Pacing and Pain

I’ve been busy, again, hence no posts. Insanely busy, in fact, and I let something get away from me: Pain Management. I know, I’ve said plenty of times here and on my other blog that PM is a lifestyle, a way of living to allow you to live. But I had a whole host of mini-handbooks to write, some mini-supplements to write and edit, a players pack to finish, and some playtesting, an inquest and its rather stressy fallout…

You get the picture.  Basically I forgot two of the major tenets of PM: pacing and distraction. And probably exercise, too, if I’m honest, but that’s not been too bad.  As a result, extreme pain, opioids, sleepless nights, breakthrough pain, the bust scenario  – if you’re into PM, you’ll know it.

So I bought a book to remind me of it, to place on my desk in front of my eyes: The Pocket Book of Pacing by Hannah Ensor.

Problematic Pacing: missing a plank

Breakthrough pain or unknown recurrence of serious pain is a problem sometimes. Recently, I’ve been having a lot of it and nothing I (thought I) did was managing the pain back down. Though things were complicated by a painful, but totally unrelated infection, I was back onto regular opioids, with all the problems they bring.

The Problem: Discovery

It was only a chance conversation with a neighbour that reminded me of what I’d been doing wrong. She is a Mindfulness teacher/practitioner and had just been on a Chronic Pain Mindfulness day (Mindfulness, meditation and similar structured relaxation/thinking techniques have been shown to really help in Pain Management: I use them all the time). Some of what she was talking about was standard Pain Management, effectively ‘slanted’ to Mindfulness, but a key comment was a discussion of how the trainer managed to write the books she had. Apparently the trainer used a timer set to 20 minutes, took a break/did something else (e.g. relax/distract), then came back and continued.

It was through pacing. Plain old, simple pacing.

My Little Book of Pain – moving on

I’ve been moving things round on this blog. The reason is because I am finally putting up a separate site/blog containing the extended chapters from My Little Book of Pain: A Practitioners Experience of Pain Management. Whenever more is to be done, it will be added there rather than here.

General comments and observations on Pain Management will still be placed here, of course, but any lessons from them will be carried forward into the relevant chapter in My Little Book of Pain. Some external links on pain still remain here, as does the general page on Pain Management as a lifestyle. Alternatively, an interested person can always search the ‘Pain Management’ category for relevant blog posts.

I hope those supporting or suffering from Chronic Pain will find it useful.