Disclaimer: This blog is for adults , over the age of twenty one with open minds and open hearts. This is for people who live with or know someone who lives with chronic pain. This is for people who have issues with addiction or know someone that does. This is for people who struggle with spirituality but want to build their faith line upon line or know someone that is questioning their faith and want suggestions on how to help. There are no miracles here…just A LOT of experiences and hard work.
Yep, just another typical evening at our house. My doting husband is inside making us a, no doubt, healthy dinner. I am sitting on the front porch, escaping the constant noise of our three children while staring at the orchard across the street; incidentally it is not an actual orchard, it’s a house with the biggest yard in the neighborhood that has at least 15 trees which is exactly 14 trees more then the rest of us so it seems equivalent to an orchard through my hazy ‘weed goggles’. Let’s ignore the fact that none of the trees actually bear fruit (small detail).
I sit out here almost every night around 6:30 packing blue dream into my vaporizer and contemplating how my story of living in the dark and being controlled by chronic pain can somehow, in some way, be useful to someone else.
I have lived much of the past 25 years in darkness. I am familiar with all the metaphors about the darkness that life can sometimes present to us but in my story I am talking about draw the shades, wear a hat, put on sunglasses, turn down the lights, pray for a cloudy day, literal DARKNESS.
Migraines snuck into my life around the age of fifteen. I don’t remember much about the severity of them back then but what I do remember is how they began to influence my actions. I started to recognize that some of my behaviors weren’t normal. I would regularly apply pressure or quietly pound my head on walls or on my desk at school because it would provide cross pressure to the part of my head that was currently hurting. I started carrying a powder compact in my backpack not only to cover up the typical teenage blemishes but also to cover the bruises on my forehead just above my eyebrows. I remember switching from playing the clarinet in the high school band to singing in the choir because voices weren’t nearly as hard on my head as instruments. Good Lord the percussion section and the brass…holy Hell. I may also give an honorable mention to the real reason I quit band and that was because I love to talk and all my crew was in choir. It didn’t really matter that my voice was mediocre at best; I would lay low in the alto section where singing was pretty much tra-la-la-ing in my normal talking voice and BOOM! I am now a singer! Not to mention, it’s really hard to talk when you have a clarinet in your mouth.
The extreme nausea started around the age of 17 as did the start of some rather embarrassing vomit moments. Suddenly the “What’s Up-Chuck” and “Where’s Ralph” jokes totally made sense in my life. Almost weekly I was barfing at work or school or home or in my car (thank God for tic-tacs and air fresheners). Which started a now 20 year tradition of another not normal behavior; carrying barf bags, like the kind in emergency rooms or the back of an airplane seat, in my purse and my glove box. Apparently normal people don’t do that; you have to order them online, incase anyone was wondering. I was downing large bottles of Excedrin on a weekly basis. Excedrin became my first drug of choice…copious amounts of caffeine with a hint of a pain reliever. Those lovely white tablets kept me awake for school and a handful of afterschool activities and jobs. The strange thing was I was used to being in pain. Pain was my normal.
I went to my primary care doctor as a teenager about my headaches and was prescribed something for on-set headaches that didn’t work…then a couple months later started my first preventative treatment which worked temporarily but like all good things it came to an end. I went to college and felt like I could handle the headaches on my own with my delightful regimen of Excedrin Migraine rotating with Ibuprofen and an occasional Percocet (if I didn’t have to drive to my 2nd job that was 25 miles away). More darkness.
In college I tried several elimination diets to try to figure out if any foods triggered my migraines. I nix diet soda early on and most artificial sweeteners. I also recognized that strong smells triggered migraines, which is not good when you live in a town whose largest economic holding is in meatpacking and processing sugar beets. Oh, and don’t even get me started on what the dog food plant smells like. To follow the lovely smells of the agricultural community outside, I worked at the Lancôme counter, which was right next to men’s fragrances inside the Dillard’s department store. Sweet baby Jesus, I should’ve worn a facemask. I took pills every single day when I got to work. I couldn’t escape pungent odors…or the headaches that came with them. By the time I was 20 years old I was taking 4 times the recommended dose of over the counter pain relievers with an occasional opiate. Every. Single. Day. This regimen continued for years…despite moving and job changes, I never went one single day without pills for the better part of 15 years.
There is some light in my darkness. A big part of who I am is the faith with which I was raised. For those of you who didn’t catch on from the title of this blog and my screen name, I am a Mormon. I belong to the Church of Jesus Christ of Later Day Saints. I am a Christian. What the heck does that have to do with chronic pain? A lot. I am certain that the only reason I am still alive is because of my firm testimony of Jesus Christ and the love and patience of my family and husbands (Yes, there is a polygamy joke in that sentence but hahaha…I was only married to one at a time and I am a woman so the joke really would backfire. Sorry ya’ll). This is where I should probably mention that I do not fit in ANY typical mold of Mormon-hood that you may have in your mind but I do have an interesting story to tell…I haven’t been active in the church in close to 20 years. Yes, I have gone to church here and there and I have watched bits of General Conferences on YouTube but I haven’t actively participated week after week, year after year, the way I did as a child. I haven’t had a calling (teaching assignment) outside of Visiting Teaching in nearly 2 decades either. So, if I have faith, why don’t I go to church? That, my friends, is a loaded question. I wish there was a simple answer. I don’t have a concrete, straightforward explanation but I can tell you that one of the first ways migraines started to control my life was making me absent from it. I missed church, school, work, hanging out with friends, appointments, and family functions. Being absent from my life led to depression and anxiety, which led to codependence and addiction.
This blog is my story. It is not an “I once was lost and now am found” story of redemption. I have never felt like God left me but I can tell you in the depths of chronic pain when I have been in bed for days and can’t think straight, the adversary has worked overtime on me. He has brought out all his best tricks. He is brilliant and deceitful and through the very device that he brought destruction to my heart and my life, I am now using it to write to all of you. I will open up about my lowest lows where I almost felt like the decisions I made were not my own; where I felt void of feeling and where I would have done anything for pain relief. I will also share with you some of the joys of the pain free days that helped me realize that I needed to stop judging myself by the source of pain relief I felt was necessary to survive at different stages and phases of this healing process. This is my journey not only to spiritual health but also to mental and physical health as well.
My first goal is to trade in my pile of pharmaceuticals for a homeopathic lifestyle. My experience with pharmaceuticals has not been pleasant and after this last go around with a new neurologist who ordered fancy MRIs and gave me 4 new pills to take, which worked for about 6 weeks, I am done. Every time I go to a doctor they hand me a new prescription for something. They (not really sure who they are but they are pretty smart) say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result…well, after 25 years of running in the same circle I must be certifiably insane. It is time to change that. I want the next chapter of my life to be the best one.
I am starting to detox from a couple of recently prescribed migraine medicines and am seeing a homeopathic doctor this week…stay tuned…
My second goal is to encourage my friends (I assume we’re friends if you’re reading this) to find your spiritual center. I know many faiths use blogs as missionary opportunities and I suppose I am doing that in my own way. The thing is, I don’t care what your faith is. We’re all in this together. My goal is not to fill the pews in my church on Sunday. The truth is, I don’t even know if I’ll be there. My goal is to fill your heart with the love of God; however you choose to understand Him. I know He is the same no matter where you worship Him. We are more alike then we are different and we are all designed from the same creator. We are all His and He will help us through all challenges we face.
Be well my friends.