Chronic pain is so difficult.
There are no words in any language to sufficiently communicate how difficult it is.
It is post operative surgery waking up in agony levels of pain, every day, forever.
It breaks you mentally. It stunts your activity levels. It robs you of patience and kindness.
It is torture, performed by no one, where you would do anything to make it stop. Anything.
Being a compassionate, energy giving, productive, and present person in the lives of others whilst carrying the invisible caustic agony of chronic pain is a sysaphean task the is harder every degeneratively waking day.
Doing the right things (2 hours of PT and exercises every day, cognitive behavioral therapeutic techniques, biofeedback tools, purposefully doing what is painful to prevent classic conditioning avoidance, and no medication for pain) is so fucking hard. Every single day.
There is no vacation. There is no rest.
My parents flew in for a two week visit and good god I cannot wait for them to leave. Distance has not made this heart grow fonder and despite years of therapy, it’s still so hard to deal with this or set boundaries before them.
They’re unbelievably selfish. Ridiculous alcoholics. They hate each other but won’t break up, which just means they’re both so annoying. And they are so, so childish.
My younger self deserves so many hugs for going through life with them. And my adult self is struggling but doing the best they can. But they’ll be gone soon. Thank goodness
My work/life balance is waaaaaay off.
I like my actual job. I like the people I work with. But when it’s a 55-hour work week with a 1-hour one-way commute, it’s exhausting. I’m missing out on time to be a dad, to engage in hobbies and self-care, home, social life, etc, because the down time I do have is usually spent resting and summoning the energy to go back to the grind the next day. Yeah I use my PTO and sick days, of course. The downside to that is that for an hourly employee that translates to a pretty big chunk out of my paycheck.
We’ve recently had a leadership shakeup here and our new boss is a younger millennial who supposedly has a more enlightened approach to running a business and taking care of its employees. We keep hearing rumors of increased PTO and promises to address work hours but we don’t expect to actually see any changes until after the new year.
I’ve looked for other jobs and generally what I’ve found is sites with toxic work cultures and/or negligible increases in pay and it’s not worth it for me. And I don’t want to take a job in another state that takes me even further away from my kid. So for now, odious as it is, I’ll stick with it and see how things shake out next year.
I’m not going to pretend that I’m the only one with this problem, and I’m not looking for advice, so if you’re about to post advice I’m going to ignore it. I just wanted to get it off my chest.
I fucked up my landing on my 67the skydiving jump, and got a spiral fracture of both my tibia, and fibula. My foot was pointing 90 degrees from where it was supposed to. I received a surgery that implanted a titanium nail through the channel for my marrow in my tibia along with 4 screws and some plates.
I’m 45 and this recovery is the single most grindingly long, and humiliating thing I’ve ever had to go through. I’m so utterly dependent on others. Which is something that is anathema to me, for which I’ve been going to therapy for years for.
And I’m lucky with clean breaks where they occurred (one at the bottom of the tibia, one at the top of the fibula.) This is supposed to be a quick recovery. I don’t even have a cast anymore after 3 weeks.
I guess I’m just incredibily tired, embarrassed and feeling bad for myself. And throwing this out into the void since I literally can’t really do anything other than go to the bathroom and shower by myself. Which, make no mistake, were huge victories.
Just went through something similar, 8 screws and a plate in my ankle. I highly recommend a knee scooter as it made me so much less dependent on others around the house. I didn’t fully realize how much it would help. I bought two one for the upstairs and one for the downstairs, and only used crutches on the stairs.
With the scooter I was able to make dinner for the family because I could carry plates or pans in one hand while steering the scooter and propelling with my good leg. With crutches I felt so helpless.
The scooters came with bags but I just used a backpack anyways so that my stuff would migrate with me between scooters.
Thanks, I’ll definitely keep that in mind.
Sadly my knee is not weight bearing, at least not yet. They had to go in above the knee to implant the titanium nail because the break was too close to the joint to go in underneath the knee. Anyways, my nail has very little flexibility right now. I’ll probably recover that faster than anything else, so once I can bend my knee and bear weight on it, I’ll get a knee scooter.
That fucking sucks, I’m sorry you found yourself in this position. Congrats on showering today and I hope tomorrow is a little easier as is the day after that. 67 sky dives? It’s pretty impressive you didn’t break anything before now!
Do you think you’ll sky dive again after healing?
Thanks for your kind words.
And yeah, there is something ineffable about hanging onto the outside of a plane at 15,000 ft. Also free fall is the closest you can come to flying outside of wing suits.
I fucked up the landing in two ways that combined to hurt me. You flare right before landing and that converts your downward momentum into forward momentum. I flared a couple feet too low. I also was trying to counter a slight crosswind with harness input, which put my body sort of into a 45 degree angle from the direction of travel with my feet first. Because I planed out about 2 ft off the ground, I didn’t have time to straighten out (and I should have been straight before I even flared, but I was new to harness input and trying to not use toggle input to correct for the crosswind). As a result, I was going 29 mph forward and wasn’t going down really at all.(I have a fly sight which is basically a 3d tracker, hence how I know) when the inside of my right foot, pointed closer to perpendicular to my direction of travel hit the ground.
I remember feeling my foot first glide a bit through the grass tops just after flaring and having time to think “shit” before I hit.
If I flared higher I would have been fine. If it been using toggle inputs rather than harness input, I could have still slid it in on my padded butt. Both together? Ouch.
You can resolve the past and create your own future, you are never stuck anywhere regardless of what happened to you.
