Each year, Chronic Pain Australia draws attention to the experiences of people living with chronic pain and, by doing so, helps reduce the social and other barriers related to living with and managing chronic pain.
Being heard can be a painchanger, a new treatment can be a painchanger, or a person who supports someone living with pain can be a painchanger. This National Pain Week, join us to talk about what your painchangers are.
Jacqueline Morrisey, one of the participants in our 8-week group program at the Peninsula Health Persistent Pain Management Service, describes her painchanger.
“I can’t tell you a time I haven’t been in pain. It’s always there, constant, chipping away, wearing you down,” says Jacqueline.
“I have struggled for over 20 years to accept this is my reality. My happiness was replaced with sadness and angst, my control replaced with fear, my laughter replaced by isolation.”
“My nervous system has known nothing else but to be in fight mode, high alert, and to be honest, it’s exhausting. I’m so tired.”
“Visiting physiotherapists, specialists, surgeons, going through surgeries, and taking prescription after prescription, hoping someone, somehow, has the magic combination to ease my pain and give me peace… 20 years down the track, I’m ruminating about giving up.”
“Then I met Tess, Ngaire, and Luke. Three unassuming people, a pain management team they call themselves, who ended up helping me in ways I will be forever grateful for.”
“People who know me would call me cynical; I would tend to agree with them. Pain changes you, and life becomes a struggle physically, emotionally, psychologically, socially.”
“So, walking into a room knowing I had committed myself to an 8-week pain management course, well, I wasn’t expecting miracles.”
Jacquie describes some of the key messages she received during the group as:
- There is hope that you can succeed in managing your pain.
- The connection between pain and the brain.
- That the brain can be retrained.
- That we can take back control of our pain.
- Acknowledgment that pain is real (feeling many others had brushed her aside).
- That struggling with pain can cause more suffering than the pain itself (like being stuck in a finger trap).
- Using calming techniques changes how you feel you can cope.
- Learning that the body will adjust, and it does (as a twice cancer survivor, those words have had a huge impact).
“Eight weeks have flown by; the course is over. I don’t want it to end.”
“Something has changed for me. I feel lighter, I feel more in control, a fog has lifted. My pain is less.”
“The strategies I’ve been given over the last eight weeks are now my own. I’ve already been implementing them; they are an integral part of my daily routine. When my pain is at the forefront, I sit with it, acknowledge it, work with it.”
“I’m in control, it’s not controlling me. It’s an ongoing journey, I know, but I’m keeping an open mind, turning my cynicism into a whisper and embracing the holistic approach with all I have. I owe it to Ngaire, Tess, and Luke. I owe it to myself.”
“In the lonely times, when the pain is too much and the hopelessness creeps in, I now know there are people who are on your side, batting for you, wanting you to be your best, wanting the best for you. Be kind to yourself.”
The Peninsula Health Integrated Pain Service, including the Persistent Pain Management Service and the outpatient Pain Medicine Clinic, works with many people who feel like they have tried everything to fix their pain.
The Persistent Pain Management Service is committed to using evidence-based practices to work from a different approach. Rather than focusing on the pain and trying to get rid of it, we focus on people’s lives and overall well-being. We provide clients with the tools to manage their pain so that it has less impact on them, causes less suffering, and improves their quality of life. By doing this, we often find that pain reduces over time.
We use the metaphor of pain being like a finger trap: the more you struggle with it, the more it takes your attention, the more trapped you feel in it, and the more distressed you feel about it. When you take a breath, relax, and get curious about it, you can move in different ways, and eventually, your fingers come free. You can still carry it with you—the trap itself hasn’t changed—but you are now able to focus on the things that are truly important in your life with less suffering.