But for the grace of...
Oct. 11th, 2009 11:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pjthompsonI spent yesterday with a friend who's on the skids. Today, I want to curl up in a ball and dream about my Happy Place. My friend isn't that old, but she's living the life of a crippled up senior citizen and so drugged out on pain medicine that when the roommate saw her she wondered if she'd had a stroke. She asked me if that was the case when I got home last night.
It shreds me. This was an incredibly vibrant woman, yet I'm realizing how much of that was a facade. She had a horribly painful childhood, she was always the rock her siblings depended on to get through—and in many ways, the mother they never all the way through their adulthoods. They never gave her a break, always leaning and hanging on. It got to be too much for her, overwhelming, because, in fact, she really wasn't as strong as they all thought. Kind of fragile, really, when she wasn't channeling "rockness." Beneath that diamond-like facade, she'd been splintering for years.
She has real, underlying physical problems, but this full collapse and retreat into drugs, I think, is more about pushing the rest of the grasping world away. She's angry at her limitations, but there's almost a sense of relief that no one is calling her and asking her for advice or leaning on her. One by one, the people in her life who only wanted to lean have drifted away, so she's increasingly isolated—and baffled that so few of her old "friends" call or come around.
She has real pain, and I don't mean for a moment to diminish that, and I know the medical profession can have their heads up their butts, but no one can find a physical cause large enough to explain the hugeness of her pain. She's been to specialist after specialist, had every test imaginable, but nothing explains the kind of pain she reports. Except maybe the pain of her experience. She admitted to me yesterday that she'd never dealt with some of it, never gotten over things that happened decades ago. So she returns again and again to this quack of a pain doctor who all her remaining friends and family, her other doctors, consider incompetent. But he's the man with the drugs. He's the man who makes the world go away.
You can think yourself sick, you can make of yourself an invalid. It's very, very easy. Take some real pain, mostly internal, and let it come to dominate your life. You can use it as a shield against the things you don't really want to face.
She has finally agreed to see a psycho-therapist. That's the one inkling of light I can see in the darkness surrounding her.
It shreds me. This was an incredibly vibrant woman, yet I'm realizing how much of that was a facade. She had a horribly painful childhood, she was always the rock her siblings depended on to get through—and in many ways, the mother they never all the way through their adulthoods. They never gave her a break, always leaning and hanging on. It got to be too much for her, overwhelming, because, in fact, she really wasn't as strong as they all thought. Kind of fragile, really, when she wasn't channeling "rockness." Beneath that diamond-like facade, she'd been splintering for years.
She has real, underlying physical problems, but this full collapse and retreat into drugs, I think, is more about pushing the rest of the grasping world away. She's angry at her limitations, but there's almost a sense of relief that no one is calling her and asking her for advice or leaning on her. One by one, the people in her life who only wanted to lean have drifted away, so she's increasingly isolated—and baffled that so few of her old "friends" call or come around.
She has real pain, and I don't mean for a moment to diminish that, and I know the medical profession can have their heads up their butts, but no one can find a physical cause large enough to explain the hugeness of her pain. She's been to specialist after specialist, had every test imaginable, but nothing explains the kind of pain she reports. Except maybe the pain of her experience. She admitted to me yesterday that she'd never dealt with some of it, never gotten over things that happened decades ago. So she returns again and again to this quack of a pain doctor who all her remaining friends and family, her other doctors, consider incompetent. But he's the man with the drugs. He's the man who makes the world go away.
You can think yourself sick, you can make of yourself an invalid. It's very, very easy. Take some real pain, mostly internal, and let it come to dominate your life. You can use it as a shield against the things you don't really want to face.
She has finally agreed to see a psycho-therapist. That's the one inkling of light I can see in the darkness surrounding her.
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Date: 2009-10-11 07:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-11 11:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-11 08:06 pm (UTC)I hope she makes it through this.
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Date: 2009-10-11 11:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-11 09:00 pm (UTC)On another note, that email I sent you. I wonder if it would help your friend? Since no cause has been found and the pain is very real to her, perhaps there is something that might help? I hope so. No one deserves what she is going through. It just isn't fair on any level.
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Date: 2009-10-11 11:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-11 09:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-11 11:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-12 12:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-12 01:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-12 02:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-12 04:14 pm (UTC)