LIVING WITH PAIN

I have struggling with some chronic pain these two weeks past. Thankfully it has ended just as suddenly as it came. It is something that has bugged me since my teens, and which had escalated from mild discomfort to pain of the stop-everything-you-are-doing-and-pant type in the past few months. My doctor recently diagnosed the problem as something physiological, and she tells me there is no cure for it. It is something I will have to live with for the rest of my life, and it is likely to get worse as I grow older.

I have tried to not let the pain affect my life very much as of now. Most of the time, the pain is something I can accommodate. It is only those few days and nights when the pain reaches its peak that I may perhaps walk very much slower, be less active, have a few broken nights of sleep etc. Still, the thought of having to live with something chronic and uncontrollable for the rest of my life is rather scary.

It made me think about those people whose lives have been reduced to moaning on the bed from terminal illnesses. I remember this old lady who had the opposite bed when I was hospitalised last December, and who was suffering from some really painful disease and some kind of dementia. She couldn’t speak and could only make sounds. It was horrible to listen to her heart-rending moans, which continued on-and-off through the one day and night I was there, and the worst of it was knowing that there was nothing much anyone or anything could do to relieve her misery.

I told SB before that maybe we should consider moving to somewhere where euthanasia is legalised when we get old and if we are both unmarried and without our own families. The thought of a life spent on the bed with nothing but debilitating pain for company is really, really scary. I would really like to know that a way out is available. I am not afraid of death (well…not really), only of the process of dying.

In the meantime, I am definitely nowhere near that point, and I did chide myself for taking a tangent along that kind of line. But I will still be checking out immigration laws for the Netherlands….just in case.