How often do we hear that Twitter, Facebook et al are a scourge of today’s society, a cesspit of spite and vitriol? I’d need a hundred hands even to be able to start counting the times. And sure, you don’t have to peel back any layers to find poison-filled, aggressive, trollshit swirling around. You only…
Category: health/chronic pain
A New Kind of Normal
There is a storm brewing. I can feel it in my face – the way my eye burns, a vice tightens on my skull, and one hundred knives fresh off the whetstone slice at my gums. Just for starters. To everyone else in my family, the sky looks perfectly innocent. Perhaps the breeze has a…
Dear Healthy Person…
Dear Healthy Person, Congratulations. You won in the lucky jackpot of healthy genes. You are twenty of me. I think I lost my ticket. I am a twentieth of the old me. You can work, eight hours a day, five days a week. Maybe more. I used to work eight to ten hours a day.…
Ten Ways to Understanding
A constant claim from many people with chronic pain conditions is that nobody can understand the pain unless they have experienced it themselves. On a superficial level this is obviously true, at least in that people who don’t have chronic pain conditions, have not felt what it is like to have chronic pain. But I…
Who Needs Matching Pairs?
Spring is flourishing here in New Zealand. The days are warm, the skies are blue, the birds have plenty to say for themselves and our feijoa trees are full with red promises of the fruit to come. Some days though, the weather likes to remind us that the season isn’t all sunshine and glamour. This…
Sunhats and Selfhelp: pain management
On a hot, wind-still, summer evening, the park by the river is the perfect place to be. When you are only just two, this perfection poses a few dilemmas. Climbing and running and jumping, your very favourite things to do, make your shoes and sunhat fall off, and somehow turn the hat inside out. And…
Ten Minutes in the Monkey Forest
Beside a small gravel carpark next to State Highway 1 on the Kapiti Coast in New Zealand, huddled in a small v between the shoulders of two hills, is a remnant of ancient kohekohe forest and sub-tropical bush. It is crammed with palms, vines, and ferns. Most people in the area know it as Nikau…
Pretty Lights
Public buildings, hotels, office buildings etc. in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Cyprus, England, Estonia, Ireland, Mexico, New Zealand, Qatar, Scotland, Taiwan, and the USA are lighting up for October 7th. To most people, the date means nothing. Yet it’s a significant day to thousands of people around the globe. International Trigeminal Neuralgia Awareness Day.
How to Measure Pain
If only pain were as easy to measure as, say, volume. As height, or weight, or speed. Medical professionals try to quantify it. How bad is your pain on a 1 to 10 scale, with 10 being the worst pain you can imagine? Most health professionals I have come across also add ‘childbirth counts as…
Verve 