary. But how do you stop it? I didn’t take anyone’s shit! It was hard. What do you do? But at that point, I had a bit of the upper hand with HR and my supervisor with daily reports on my progress so I reported incidents. Things calmed down a bit …Remember, I looked perfectly fine to everyone but because my pain was internal. But my nerves were screaming at me 24/7 . I just wanted something to show them that I was being honest and true, that I was not faking my illness. A cast, a bandage, a neon sign attached to my nerves that showed my pain level for the day! When asked how are you today? Short and sweet I’m fine. In the back of my head my brain was, are you? Are you really? I almost lasted a whole 6 months on the return to work program before my body rebelled again. But this time it would be the last time I would go back to work.
My Everest... 
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