My company took my boyfriend and me, along with about 300 others, to an all-inclusive three night, four day vacation to Cabo San Lucas. I can’t get over how luck I am to work for a company that does so much for their employees. We went whale watching, had an incredible welcome dinner, a black and gold themed awards ceremony, and lots of time to just hang out and soak up the sun. It was incredible.
But it was also incredibly hard.
I’m thinking others with chronic pain will understand this: I have routines and tricks and things that help lessen my pain, things I know to avoid so I don’t make my pain worse. And all of that is hard to keep up with when I’m in a new place with different people and no access to a lot of the helpful things I’ve acquired over the years.
So going on this trip, it was absolutely incredible, but I wanted to leave the whole time.
My biggest pain trigger is wind. Wind blowing in my face sends endless amounts of what feels like hot electrical shocks through my face. It goes up through my nose and my eyelids and into my tongue and teeth. It makes me feel like my face is swollen and it gets hard to talk.
Even though I knew this is what I would be facing, I couldn’t get myself to just sit inside all day, not while I’m in such a beautiful place. So I decided to just accept that I would be in pain the whole time and I still tried to participate in everything.
But pushing through pain, especially with such intense pain, is taxing. It’s exhausting. It takes every bit of my energy to do it. Which means I don’t have much left in me to just enjoy myself and smile and laugh and be present.
The only thought on my mind is pain.
The only sensation I have is pain.
The only thing I can feel is pain.
Even when I’m surrounded by palm trees and ocean breezes and the best people. Even when I’m in an incredibly beautiful resort. Even when I have every type of food and drink and people just waiting to serve them to me. All I can focus on is my pain.
I don’t know what the point of saying all of this is. I didn’t have some huge epiphany, I don’t have any good tips or tricks, I don’t have any way to get around it.
I guess I just want others dealing with this (or anything similar) to know you’re not alone.
Because it feels so isolating.
It’s so lonely to have such extreme pain.
And that’s not to say I’m alone. I have the absolute best support system around me. I have a family and a boyfriend that does everything they can to not only understand what I’m dealing with, but to give me grace with it all and just help me get through it.
As I said my boyfriend was with me in Cabo. He knows my pain better than just about anyone because of how often he’s around me.
He picks up on when I start talking differently because of my pain. He notices when I stop smiling because of the pain. He realizes that sometimes I just can’t get past it and he does what he can to distract me.
And so often that works - it did most of the time in Cabo.
So maybe that’s the point of this all. If you can’t escape it, just distract yourself from it.
Personally, I distracted myself with good food and good drinks and good company. My boyfriend and I got dressed up and went to dinner, we met some new people around the resort. We spent time inside finding fun things to do, and when I was up for it, we ventured back outside.
I struggled with it a lot, but there’s balance in everything. For me, this trip didn’t look like it did for most everyone else, but it was still a welcome vacation that I am so incredibly blessed to have gone on.
Balance, for me, means riding out my pain for as long as I can, and then giving myself the grace to rest afterwards.
Balance.
Go out and have fun all day long, and know I’ll have to call it an early night even though we’re on vacation.
Balance.
There is a lot baggage that comes with chronic pain. There is a lot that gets hidden, the struggles, the pain, the limitations.
But that doesn’t mean that any of the good has to be taken away or minimized. It can be tough sometimes, but the sun always pokes through at some point, even on the cloudiest of days.
And that’s what you have to hold on to.