Focusing on the outside world is difficult when you're preoccupied with minimising your pain, writes BREDA O'BRIEN
ONE SUNDAY morning early in January, I got out of bed. A wave of pain hit me, travelling from my right hip to my foot, so intense that within a few minutes I had fainted. I was helped back into bed, and while lying down was a relief, the pain was still so severe that it made me cry, something I had not experienced since childhood.
I thought that a few days of bed rest would sort me out. Days passed. By now, I could get out of bed, but putting the foot to the floor was agony. My entire leg was trapped in a vicious cramp nearly all the time, and just for variety, pains like electric shocks would sometimes run down my leg. Medication helped to prevent me going out of my mind, but I was never without pain. My whole being became focused on not aggravating it. My endlessly helpful GP suspected a ruptured disc, but an MRI was needed to confirm it.
The problem was I could not sit down, especially not in a car. (I still can’t sit down. This article was typed standing up, with regular breaks to move around to prevent the leg seizing up.) Luckily, we have a people carrier, so I could lie down on the back seat, trussed with a lap belt. Dignified, it is not.
Getting in and out is nerve-wracking, as I live in fear of doing further damage. I still have to travel that way. I even travelled to the wedding of my husband’s sister, dressed in all my finery, on the flat of my back. I stood for the ceremony, and collapsed into bed in the hotel immediately afterwards.
I had vague notions of coming downstairs later that evening, but instead triggered a relapse. It took 15 minutes to get out of bed, even with my husband’s patient support, and the pain was so excruciating that I passed out again. Unfortunately my 12-year-old daughter had just come in, all excited, to tell me about the dancing. I cursed the bad timing that meant she saw me prostrate with pain at such a joyful moment for her, the marriage of her beloved auntie Yvette to Wayne.
Discs allow our backs to be mobile, but they were never designed for our modern lifestyles, for example, sitting for hours in front of a computer screen. When my lumbar disc ruptured, its contents spilled out, scalding the sciatic nerve, that proceeded to fire off demented distress signals the full length of the leg.
I thought I had good pain tolerance. I had had three home births without pain relief, and coped reasonably well for years with fibromyalgia, a chronic pain illness. This pain, though, was like an acid, burning not just my sciatic nerve, but eating away at my very identity.
I am the sole wage earner, and I have two jobs. My husband working in the home meant that I never had to lie alone in an empty house, or lacked for someone to help me on with shoes and socks. (Still can’t do that one, either.) But for the first time, I understood not only how difficult it is to care for someone who needs help with the most basic tasks, but how difficult it is to accept that you have no choice but to be a burden. My husband was much more accepting of his need to care for me than I was of my loss of independence.
As weeks went by, and I was not getting much better, the guilt I felt about all the people I was letting down by being ill intensified, despite the fact that both workplaces could not have been kinder or more supportive. If I slept, I had nightmares, where I wandered around an unfamiliar school unable to find the class I was to teach, or realised in horror that I had misread my timetable so badly that I had missed dozens of classes. If I couldn’t sleep, worst case scenarios swarmed into my mind.
What if even surgery did not work? What if I were left with chronic pain, and could not work and support my family?
The surgeon I consulted suggested a spinal nerve injection. I had been warned it could temporarily worsen the pain, but I had no idea by how much. After the injection, I looked at our stairs. Seven years ago, I climbed those stairs in the last stages of labour. My midwife was stuck in traffic, my three other small children were at home, and I desperately needed privacy. We corralled the kids with a video in the sitting room. I would scramble a few steps on my hands and knees, and then would be thrown forward ont o my face by the force of the next contraction.
Despairing, I realised that it had been much, much easier to conquer those stairs in labour than it would be with this pain.
Some 10 days after the injection, the pain has receded to a sensation like having a jagged piece of metal embedded in my hip, with occasional slivers jabbing my thighs and shins. I am so grateful, even though it will require weeks more of expert help and rest before I can expect to function normally.
I was stunned by how pain narrowed my focus. My country was going to economic hell in a handcart, but all my energy was sucked into calculations such as whether the pain caused by turning in bed would be better or worse than the pain caused by remaining on my back. I realised I was getting better the day I felt really angry about the cuts that will send little children with special needs back into mainstream classrooms, and the havoc that this will wreak for all concerned.
I am so grateful to, and humbled by, all the people who prayed for me, or were kind in other ways, like the woman who does a very gentle form of physical therapy. She explained that she does not do housecalls, but proceeded to turn up week after week, smiling. I can’t name her, because she does not do housecalls, but you know who you are. And the bearers of goats’ cheese deserve a special mention, too. Thank you all, and please, mind your backs.