TdJ: Physical Pain

The beauty of the Topic du Jour technique is that there are only thirty topics.  So on months, like the last one, that have thirty-one days, the reader is spared the evil kvetch for a day.  Alas, February is only 28 days, so the reader gets no such reprieve.  However, it will spare the evil of the last two topics, so maybe....

Hmmm, physical pain.  I've already said so much about this, it seems redundant to go further.

I am no stranger to physical pain.  I have at least two chronic diagnoses that over 90% of other people I have met are on complete disability for.  I always get the reaction, "How can you work?"  from these people when I admit that I too share their disease.  In all actuality, it never ended my mind that I can't work.  In the early 1970s, I remember seeing a comical paperback book title: "It's Been Down So Long It Looks Like Its Up To Me."  I have no idea where I even saw that book.  But I do know that almost 40 years later, that phrase sticks in my mind.  (I don't even know what the book was about.  I didn't read it.  I sight-read signs and the spines of books when I was three and four as my  bored English teacher mother was on bed-rest with her pregnancy with my sister and taught me to read as a lark. Hence, I read alot of things I did not really delve into further.)  That phrase kind of sums up what life is like in my nuclear family.  If I don't do it, it doesn't get done.  Occasionally it gets done, but grudgingly and haphazardly.

So, while I would like to give into the physical pain, or give myself a break at times, I am too much of a worrier and control freak and not willing to be homeless or live in utter filth.  Which, without my efforts, no one else is really invested in preventing.  I am aware of this.  I have no choice but to accept it.  As a result, I work through the pain.

The ripple effects from this are bitterness (Hello?  You have read this blog?) and exhausting (ditto) and increased pain.  I have aged 25 to 30 years in the last 10 years.  And basically little concern for my own self-care.  Simply put, I am too exhausted/bitter to do the things I know I need to do to take care of myself.  If no one care enough to help me, why should I bother?  And of course, on any given day, I have at least 50 other people demanding my attention, diverting it from any type of need I personally may have.

Compassion fatigue coupled with physical pain.  Wow, I may have found the cure for codependency.

Or not.

(image from http://talking2mymoon.wordpress.com/