Last night, in the early hours of the morning, I was awoken by pain that extended from my glute down my thigh. The pain had crept up on my unconscious body, and I finally jolted awake when it reached its peak. It stayed like that for several hours. If I was focussing on something else, I might not have noticed it as much, but in my dark, silent room, all I could think about was the deep throbbing in my leg.
The pain started a month or so ago in an office at St. Johns, with rather deep-set sofas. I was sitting up, leaning over my laptop to take notes, with a pencil case precariously balanced on my leg, when I noticed the pain creeping up on me after an hour of class. At first, I thought I was just uncomfortable and readjusted, but the pain didn’t go away; it just got worse. Like a toddler, I wriggled every few minutes, trying to find a comfortable position where the pain was manageable. I tried to awkwardly lean back into the sofa, as if I was lying down, but decided that was too embarrassing, so stayed upright. In the last half an hour, I couldn’t find a comfortable position. So I asked for a break to get up and stretch, but this was only a momentary relief and half an hour after I sat back down again, the pain said ‘hello’ again and decided it was going to stay. Now, every week, I dread going into that office and feeling the pain flare up like a burning poker spearing me.
When the pain extended beyond the classroom, I started to get worried. I tried not to cry in my bed as I desperately tested out positions, even trying out the floor at one point, in a hopeless attempt to get rid of the pain. At 4am, while my partner was softly sleeping, I was rolling out my glute with a mallet ball to find some kind of relief. In the end, I had to put on a podcast loud enough that I could focus on the words rather than the fire in my leg.
I know that I am stressed when my pain flares up at night. But it was only ever my right shoulder blade that would feel like someone was trying to pop the bone off my back with a knife like I was a fish being gutted. Usually, the pain resides in the shadows, lingering around but easy to ignore. When it comes to the fore, I know that my mental state is being expressed through my body. And yet this new pain, which now accompanies the one in my shoulder like an evil twin, has made me realise that my chronic pain is getting worse.
To bring up John’s again, the walk from Hilda’s used to be easy; now I want to cry out of frustration, my shins burning and feeling like they are going to collapse from beneath me. I have started getting the bus, as the walk into town seems like something I just can’t do anymore.
I used to pride myself on my strength and perseverance, and while I do think I am both of those things, I am starting to realise that there are some things that I simply cannot do anymore. There are some mountains I cannot conquer.
It feels like such a juxtaposition: I am a powerlifter, and the weights I lift speak to my strength. And yet a 25+ minute walk feels so impossible and daunting that all I want to do is hide away in my room and never leave again. The muscles I have developed have allowed me to carry heavier bags, and yet my chronic pain has only grown as the days progress. I find it hard to reconcile these two states of being: how can one body be both so strong and so scared?
I try to ignore it most of the time, to convince myself I am fine. When my Mum visited me recently, she kept asking if my bag was too heavy and if I needed to go sit down. I kept saying that I was ‘fine’, and I did genuinely feel fine, until she noted that I was hinging forward to bear the weight of my bag more evenly across my back. I immediately stood up straight and realised how uncomfortable the bag was. While my Mum knows my body better than anyone, I was shocked by how I didn’t realise how uncomfortable I always felt and how I was unconsciously trying to bury it, to pretend that I was fine. To pretend that I could handle it.
It does feel like I am working backwards. While I remember the many types of pain I have experienced due to my back, my chronic pain has never been so intense nor as constant as it has been at uni. I understand that this probably correlates to my lifestyle: I stomp around everywhere (you can’t ever convince me to cycle here, and I can’t do it anyways) and am barely ever home: always going somewhere, doing something. And I know that my flare-ups also show when I am stressed ( 5th week pains?) which I often am in Oxford, but I feel like a failure. Like I am failing to recover, to manage, to live. I feel so weak and small and wish that someone else could bear this heavy load instead of me. I just wish I had a break from it, that I could do everything I wanted to in a day without breaking down in pain. I wish I was ok. And most of all, I wish I could sleep.
Even as I sit here now writing this, the pain in my left thigh is drumming against my skin, and I instinctively reach down to try and knead it out. Not even an hour ago, a friend took her elbow to my glute to try and get rid of the knot, yet the pain has returned, mocking me in its persistence. It seems that no matter what I do, no matter how much I work out, I will always suffer from chronic pain, and it seems that it is going to get worse. This is scary: seeing problems rear their heads and desperately trying to resolve them, only to find out that they are both a symptom of my mental state (not so easy to fix) and of my bodily reality (UNFIXABLE). It’s scary not to have control over how your body feels, trying to manage something that loves to be unmanageable.
And so, I take a deep breath, the release painful, my shoulder throbbing in tandem with my thigh, and I feel scared. But I also know that I am strong and I will persevere; this pain is a part of me, but it is not my whole, and I will learn how to manage just as I learnt how to walk again.