nero

I find it hard to respond to your message that pain is possibly good, and just an emotion, other than the fact that pain can elicit a response which means one tends to help oneself or at least find out the source of the pain symptom.

However, pain as a positive outcome I find difficult to accept. Just because I too have a high pain tolerance and can treadmill for an hour five times a week, regardless of the two spinal chord compressions I suffer in the cervical and lumbar area, doesn't mean I have to like it. Definitely I have learned to work with my pain, tolerate my pain, explore my pain and minimize it by rationalization and more often than not, drug free. I am blessed i think with that ability.

The ability you have "Hugo..", DonnaKay has, and i feel I have to a degree, doesn't mean others have that strength. My best friend is my age, in her 40's with two kids, a hubby and trying to make a life for herself through suffering the debilitation and pain of M.S. She "smokes", takes morphine, and other drugs in order to sustain some semblance of coherency each day through the pain. The pain of cervical disc herniation and spinal chord pain (like many of us have had) is the same as the lesions caused on the nerve endings from M.S. I have had a difficult time since my injury complaining on any level to her about my pain, although she is fully appreciative, but I would never, as they say tell her to "suck it up".

If I had not known my pain was mechanical and was fixable within reason and not known there was a conceivable minimizing of my pain or potential eradication of it, I probably would have found it hard to minimize the pain I suffered. My friend and many others like her who suffer progressive long term pain don't have this intellectual luxury.

So be A LOT careful when you generalize (as DonnaKay) said. We'll all like each other's input and we all have a right to be proud of our abilities but yours too could be judged in terms of exactly what kind of pain it is you too suffer. I like the fact that you ask us to contemplate our pain and work with it, clearly that is everyone's option, but try telling that to our ballet director's mother who had ALS and couldn't swallow at the end to save her life.


Just a thought.

Nearly new... Nero