A-Z promising quotes: Pain

Oh, please. MSers know a little something about pain. Living with multiple sclerosis, we experience achy pain, emotional pain, fatigue pain, injury pain, mental pain, migraine pain, muscle pain, nerve pain, sharp pain, spasticity pain, tingly pain, and whatever sorts of pain anyone might imagine.

That doesn’t include the pain from injections and various neurological diagnostic procedures (such as evoked potentials testing, up-close neuro-eye examinations and the ever-dreaded lumbar puncture).

We get it, when it comes to pain – like anyone battling a chronic medical condition.

Maybe that’s why these lines from British Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) rings so true.

We look before and after

And pine for what is not.

Our sincerest laughter

With some pain is fraught.

Our sweetest songs are those

That tell of saddest thought.

Shelley was well acquainted with pain. He lost at least two loved ones to suicide and wrestled personally with depression. In fact, some sources seem to indicate his drowning death at sea may not have been an accident. Shelley understood darkness and sorrow and suffering.

Here’s an odd truth about pain.

Those who grow most familiar to it often seem to find ways to learn from the trouble. Long-term suffering, such as that which comes from chronic pain, tends to make us either bitter or better. We can ripen or rot. We may grow wiser or simply wizened.

Not sure where the threshold is, but I seriously want to grow bolder through brokenness, deeper in deficiencies, and powerful through pain. I wanna pray stronger, carry firmer faith, and stand steadier – especially in the stretches when MS makes me unsteady and uncomfortable.

Hey, is pain is somewhat inevitable with a condition like MS, why waste it?

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