Tag Archives: Healing

Varieties of Painful Experiences

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When I first arrived at neuro ICU my body felt mostly numb from strong meds and also inflammation from the injury. In the relatively short time I was there I began to sense the changes as the inflammation gradually decreased and sensations of pain emerged.

I experienced the frequency of muscle spasms incrementally increase as arm and shoulder muscles tightened. Little did I know this would continue as a chronic baseline pain to this day. Sometimes it can be temporarily alleviated with medication or other modalities, but the pain is always there.

Also during my stay at neuro ICU, a mild soreness in my throat gradually intensified to the point of finding it difficult to swallow. At the time I didn’t need to swallow often since I took in water and nutrients through tubes and phlegm could be removed with the suction tube. Fortunately that particular pain was permanently relieved about a month later when the feed tube was removed from my nose and throat.

Being unable to move makes one acutely aware of how discomfort and pain exist on a continuum. Without a way to easily relieve oneself of mildly sore muscles, I would sometimes wait it out until it escalated to legitimate pain. In such cases my only option at the time would be to trigger a nurse call light to request a dose of oxycodone.

Sometimes I’d still feel pain after the effects of the oxy wore off. Since I wasn’t allowed to take more than one dose of it within six hours I had no choice but to live with the pain, which was an experience I’ve never had to endure prior to my injury. Like most people, I’d always find some way to block, alleviate, or easily distract attention away from the pain with activities. In some cases the sustained pain became a new baseline and seemed to lose intensity over time on its own.

Being less able to completely avoid pain forced me to examine it and think of ways to ameliorate it as much as possible in my mind. I had previously noticed how emotional pain sometimes diminished with the onset of more immediate physical pain, or how a lower intensity pain would fade in the background as more acute and alarming pain emerged, highlighting the connection between pain and attention.

Another pain management strategy was one I practiced while conditioning myself to be able to sit on a wheelchair for extended periods. In conjunction with binaural beats, I visualized my soul or astral body disassociating from my physical body and floating away, usually orbiting above earth. This imagery happens to be similar to thumbnail and video art often accompanying binaural beats on YouTube. The sound and visuals seem to go together naturally and I found it to be effective for the type of pain I went through.

As if to foreshadow what was in store for my future, just a few days after being admitted to neuro ICU I was visited by Aaron, a research coordinator for a University of Washington study on hypnosis as a pain management therapy for spinal cord injury patients. He was scouting for volunteers for his study which would require a series of one hour sessions throughout my stay at Harborview (and a few months after) compensated for by a small gift card stipend and access to the hypnosis recordings.

Though still in relatively less pain at the time, I volunteered to see if hypnosis could diminish the pain I was starting to feel and to hopefully provide useful data for therapists and patients. Volunteers were split into study and control groups. Those in the study would receive the hypnotherapy while the control group was interviewed about experiences and attitudes regarding pain.

Unfortunately I ended up in the control group, but was allowed access to hypnotherapy recordings after the conclusion of the study and the interviews provided much food for thought about the nature of pain. It also helped mentally prepare me for the increasing pain to come. As it turned out, the hypnosis sessions I listened to didn’t seem to alleviate my pain, though the effectiveness may have been hindered by my mental state and/or setting.

I may give hypnotherapy another try in the future, but in the meantime I’ve found therapeutic massage, acupuncture, electrical stimulation therapy, and CBD, CBN, and CBG cannabinoids to be more effective alternative treatments.

Ruminations on Trauma

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Once again focusing attention on my immediate situation, I self-assessed how I felt. The adjective I kept coming back to was “traumatized”. At first it didn’t seem quite right because I associated trauma with survivors of violent assault. Upon further thought, I understood how it results from any violent event and could be physical as well as psychological.

Though I have no accessible memory of the crash that caused my injury, it’s possible a buried subconscious memory exists. At times I couldn’t stop recreating scenarios of what probably happened mixed with fantasies of what could have happened (either dying or escaping unscathed). In any case, the injury resulting from the crash including aspects of hospitalization, was itself a source of trauma.

Unless one has experienced it, it’s difficult to imagine the horror of waking up in a newly immobilized body especially if one was relatively healthy immediately prior to the injury. It instantly shatters any illusions one might have had of a just universe or merciful higher power. But the evidence was always there, from psychopathic war criminals and health insurance CEOs living in luxury to innocent children killed and maimed in indiscriminate bombings and countless sick and injured living curtailed lives of misery due to denied claims and inaccessible treatments.

Initially it’s like a waking nightmare that never ends. One wouldn’t wish such an affliction on one’s worst enemy, much less easily accept that it’s actually happening to oneself. Even typing this now, nearly a year after the crash, waking life still sometimes feels like a bad dream.

As the reality of the situation sets in it begins to feel more like a fracture or demarcation point between two very different lives and lifestyles. Though fundamentally one remains the same person, the extremity of the physical change makes changes in personality, priorities, interests, beliefs, self/public image, and relationships, inevitable and how could it not?

Although in my case I experienced no physical deformation and associated acute pain, it was nevertheless traumatic to so suddenly lose such a large part of oneself. Especially early on, it was odd to feel so disconnected from one’s body despite appearing healthy on the outside (aside from breathing tube, nose tube, catheter, IV line, etc).

In a sense, my injury was analogous to accelerated aging. Rather than a gradual loss of certain functions and abilities over time, it’s a rapid loss of many functions and abilities instantly. At the same time, quadriplegia evokes the experience of infancy such as the many times when one is more of a spectator rather than participant and having to rely on others to attend to basic needs. Quadriplegia is not as restricting as Locked-in Syndrome, in which the only body part capable of movement are the eyes, but it is still a significant reduction of freedom and a loss of one’s primary means of interacting with the world.

From one’s new perspective, life pre-injury was one of relative comfort, ease and happiness (even if it didn’t always seem like it at the time). Life post-injury may have moments of comfort, ease and happiness, but much shorter, fewer and farther between, making them all the more precious. On particularly challenging days, sleep also offers a welcome respite as it did that night.

The First Day Continued

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When Danielle and Florence first visited me in the Neuro ICU, it felt like the first time I saw them since before the crash. On further reflection I recalled the hazy dream-like hospital room that was actually the Trauma ICU. My memories of it even at that time seemed faded and fragmented whether because of the heavy medication or a side-effect of physical and/or mental trauma.

Regardless, how could I not realize I was quadriplegic through that period which was at least a week? I tried hard to recall what people actually said to me but could only remember portions of my mother explaining how my family scrambled to get to Seattle and my brother Daryl explaining something about a computer.

Part of the missing information could be attributed to impaired hearing, since I noticed sounds coming through my left ear had a slightly distant or muffled quality. But I think the main factor was my fragile mental state compounded by heavy medication causing faulty memory. It could also be that “selective forgetting” was a way to protect myself from uncomfortable information my mind was incapable of accepting.

One example was at some point that day I felt the urge to urinate and thought I’d need to call the nurse for a bedpan. This alarmed my visitors because they witnessed the same scenario at the trauma ICU not long before. They explained for a second time that I had been catheterized shortly after being admitted to Harborview.

Perhaps suspecting there’s other important details I hadn’t retained, Danielle provided a detailed description of my injury. Though I had deduced what what was going on with my body, it didn’t hit home until she described it as the same injury suffered by Christopher Reeve. She then asked if I knew how I was injured and after I gestured “no” she recounted what she knew about the crash from police and first responder reports. Even though I had no prior memory of such details, it didn’t come as a complete surprise since a bike crash was always the most likely explanation. She described surgery scars along my neck and spine that resembled tattoos and puncture wounds on my head from having it bolted down to keep it from moving. I couldn’t feel them at the time but did later on.

Also new to me (though likely recounted before) was the timeline of my stay at Harborview. To me it felt like it could have been anywhere between a few days and a month. In actuality it had been about two weeks. Even more surprising was learning I had flatlined for a few seconds on at least two occasions. Danielle became teary-eyed as if reliving those moments and seemed almost as re-traumatized recounting repeated unsuccessful attempts to get information from my employer’s impenetrable HR department.

Although I retained a partial memory of it, my mother described how she, my father and older brother arrived at the hospital just two days after my crash. My dad and brother had to go back home after about a week but my mom planned to stay for three months. I was appreciative for their visit because my parents had been reluctant to travel by plane since the start of Covid in 2020.

Throughout the day we were frequently interrupted by nurses taking vitals and refilling the IV with saline, liquid food and medications, staff members changing my bed position and cleaning the room, and phlebotomists drawing blood samples. An odd side-effect of my lowered metabolism (or slowed-down state of mind) was that everyone’s movements seemed “sped-up”. The entire day seemed to go by rapidly as well and before long it was evening.

3 EXTRAORDINARY PARADOXES OF PERSONAL AWAKENING

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By Dylan Charles

Source: Waking Times

How do you reconcile the utter madness of the world with the overwhelming joy of being alive in it?

“Paradox: a situation, person, or thing that combines contradictory features or qualities.”

Without question we live in interesting times. The deception, insanity and turmoil in our world has no end, yet when we tune in very closely to life’s pulse, we find softness and connection open to us at every step. These contradictory features of the human experience point to the dualistic nature of the universe, but ultimately offer a glimpse of a middle way, the center, where harmony resides in a sea of chaos. A seeming, but natural paradox.

“When people find one thing beautiful,
another consequently becomes ugly.
When one man is held up as good,
another is judged deficient.

Similarly, being and nonbeing balance each other;
difficult and easy define each other;
long and short illustrate each other;
high and low rest upon one another;
voice and song meld into harmony;
what is to come follows upon what has been.”

~Tao Te Ching 2

This is what personal awakening means. To create a harmonious relationship with your own life. To solve the paradox. Have you experienced any of these 3 extraordinary paradoxes of personal awakening?

1. The Awakening is Triggered by Fear and Supported by Love

Like an invading virus triggers the immune system, fear triggers the awakening. War, strife, turmoil, conspiracy, control, death, suffering, theft, abuse. This is the world we have created for ourselves. The toll of such heaviness manifests as a dense type of contagious fear, a chronic trigger that perpetuates the fight or flight response, but without an immediate or tangible threat to face directly. But there is nowhere to run or hide from the fear. We can confront it or be consumed by it. Or transmute it.

And what is to found beyond the fear? Love. An endless stream of it. In the stream the fear makes sense as a force which guides us into the stream of love.

2. Healing Hurts

The awakening is ultimately a healing process, but it’s hardly free of pain, because it is in a sense a recovery from injury or illness, like a form of forgetfulness of who you really are. As such, it actually hurts. A lot. And just like the agony of having a broken bone set, or the pain of recovering from a difficult surgery, emotional and spiritual pain is a necessary component of healing.

Letting go into whatever it is, depression, sadness, boredom, or even grief, is how healing begins. There is no out, only through. The remembrance of the pain is there to forever color the outcome of the healing process.

“If you desire healing,
let yourself fall ill
let yourself fall ill.” ~Jalaluddin Mevlana Rumi

3. The Void Has Everything We Need

Counter intuitive it may seem, but stepping out of the cultural and mental clutter and into the void, where being and non-being balance each other, reveals everything we truly need. It turns out that silence is the teacher. In silence the universe comes into focus. Time stops and morphs into timelines. Infinite possibilities all become clear at once. Everything we need to know and feel is in this space, but to get there, everything has to be stripped away.

“In the pursuit of knowledge, every day something is added. In the practice of the Tao, every day something is dropped.” ~Tao Te Ching

Final Thoughts

What lies above lies below. A proper life is about balancing the joy of being alive with the terror of being alive. Ignoring either side of the equation leads to chaos.

“Do you want to improve the world?
I don’t think it can be done.

The world is sacred.
It can’t be improved.
If you tamper with it, you’ll ruin it.
If you treat it like an object, you’ll lose it.

There is a time for being ahead,
a time for being behind;
a time for being in motion,
a time for being at rest;
a time for being vigorous,
a time for being exhausted;
a time for being safe,
a time for being in danger.

The Master sees things as they are,
without trying to control them.
She lets them go their own way,
and resides at the center of the circle.”

~Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching