Why Life With Chronic Pain Makes Every New Ache Extra Terrifying
/By Crystal Lindell
Late Sunday night, while putting freshly cleaned sheets onto my bed, I twisted a little weird and threw out my back.
By Monday morning, the pain was so debilitating that I was sobbing as my fiancé tried to help me out of our bed. But beyond dealing with the immediate physical pain, I was also terrified of the future.
As a chronic pain patient, every time I get any new illness or affliction I worry that it will become what the rib pain I woke up with in 2013 became: Permanent.
When you develop chronic health issues of any sort, you lose one of the healthy population’s greatest luxuries: The ability to assume that you’ll eventually get better.
Thankfully, I seem to be recovering from this flare up of back pain. Three days after the initial onset, I’m able to lift myself out of bed, and even do some light cooking in the kitchen.
This is the first time I’ve ever experienced any type of severe back pain like this though, and I had been very stressed that my back would never recover.
This isn’t the first time I’ve faced this fear.
When I had a bad case of COVID in 2022, I spent the first few nights awake with the most severe cold-related muscle aches I’d ever experienced.
In my fever state, I frantically Googled to see if this was a symptom that could become permanent. I was petrified that my body was just broken like this forever. Thankfully it wasn’t, but I know all too well that there’s no guarantee of recovery when it comes to the human body.
It’s not just my health I worry about either.
Anytime a loved one tells me about a chest cold, some new joint pain, or any type of new health issue, I panic that their body will never recover. Or worse, what if it kills them?
This fear has only been made worse since 2020, when COVID, which first presents as cold symptoms, started spreading. In the years since it has killed multiple people I knew.
Now anytime anyone I know develops so much as a sore throat, I worry that they’re going to die.
I keep this to myself because there’s nothing to be gained by spreading my worry to them, but I worry nonetheless. I know firsthand how fragile our bodies are, how delicate our health truly is. I am all too aware of the fact that any of us can lose it at any time.
As I've been enduring the new back pain all week, cursing myself for taking my ability to bend over for granted, I’ve thought a lot about my late-father, who died from COVID in 2022.
I have vivid memories of him throwing his back multiple times throughout my childhood. Now that it has happened to me, I’ve realized that I didn’t spend nearly enough time asking him how he coped with it, and then seemingly got past it.
My dad’s back was so bad that he was walking with a cane at age 35, when my younger brother was born in 1989. But the cane was gone within a few years and I don’t remember him needing it again after that.
Talking with my brother this week, he told me our dad blamed his back pain on driving a truck for a living, a profession he eventually gave up so he could pursue computer programming. So, I assume it was the career change that alleviated his back pain. But now that he’s dead, I’ll never really know for sure how he healed his back, or if he even really did.
My late-grandfather on my mother’s side also spent decades of his life battling seemingly untreatable back pain. He passed away when I was a toddler, but stories about his back pain continued long past his death.
Now, as an adult, I suspect he was one of the links in the genetic Ehlers-Danlos chain that we now know runs along my mom’s side of the family. We both battled the same condition, but he’ll never know that.
Pain is always bad, but as our bodies age in the same ways our parents, and their parents before them have, it does have one small, silver lining: It can help us connect to our ancestors in new ways, helping us more fully grasp the lives they lived before us.
After battling this back pain flare up this week, I have a new appreciation for how much pain my dad and my grandfather must have endured due to their back problems, and a more fully developed sense of empathy for their troubles.
So while I will continue to worry that every new health issue will become permanent, including my new back pain, I can take small comfort in knowing that even if that’s the case, enduring it just makes me part of a long line of my ancestors who’ve endured the same before me.
Human beings suffer, but when we suffer together, it does tend to alleviate our sorrows ever so slightly.
