Eight is Enough

Life’s been whizzing by the past couple of years since my daughter started grade school. I thought I would have more time, but I haven’t. The good news it has become easier to manage my pain on a daily basis. The bad news is it’s still around lingering like an irritating neighbor that just won’t leave you alone. Still, I learn new lessons about life with pelvic pain.

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Liberation

It’s finally here, the day I’ve been waiting for now for over six years. Liberation day. As of tomorrow, my almost 6.5 year-old daughter will be in a most-day camp for the rest of the summer, and then as of August, she will be entering first grade. So essentially starting now, my life begins to resemble some sense of normalcy for the first time since before I became pregnant. It comes with continued sacrifices and pain, but it is so refreshing I can’t even begin to express the emotion I’m feeling.

Glancing Back a Year

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.

Toast

It’s all about toast.  I really love toast. In college, my cinnamon & sugar toast became so famous that I actually was teaching friends of friends how to make it just right.  (That was about the extent of my cooking skills anyway.)  Toast has also become a theme in my management of pain the past four years because it’s an easy way to explain the good days vs. the bad. On the good days, I can stay standing next to the toaster, doing other things in the kitchen while my bread toasts.  On the bad days, the pain is so severe that it hurts too much to even stay standing long enough to toast the bread.  That’s about 4-5 minutes.

This pain began with early bed rest in my first – and only – pregnancy.  I started bleeding a few days into the pregnancy and was having a lot of abdominal pain.  The doctor advised me to take it easy and my husband had to keep reminding me that in 80% of cases, early bleeding was not an indicator of miscarriage.  So I rested.  Over the next few weeks, the embryo developed just fine and we could see the little pulsating blob on the ultrasound, which we named Dot.  Still, the first trimester kicked my a** and I was exhausted all the time, I couldn’t focus well, and I was in a lot of pain as the ligaments stretched (and it’s possible the stretching of my nerves in the pelvic area began here as well.)