I live on an island and we are very much an outdoors crowd, particularly water sports – besides swimming; I loved horse riding, kick-boxing and wrestling. But now I find I’m pretty much a forced recluse due to the inoperable and permanent nerve damage from 2 failed surgeries, which affects my left side in a chronic-acute-neuralgic-pain-syndrome kind of way

I call myself a cave bear as I really am just hibernating…. or am I in a cocoon ready to show the newly morphed me? Instead I am left with what feels like a bad experiment. So I don’t go out much – you don’t when you deal with chronic pain – it’s exhausting. It’s just too painful, hard, embarrassing and awkward to go out.

Anyhoo, back to the story. I went to talk to my shrink for an hour today – she is lovely; spiritual, intuitive, and…. hold onto your hats, she does not believe in CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy). Instead she believes in the meta-conscience, an intriguing concept and much more of a fit for me.

So I understand it’s all about identifying myself now – not who I was, but who I am now. I am not sure of what defines me now – in all entirety. I was absolutely convinced I had found my calling when I joined the police with the goal to help our kids. So my faith in me is shaken and I’m finding out who I am as this other me. I know I will get through this because this is my journey – somehow there will be some sense in all of this pain. I was on enormous amounts of methadone in 1998 along with gabapentin, fentanyl and a dozen other medications. I couldn’t even shower myself or brush my teeth. For years I was a zombie until something inside me said “Kait, this is not you – this is not who you are and this is not what should define you.” So I took a long time weaning myself off the medication and I survived when I was supposed to die, I managed to have a life when I was told my life was over. It’s a horror story and not one I want to write but I got through that – dealt with pain on a daily basis through no help of anyone else and carved a life for myself and my son, who had lost me for nearly 5 years already.

Then I give up everything to go to get my degree in Criminology. My son is grown up and doing his own thing. I graduate in 2011 – start my job and slip on my front step. Need a discectomy – it goes badly wrong and triggers old pain syndrome from lung nerve damage of 1998 into its rabid self. I’m in the high dependency unit again – major drugs. I begged everyone around me that if anything should happen they are not to put me on that poisonous methadone. They put me on morphine instead and so the hell has rolled on for the past two years with no positive outcomes. There has been a barrage of medications again and I don’t want to have to take them. Sometimes I feel like a failure when I have to succumb because I am in so much pain but I don’t know what else to do. And the knives I put in my own back become innumerable in this too.

So yeah – I use self-hypnosis and breathing techniques – I do my best not to take medication. It dumbs me down and kills any motivation toward anything. It kills you on the inside too so you don’t have any spirit to feel human any more or to fight for a life – it consumes you in a rolled up carpet, a dark cupboard and deaf/mute existence. I see so many people who are left dependent on heavy medication and with no existence – these are the true zombies of the world. These are the walking dead, the emotionally unfeeling, uncaring and unknowing. It’s almost a way of keeping things quiet….Don’t let them get you 😉