Listening to My Scars: A Journey to Pain Relief. Who Knew?

I decided to actually see an osteopath when the pain in my left hip started to change who I was and the way I behaved. When the ghosts of my beloved grandmother rolling over in bed from the pain in her bones chased me towards doctors and X-rays, when the answers were that all is well but the pain continued to accompany my every movement, I figured I had nothing to lose.

The osteopath spent half an hour asking me questions, investigating my pain: the way it felt, how long it had been with me (I could actually not remember ever being without it, I realized). The discussion took me back, way back, to my high school years when I spent hours sitting on a wooden chair in classroom with no heating, in cold Romanian winters. To my carrying bags of books on my back, to my cesarean section surgery almost 18 years ago. I could not see the connection but a doctor was asking and so I obliged.

When she started to examine me in order to see how the pain is manifesting in my movements, she noticed another scar on my abdomen. One surgery I had not mentioned because it had happened before I was 10 and I did not think it was relevant. She smiled a smile that told me nicely, “Will you just let me decide what is relevant and what is not?” The osteopath explained that when we undergo surgeries the doctor cuts through many layers of skin, fat, tissues, organs and when the stitching time comes, things often don’t get put together as smoothly as they had once been. She asked me if my scars ever bothered me and I vaguely remembered that they did but I was too young to remember one of them and a brand new mother to care about the other.

I could not remember much about the scar I had not mentioned. I was too young. All I remember was my brothers and I playing, one of them hitting me, pain, doctors and one of them feeling my stomach and telling my parents I am lying, that it cannot hurt that bad. I remember being in bed at home, in a hospital bed and then helped to walk again. Fragments of scary.

She then asked about the scar from my cesarean section. Almost two decades ago came running, to tell the story of feeling the most scared I had felt in my life, the most alone, the most cut off from reality. It reminded me of a night spent calling out to nurses who did not hear, of going to a lonely home with a newborn who was totally dependent on my while I could not move properly from so much pain and a brain that had decided that was the best time for a breakdown. I remember pain I ignored because my son needed bathing, feeding, cleaning, walking. More fragments of scary.

She explained that they body continuously strives to get back to some sort of a balance and so when it encounters a problem in one place it compensates by overworking in another (hmm, that sounds vaguely familiar … ). That is, until it cannot any longer and then pain or other symptoms alert us to the fact that we actually also have a body to care for.

She spent the next ten minutes paying attention to my scars, finding the rough patches in them , pushing through a pain that was actually still there (on the other side of my body from the hip and leg that were hurting). The pain when she started pushing on those points was almost unbearable. And we sat together through it, we did not let go, we refused to look away from it this time. Minutes into it, the pain started to subside and what was even more amazing was that it started to make a difference to my movements on my left leg. Long story short, I walked out without any pain in my body, probably for the first time in at least twenty years. It has now been over two days and I still cannot believe it (and if I am honest, I am still waiting for the pain to return).

The metaphor of this for that idea that the body always keeps the score is not lost on me. I realized once more that wisdom, reactions and emotions actually are stored in the body and that we either pay attention or we don’t and each of these scenarios change us. As I have been walking around without pain, I find myself still limping at times because the brain tells the body what to do, and the brain seldom actually knows. So now it has not caught up with the news just yet.

I have to remind myself at every step that I am free. In more ways than one, but free from physical pain now. I have to remind myself that it is ok to walk as if I am not one hundred years old and my bones will break, because I am in fact under fifty and my bones are fine. I have to take the leap and believe that the next time my body says something to me, I will hear it in my bones and not my brain and that I will listen.

Photo by Alexander Krivitskiy on Unsplash