Pain and Illness: The Unrecognized Humbler and the Equalizer

Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash

Life — “No One Gets Out Alive,” we often hear. It’s also true that almost no one gets out of life without pain. One day you’re a lean, mean, marathon-running machine playing weekly tennis — the next, you’ve just had your first heart attack. One day you’re canoeing a lovely stretch of the San Joaquin Delta — the next, the twinge in your back turns out to be multiple myeloma. One day you’re hosting your daughter’s wedding — the next, your chronic pelvic pain rears its ugly head as metastatic cancer and it is literally too late to save your life. One day you’re hiking New Mexico’s mountains in your seventies — the next, you’re having spinal surgery to deal with your excruciating pain. It’s how we cope with pain and how the medical system either works for us, or doesn’t, that helps to determine our fate, our future, and our outlook on life. And unless you happen to suffer from a hereditary disease, none of these things are predictable.

I had intractable pelvic pain in my forties and at the time I didn’t have much support from anyone in my life. My then-husband seemed to think in catastrophic terms, likely picturing a life caring for an invalid. After a couple of years of intensive focus on my health, including an open abdominal hysterectomy, I spent my fifties healthy as a horse. I used my experiences to help others and eventually filed for…