Turning pain into gain!

Chronic pain from neurological conditions such as cervical dystonia (link-scroll down to ‘do drugs help’) and also some other forms of dystonia may be difficult to live with. It can change the direction of our life. This does not always mean for the worse. If you experience chronic pain from dystonia or some other cause, perhaps a combination of chronic diseases such as dystonia and arthritis or some other form of degenerative bone disease, relief is available .

Pain is our body’s way of telling us something is not quite right. Apart from minor bumps, scratches and small pains requiring minor relief available from a pharmacy, pain basically falls into two categories. Firstly, acute pain is sharp and severe requiring immediate emergency intervention. Secondly, long term pain or chronic pain becomes part of our life. Like all areas of ongoing situations in life, we need to plan for chronic pain. Pain requires management that not only controls the actual pain and discomfort but enhances our lifestyle.

Exercise and diet are important components to managing pain. Good general health and a positive mental and emotional outlook on life are essential for managing pain control and enjoying life. Reducing anxiety through relaxation and meditation is a helpful approach. Physiotherapy by a physiotherapist trained in techniques specific to your medical and or neurological condition may be helpful. Regardless of which physical, emotional and spiritual remedies you choose your treating specialist in consultation with your family doctor and other allied health workers are the people to be talking with about your pain control and medication management program.

Some medications can actually intensify discomfort and pain. It is possible to overdose, even on medication we think of as being very safe, such as paracetamol . Using codeine for long periods of time or unsupervised may lead to dependence, addiction or other serious medical side effects.

I hope this article is helpful. Please take time to return to the links above and save to your files if they are useful. If you would like to leave a comment or email me directly, you are most welcome. I will get back to you. Also, take the time to check out the links on Cairns and Australia below. They will take you from one end of Australia to the other! I hope you enjoy them.

Sue Bayliss. Cairns, Australia. (s.j.bayliss@bigpond.com.au)

Living with Dystonia and re-creating our lives.

Re-creating personal lifestyle can be full of satisfying and fulfilling activities. This is particularly so when speech is effortful, broken and exhausting, neck and shoulders painfully contorted, or other forms of dystonia are troublesome. Sometimes, our lives are not what we expected at this point in time. Looking for alternative activities and hobbies not only enable us to learn new skills or developing the skills we already have, we may also become aware of a creative, healing power within. This creativeness or re-creation of our sense of self has a powerful effect upon our perception of self-worth.

Allowing our abilities to develop, expressing a part of us that neither our self nor others have been aware, can surprise the most skeptical of personality types! Tapping into an online library or handicraft sites requires skills of computer literacy and research ability alone! However, I do hope the highlighted links to the sites in this article provide you with ideas enabling you to extend your skills or alternatively, explore new skills. This is one way people living with dystonia are able to manage the frustrations associated with daily life.

If you would like to leave a comment about what helps you, living with dystonia, I will reply. Meanwhile, in solidarity and hope let us keep on keeping on together.

Sue Bayliss. Cairns, Australia.

Faith, hope and … umm … what is that other thing again?

Stress! That is it, S T R E S S. Think about it. We will always have some degree of stress in our life. This is a perfectly natural state and is quite unavoidable. It is the ebb and flow of strength and fragility throughout our life. When we get really stressed out and our stress becomes distress, what is it that actually holds us together? Faith and hope are the two variables we tend to fall back upon. Although as individuals, we probably each go about things a little differently. Some folk choose to do things really differently to most and that is okay. Underlying feelings seem to be much the same though, even when expressed in different ways. Feelings of stress are the effects of strain. This strain may be physical, psychological or emotional. Sometimes, we experience a combination of all three.

Hopelessness! Despair! Depression! All pretty rotten kinds of feelings. Thoughts that sneak in at these times are invariably of the stinking thinking kind, to say the very least. These feelings and thoughts seem to go hand in hand with all kinds of stressors and crises during our lives. It is a natural reaction to seek emotional protection from any state of distress and hope for something better.

Hope and despair are at opposite positions on a continuum with varying degrees of happiness and depression in-between. Most of the time, we fit in there somewhere between hope and despair. When we are feeling the effects of stressful situations, it is hope that gives us relief from feelings of tension and frustration. Hope is the promise of improvement in the future. The promise of hope relieves stressful situations associated with our health, coping with a disability or with any life situation.

There are very strong elements of emotion involved with hope. These emotional elements are what we refer to as faith. Faith is the very stuff we hope with. Evidence of what we can not see but we know within our heart and our mind that it exists. We talk about religious Faiths, the major religions within the world all proclaiming faith in the one true God. Some people call this belief a strength or force greater than themselves. Every evening when we go to bed we do so in faith that the sun will rise in the morning. We believe we will do things we are planning, before the time is even in existence. As children we believe in and rely upon our parents, sometimes on others carers and or family members, to care for us and protect us as we grow. These are all examples of faith and also of hope.

I hope this article is giving you something to think about in your life in relation to stressful situations you may experience. My experience of stress in relation to my spasmodic dysphonia and also cervical dystonia is that I develop a fear of speaking on the telephone and a fear of falling over or not being able to see what is at my feet when my head pulls back from muscles tightening. I do have faith that the medical team working with me will be able to offer on-going relief for me with botox injection treatment, speech therapy exercises and physiotherapy. My hope is that I will continue to live as independently as I can and enjoy my relationships with family and friends.

Would you like to read about other stress related topics such as stress management or any other areas of interest? Please let me know by leaving a comment or you are welcome to email me at s.j.bayliss@bigpond.com.au and I will get back to you.

Sue Bayliss. Cairns, Australia.