What does pain foretell? A reflective piece on what chronic pain means to triple negative cancer survivor Geetha Paniker that is beautiful and cathartic.
It is one thing to feel empathy for others, but something totally different to be in pain. Each person's own pain is most difficult until one goes through chronic pain day in and day out or an illness that calls for sheer grit to go through it. Chronic pain is pain that continues for weeks, months and even years. The experience of acute pain is excruciating and traumatic. With chronic pain, however, pain signals continue abnormally that can be both distressing and exhausting for chronic pain sufferers.
To understand chronic pain sufferers, you should learn about chronic pain, be supportive and know what to say and what not to.
When I embrace pain, making it burn as fuel for my journey, I learn to live with it though it can be crippling at times. I prefer walking bravely through pain’s cleansing fire, although it does scare me at times burning so brightly that I walk in knowing it will hurt me a lot. But I know I will come out on the other side stronger and more complete. There is a beauty in pain that even happiness cannot touch, because I risked letting myself feel it. Pain is what brought me back to myself.
Pain is a part of my experience, not something I run away from, to escape. Pain will find me somehow, and to go through its cleansing fire is one of the truest things that can happen to value life.
The gift in pain, because it makes me find a meaning for life.
I have come to realize the importance of pain in protecting myself and the gift inherent in pain. With an understanding of pain, I find the gift that pain is a warning of harm to the body. Pain is also a messenger, an expression in a very straight forward way. It says my body has approached the limits of its endurance. The pain is present and I respond to that pain even before I can think about what is happening, a mechanism to tell me something can be potentially injurious to my wellbeing. Without pain my body would not be warned of any danger. Had I not felt the stabbing pain in my breast I would never have known that cancer has invaded my body.
Today pain is a messenger warning me that something is being taken past it limits of endurance. There are the myriad types of pain that don’t seem to be so straight forward to this simple analysis. There is the pain that comes because a part of my body just stops functioning properly. It is a warning, a messenger, an alarm.
Ultimately the pain is a fact of endurance of a truth of my being.....wading through life with a complicated body of complicated pains.
Review of Geetha Paniker's book: Cancer made me love myself with all the passion in my soul
