Stating the obvious

Chronic pain is, you know, hard.

I've had the misfortune to be on the suffering end of one other bout of chronic pain. It was suggested then that I get therapy, aside from the physical kind, to help my state of mind.

Which was, in a nutshell, miserable.

My answer to that is "I know what will cure my mood--curing my knee."

Lo and behold, I was right. In fact, my knee was cured twice--once by finding the right meds, and once by getting me off said meds and 100% pain free.

Pretty simple.

I'm older now, and probably either more stupid or less. Thinking of my mood being repaired with my migraines isn't enough. It's not like I had any idea when anyone was going to fix my knee, and in all truth I had fewer friends around and was more physically incapable than I am now.

So why did tomorrow seem less grave back then? Of course chronic pain is depressing, and the knee put me in more pain and on more weighty painkillers for longer.

A Henry Ford study says that migraine sufferers are five times as likely as the general population to develop depression. They have no stats for people with nerve damage to their knees, but I'm going assume the migraineurs take that too.

I won't pretend to know crap about the chemistry involved, but serotonin comes up a lot. One of the angles for treatment of migraine involves anti-depressants (oddly co-incidentally, another angle involves anti-epileptics which put me on Neurontin for the second time--the first being for the aforementioned knee injury). So I've been on more of those than most people.

I used to joke that by any measure of meds I should be way happier than the normal person, but the irony began to wear a little thin.

Plainly stated, it's pain. It's pain that no one else can see, and no one else can properly explain. Treatment is scattershot at best, and so far pretty damned ineffective. If depression is, as I once read, an inability to imagine a different tomorrow, it gets hard to construct a migraine free day in your imagination after a week full of ones that pegged the metre at 7 or above.

I know that psychosomatics can also be a factor here, so I do try my best not to wallow or prognosticate negatively.

And sometimes it works...not necessarily to prevent a migraine, but you'd be surprised at how often they take me unawares. How inbetween them I feel like I must be a whiner, exaggerating.

Yeah. I only wish that delusion lasted longer. More than 24 hours would rock.

There's a middle ground somewhere, where I accept but don't wallow. It's a very good feeling, even though it's gravely realistic. But it's where I can plan, and plan reasonably. I don't reach for the moon, setting myself up for disappointment when I fail, and I don't fall in on myself and foretell my own doom to all and sundry.

That's what I aim for, and that's what I wanted to get out of therapy. All I need is a mental health professional with similar goals--or at least that's where I'd like to start, and why I'm so disappointed in my initial foray into the field.

I need good coping mechanisms. Short and long term. That's what I look for. Complete personality overhauls don't fit within my schedule. Time is short.

In the meanwhile, I just keep reminding myself that everything is temporary. Everything.