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, playtesting, an inquest and its rather stressy fallout…
…all of which is not good for pain management.
I think most of the blog posts on here are when my Pain Management fails. It’s not through self-pity, but because at those instances you really have to focus on management and run through the techniques you know to apply them. Right now I’m on the tail end of a couple of weeks of unfortuante events and I’m, well, ouch and trying to sort out how to deal with it without resorting to myriads of opioids.
When running through the techniques and applying them, it brings to mind some odd, quick-fix things that can help. There’s a few here coming from my experience. Of course, as ever, the are always limited by what the pain sufferer can physically do, but it is worth making the effort.
I’ve just come back from a few days away which involved a couple of key meetings and a games day. I’d have to stay over either side, of course, but the meeting and day seemed to be worth it. Further, I thought I could manage it properly from a pain viewpoint but, frankly, I was wrong.
I am now in shed loads of pain.
I’m due to make a long trip and find myself tensing up. The regular pain worsens as a result of that, but my daily routine hasn’t changed. That means the only real reason for the increased pain is the anticipation of being in severe pain as a result of the trip.
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.
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.
Tim's Sceap Tome 