Life just beats us up—pain or no pain.  Eventually many if not most of us gravitate towards a survival mode.  Instead of living life with creativity and vigor, we’re just trying to get to Friday and recover over the weekend.

Chronic pain greatly magnifies this process.  Instead of aiming for Friday, you are trying to just get through the day.  As you become more anxious and frustrated, it becomes more difficult to engage in positive experiences with your family and friends.  Good food, wine, and hobbies gradually disappear.  In almost all cases, people suffering from chronic pain become increasingly isolated.

The major problem with this sequence is that an inordinate percent of your nervous system is focused on your pain, so you will feel it more.  The reason that goal setting becomes such an important part of the DOCC project is that it causes your thoughts to be somewhere else besides your pain.  Goal setting is not positive thinking.  Positive thinking is just another way of suppressing negative thinking and particularly in the context of chronic pain it is a disaster.

Somehow I was reminded today about a poem I wrote in 2003 while attending a surgical training session sponsored by one of our instrumentation companies, Medtronics.  It was a remarkable weekend that dramatically altered my approach to spinal deformity.  A good part of the three-day training was spent working on cadavers.  I wrote this poem:

Whoever you were
You were generous
Giving yourself
To be my teacher
On your last day of
School

I wrote this in November 2003, after spending 3 days in an anatomy lab.

BF