The holiday season has become an uncomfortable time of year for me since my daughter’s birth. She was due on Christmas and then came two weeks late, along with all of the complications. Now each year as this time approaches, along with her birthday, I’m always reminded about how awful the past four years have been and how far I still have to go in my recovery.

I was making some progress this time last year, and last summer I felt some hope. But then I made a decision to try and bump my recovery speed up with those awful nerve block injections that backfired and made my situation worse. Now I’m stuck with worse nerve volatility than I’ve had since maybe ever, or at least since Julia’s first year, and I’m not sure where to turn. My stomach’s torn up from medications, I’m sick of side effects, and I really hate all of these unnatural treatments. Unfortunately I may have to fight fire with fire in order to make more progress.

I have a dream… an Olympic dream. Mine isn’t quite like others. I just want to be there to observe and to write about my experience. I just want to breathe the crisp winter air and see magic transpire on the ice and snow, hoping for a day when I can compete again.

I first laced up ice skates at age five, and my parents tell me that the look on my face told them I was hooked.  I never had Olympic aspirations – I knew I didn’t have that kind of talent – but I also never lost my love for skating.  I kept at it, even after college, and I’m proud to say I’m a national adult figure skating medalist. Not at the highest level, but that doesn’t matter.

After going through two long bouts with severe injuries resulting in long-term pain, I realize I’m still uncomfortable asking for help.  Only when I began opening up to friends and colleagues over the past year did people begin offering to bring me food or help with my daughter and I honestly didn’t know how to respond.  Finally I finally started allowing friends to bring me food now and then, and to help me with my daughter.  But every day life is still a real challenge for us, so I think I’ve identified at least one easy way friends can help – even from a distance.

It’s been over three months since the nerve block injections. A few days after I received them, The New York Times came out with a a feature about a study on how many redheads react to anesthetics. That would be me. Sigh. Luckily, thanks to this blog, I got in touch with someone else who had a similar reaction who told me it took about 3 months for it to wear off. She was right. It was a huge help having a timeline to focus on. Now I’m almost back to where I was before those awful shots.

It’s been two weeks since my injections and people are already just assuming I’m feeling better, so I thought I should explain. No, I’m not. It’s worse. I was warned, but not quite enough. See, I was told I might get a “flare-up,” but I’ve never felt anything quite like this.

Imagine being cooked over a fire, boiled, burned, smoldering, along with being stabbed by small knives, all at once. I wish I could say I’m exaggerating, but unfortunately that’s what this pain feels like. It’s not that way all the time, so I’m lucky in that respect, but it can come on at any point from sitting or moving too much or whatever. This is way worse than any flare-up I’d had in the past from other activities that might have exacerbated my pain. Sigh.

Over the past few weeks since I’ve begun sharing my story of chronic pain on this blog, via its companion Twitter feed, through Facebook and just in general, I’ve learned two things: 1) I’m not alone – not by a long shot, and 2) by sharing, I’m helping others to bring out what they’re going through as well. During this short time, several friends have come to me with their own stories of pain, and four have started blogging about it.

I’m engulfed by sadness for those who toil daily with similar agonies, but I’m also overwhelmed with a positive feeling that by communicating about what we’re going through, perhaps we can help each other heal and help reduce the general stigma that surrounds people who live in pain. John F. Kennedy, one of the most revered leaders in modern history, suffered in severe chronic pain for years, yet he had to cover it up in order for the public to have confidence in his presidency. We can all gather strength from each other and our experiences.

My physical therapist is a really wonderful person. I’m incredibly lucky to have found her. Both my OB/Gyn and the local pain clinic sent me to her over a year and a half ago, and she’s made my life a lot better. But once my recovery started to plateau, she referred me to a pelvic pain specialist in San Francisco who essentially finally diagnosed my problem as pudendal nerve neuralgia (aka neuropathy, stretched nerves, entrapped nerves). His recommendation: a series of massive injections.

Yesterday, after a month of planning and preparation to make sure I would have help with my daughter, food in the house, and access to all of the pain management supplies I could possibly need, I trekked up to SF with my husband to get the shots. My PT had told me what to expect, thankfully, so I knew it would be excruciating. Thinking about it now still turns my stomach. It was like being stabbed 7 times in my pelvis. He injected me three times, with a six inch needle, and moved the needle around internally to hit the right spots near the problem areas – vaginal muscles, coccyx, and pelvic floor. It took less time than giving birth, but in many ways, the pain was sharper.

There’s a song in Les Miserables – “One Day More” – where the revolutionaries sing about how their hopes for freedom could be recognized the next day. And of course the next day, pretty much all of them die. Three days from now, I’ll be having a pair of really scary injections and I’m feeling the panic set in.

I resolved myself a couple of months ago that it was time to do something a bit more drastic in terms of treatments, but then when I had the consultation with this expert pelvic pain doctor (who says he’s given over 2500 of these injections, like it’s supposed to make me feel better somehow) and after all of his testing, my pain’s been worse. I’m not a happy person. But now, it seems there’s nowhere to go but ahead with the injections, so Wednesday at 2:00pm Pacific time, I’ll have 2 needles stuck into my… well… yeah, there. Where the baby came out three and a half years ago and stretched my nerves to kingdom come.

Glancing back 16 months ago, I found a post I wrote at the Silicon Valley Moms Blog, entitled “Coping With Chronic Pain – Two Years and Counting…” Due to their posting requirements, I can’t reprint the entire thing here without permission, but you can click on it and read it there, and I’ll include some excerpts that I thought were relevant at this point to reflect upon.  Keep in mind that I wrote the post because we were doing a topic day on ‘coping.’

I wrote:

I finally got to writing this post at the end of our topic day because – well – I spend so much time on various forms of coping, one of which is a deeply ingrained talent for keeping too busy. Actually things are much, much better for me in terms of my health and the chronic pain. (I usually don’t repeat adjectives, but really, they’re a lot better.) So I can’t complain and I’ll try not to make this sound like it, but your life changes when you suffer from severe injuries. Gradually, as you realize you may never be the person you once were, your perspective becomes altered.

I’ll admit there are a lot of sad aspects to living in chronic pain. It’s no picnic any day, regardless of how it’s viewed. But at least I have the benefit of some experience. Pain from two different sources that lasted five years qualifies, doesn’t it?

In 1996, I took my first job after graduating from college. I was excited to be working at a small company as a contract systems administrator. It was a great experience professionally. Physically, however, it was a ticking time bomb.