Category: Healing From Chronic Pain And Illness

By the time this entry is posted, I’ll be back on the road driving for twelve hours to a place I still call home. Since I left there last, my body has developed even more physical ailments that have become all the harder to endure. And lately, as much as I don’t like to openly admit this, I find myself questioning God because of how bad I feel.

I could spend pages and pages writing about the specific physical pains I feel and how they are controlling my life in its present moments. I could talk about all the things I have done and am still doing holistically to try to heal from what I believe its causes are. I could recite off all the self-help books I’ve read to bring about hope. I could share about all the homework exercises I’ve done that were assigned by practitioners and therapists to help in my healing. I could recount all the doctors and medications I tried to find some relief through. I could talk about all the recovery work I have done on myself and continue to do for others in the twelve step programs as well as all the toxic people I removed during that work to get healthier. In fact, I’m sure I could even find enough words to span the length of a novel about what I’ve gone through in these past few years in my repeated attempts to restore my health to a level where the pain doesn’t override the joys that life can bring.

It really has been tough for me lately to keep going. There’s not a day anymore that I don’t seem to be asking God whether I’m ever going to feel better again or whether anything good is truly going to come out of all the high pain levels I deal with every day. What’s even harder is facing the reality that sometimes amidst all this pain, I think about following in my parent’s footsteps and ending my life early before finding out the answers to those questions.

Just the other day in one of the many down moments I have been having lately, I received an inspirational e-mail from one of the things I subscribe to that said that there is nothing that has ever happened, or could possibly happen in our lives that is “bad”. It continued by saying it’s a spiritual law that there is never anything the universe sends us that isn’t in our own best interest and while it might not make sense in the moment, everything ultimately is either for our protection, or growth. The final words were the most difficult for me to grasp though. It said that even truly tragic things occur to make us stronger, bring us closer to others, teach us lessons, or give us a greater appreciation for life itself.

Have I gotten stronger through all of this? On some level that might be true on my ability to endure this pain. Has all of this brought me closer to others? On a day-to-day basis with interpersonal connections, I’d have to respond with a no. In fact it has done the exact opposite where I struggle to be around people especially when the pain is so great. On a level of having compassion for everyone who has gone through or is currently going through suffering, I’d have to respond though with a yes. Has all of this taught me lessons? Most definitely, the answer is yes. I have grasped many of them, each of which could be it’s own blog entry and many have been already. Has all of this brought me a greater appreciation for life itself? The sad truth is that it hasn’t, not for my present life at least. It’s challenging for me to get through even the slightest of tasks these days and the only appreciation all of this has brought me is what I once had several years earlier before all of this started. What’s a sobering thought is that I once lived life carefree where I was rarely grateful for any of what I was given including all those sports I excelled in, all those jobs I earned extremely high wages in, or all those things I did to where I pushed myself to the limits without any consequences. With it being hard for me today to even walk a few feet, I have struggled to find appreciation in anything when the pain rips through my body and nothing seems to help alleviate it.

The reality is that I don’t wish what I’m going through upon anybody. I keep trying to tell myself that everything happens for a reason, that all good things come to those who wait, that this too shall pass, and that God is only giving me what I can handle. All of those are examples of those positive sayings that people have told me along the way, and sometimes I cling to them with what little hope I have left.

The only thing I can say is that while I don’t know whether God truly exists or not, I am doing my best to maintain the belief that He does and that He has something good in store for me that I’ll be seeing very soon. It’s the only shred of anything that keeps me going anymore and to take that away from me would remove any remaining sense of hope I have to where I believe my only nature recourse would be to follow in my parent’s tragic footsteps.

I didn’t really want to write an entry in here today that was filled with so much of my pain but I am trying to keep my honesty for anyone who may be reading any of what I write. The only thing I can continue to do is pray and try to keep my faith that God is there watching me, embracing me, loving me, and telling me to hang on for just a little while longer.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

Lately, with the level of physical pain I continue to endure, I find myself questioning whether prayer really works. I don’t think there’s a day that has gone by since all of this started back in 2010 where I haven’t asked God to help get me to the point where I don’t hurt anymore. Prayer is a funny thing in that sometimes it seems to produce a desirable outcome and other times it doesn’t. In regards to the prayers I’ve said surrounding my physical pain, they don’t seem to have been answered yet, at least not in the way that I think they should be answered, solely because I’m still in a lot of pain. But in the case of other things that I’ve prayed for, such as the issues that once surrounded my partner’s cat, I’ve been blessed to see one of those positive outcomes actually happen.

It’s been about 17 months now since I was first introduced to Driggs, my partner’s female cat. Within the first few days of that initial visit to her home, it was made very obvious to me that she was not happy with my presence there. Every single attempt I made to get closer to her was met with an angry growl or a very loud hiss. I could tell she was very threatened by me. At one point she even bit me and drew blood, which was only met with a backlash of my anger and complaints to my partner that put him in a very uncomfortable position on what to do. For the rest of that visit, I tried more controlling behaviors such as closing her in a bedroom. All that did was make me feel guilty and her angrier. On the next visit, I tried another approach. I outright ignored her. Her response to that behavior was to constantly come up to where I was sitting and stare at me and then hiss and run away when I tried to reach down in another attempt to pet her. I began to grow resentful about it and in a selfish way I started wishing I could find her a new home to live even though my partner truly loved his cat. In my irritation, I fondly nicknamed her Cujo Kitty, which was aptly named after the dog that went psycho in the Stephen King movie. After several more visits with no changes in the standoff between us, I decided to try the one thing I hadn’t yet. I prayed for her.

Praying for a cat initially seemed silly to me, but with an open heart I began asking God daily to bring love, forgiveness, and peace to Driggs. Through those prayers, I felt moved to do some of my own healing work on her using a technique I had learned with magnets to release energy blockages. In addition, I also felt guided after those prayers to start adding a few droplets of one of my calming herbal essences to her water. And then finally, in one more attempt to show her some love instead of anger, I brought her to a groomer for the first time in her life. What happened next was completely unexpected. The next day after her grooming, she was staring at me again while I was sitting on the couch and suddenly she jumped up on top of me and meowed slightly. I was stunned and slowly, ever so slowly, I put my hand on her and stroked the short hair behind her ears. After a few moments of adjustments, she lay down and began purring. And the rest was history.

It’s been over six months since then and rarely has there been a day that goes by when I’m visiting where she hasn’t wanted to lay on me for long periods of time and do nothing more but purr and fall asleep. When I’m in a separate room than her doing something like working on a puzzle, she’ll come join me and lie on the floor near me and start purring again. She will even come nuzzle me now when I lay sprawled out on the floor watching television. So I guess it’s safe to say now in the case of those prayers I said to God regarding Driggs that they worked.

Did it happen in the way I originally wanted? No because my ego wanted a quick fix and I see more clearly these days that there are no quick fixes. Instead it took a lot of time and a lot of patience. And it most definitely took a lot of love. Because of what I learned in this, I am doing my best to apply what happened with Driggs to the prayers I’ve said to God surrounding the healing of my physical pain. I realize that healing takes time and patience, especially knowing that I didn’t get sick overnight. And I also see now that it’s important to love everyone and everything, including all the physical pain and myself. In doing all of this, I’ve come to the belief that maybe God really does provide a desirable outcome to all of our prayers, except the path to get there might just be a wee bit different from what we think it should look like.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

Having chronic pain is difficult in itself, but trying to function in daily activities and live a normal life with it can be extremely challenging. Thankfully, I’ve learned along the way that one of the best distractions from it is to do a puzzle.

It’s really funny how the things I once despised are now becoming the things I get a lot of satisfaction from. Puzzles are just one of them. A few years ago, I wouldn’t have been caught dead working on one of them for even a minute of my time. It never made much sense to me how any enjoyment could come from trying to put together something of different shapes and sizes solely for the purpose of forming some kind of random picture. It seemed rather boring and mundane to me as well as a waste of time. Instead, I would spend my free time doing more exciting things like  playing tennis, bowling, basketball, swimming, biking, hiking, walking and more. None of that has been possible for quite some time now so I’ve been limited to just a few choices on how I can use all my free time. The idea of a putting together a puzzle wouldn’t have been one of them but last year my roommate had brought out a 1000 piece puzzle that had been sitting in the closet for quite a long time and asked if I wanted to work on putting it together. It was of some ski resort he had visited a long time before. I’m not sure what initially motivated me to sit down at the dining room table where he had dumped out all the pieces but one day something did. By the time I just about had its border completed, I looked at the clock and saw several hours had flown by. What was the most interesting thing to me though was that for those few hours I worked on the puzzle, my only focus was on it and not my pain. Thus began my quest to do one puzzle after another, simply for the purpose of distracting my brain from constantly focusing on the areas of my body that are usually in pain.

Since then, I have completed a 2000 piece Noah’s Arc, a 1000 piece Parisian street, a 1000 piece scene from a home in Santa Fe, and most recently, a 1000 piece of Van Gogh’s Starry Night. Every one of them has been different from each other in their shapes, sizes, and colors of the pieces. The last one I just finished proved to be the most challenging of them all for three reasons. First, every piece was exactly the same size as each other. Second, the colors of this puzzle all blended in to each other. And most importantly, third, when I finally came down to the last few hours of working on it, I discovered a single piece was missing. The last thing I ever wanted to face was to have a piece be missing after having spent so many hours, days, and even months working on it. So with this having occurred, I became very angry and realized that unless I could produce the missing puzzle piece, I wasn’t going to be able to have it professionally framed like I had done with all the others. After an exhaustive search, I accepted the fact that either it was lost or missing from the start so I decided to pray on it because I didn’t know what else to do nor did I like feeling so angry about the situation. The solution that came was to go and purchase a second copy of the same puzzle and find the missing piece within it. After another hour of searching in the new puzzle box, it was found and the puzzle was completed.

The moral of all of this is that puzzles require patience, not just to put them together, but also to deal with situations like when a single piece of one goes missing out of a thousand. I never had much of this trait in my life, but working on one of these has surely helped me to develop that. It’s also helped me to develop other traits too like slowing down, being still, and becoming more aware of all of my emotions. I never really thought something as simple as a puzzle could achieve all of this, but then again, I never did give them a chance to find that out either. Either way, I’m just glad God saw better and decided to show me this.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson