Battling pain!

rainbows70

Hi,

Can anyone give me tips about how to deal with pain.

Most of the time, it seems to get the better of me.

Your advice would be so appreciated. t4591

Mike1

Oh, for a magic wand! Regrettably pain is part and parcel of the conditions that we have to suffer and we all have different coping strategies/pain thresholds etc. I am riddled with OA and despite being on Morphine cannot do anything without increasing my pain, from getting out of bed; making a cup of tea and so forth. It is a case of trying to accept what we have been dealt, no matter how extremely hard that is at times.

stickywicket

I'm sure Mike is right. Firstly we must accept pain as inevitable and then ignore it as much as possible by doing things that take our minds off it. Pleasant things that make us happy are the best (for me - watching or listening to cricket, watching my grandson playing baseball, chatting tó friends NOT about pain , reading, doing crosswords or sudoku) but the routine drudgery of washing up, doing the laundry, making beds, cleaning etc rarely leaves much time for thinking about tóday's hurty bits. I time my work according which bit currently needs a break so preparing yesterday's meal for the family happened in bits interspersed with sitting at the comput er do prepare the church notices.

Distraction is essential but so are exercises. I keep my muscles ( such as they are ) in as good a nick as possible to support my rubbishy joints. Some exercises can be done tó music and others to Radio 4 where I often catch interest ing snippets of programmes I mean tó listen to later in full but never do :roll:

Try reading what Versus Arthritis says about dealing with pain. It's long but extremely useful. https://www.versusarthritis.org/about-arthritis/managing-symptoms/managing-your-pain/