I laughed out loud at the headline in our local newspaper: “Pain often comes with age.” Now there’s a news flash.<\/p>\n
Mostly, I don’t mind getting older. I make better decisions, I don’t get as agitated, I’m not quite as restless. But at times I quote my mother: “It’s hell to get old,” she used to say.<\/p>\n
Today is one of those times. Today, pain has consumed the entire day. \u00a0All I wanted was to make it stop.<\/p>\n
I’m in pretty good shape and I even relish going for my annual physical, confident that my doctor will once again tell me that my lab tests were very good. My blood pressure is a reliable 110\/70, and I just take herbal medicines for any day-to-day health needs.<\/p>\n
Then I had a bout of sciatica for the first time a couple years ago, and it was shockingly terrible. My chiropractor gave me some stretching exercises to do, and the sciatica disappeared.<\/p>\n
But once in awhile, it flares up. Usually, I can just take a hefty dose of ibuprofin or a prescription anti-inflammatory, and it goes away.<\/p>\n
Not today, though. Today the sciatica pain has been screaming up and down my hips, thighs and knees, since 3 a.m.<\/p>\n
I have stronger prescription meds for just this rare occasion, but even those weren’t working. And so I got stressed – from fear of the pain, fear that it would never go away.<\/p>\n
And of course, stress just makes your muscles even more tense, increasing the pain.<\/p>\n
I tried to distract myself with cooking, reading, working on small projects around the house. I even laughed, remembering what Dad used to say when we were kids crying over a skinned knee: “Just think how good it will feel when it stops hurting.”<\/p>\n
Finally, after Tom got home and was there to talk to and comfort me, the pain began to ebb.<\/p>\n
There are millions of people who live with chronic pain. I do not know how they do it. I can hardly bear it even for 24 hours, even when I know that it will go away.<\/p>\n
But I’ve learned one thing about pain: Love helps a lot.<\/p>\n
Friends, next time you are in pain, feel free to call me.<\/p>\n
I chose for today’s penny one that looks like it’s being consumed by some dark force.<\/p>\n
If a penny could be in pain, this one would be. And it’s a 2014 – just a youngster.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I laughed out loud at the headline in our local newspaper: “Pain often comes with age.” Now there’s a news flash. Mostly, I don’t mind getting older. I make better decisions, I don’t get as agitated, I’m not quite as restless. But at times I quote my mother: “It’s hell to get old,” she used … read more Day 39: Make it stop<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5244,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[318],"tags":[36,8,136,9,83],"class_list":["post-5242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-refraction","tag-36","tag-dad","tag-health","tag-mom","tag-pain"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5242","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5242"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5242\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5245,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5242\/revisions\/5245"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5244"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}