The Common Pain

One of my earliest memories as a child was dropping a 20 lb. weight on my right ring finger. It knocked the top of the fleshy part of the finger off and I had to have stitches. It could have been worse and wasn't. I healed. A year or so after that, I tried to flip on a swing and cracked the top two vertebrae of my spine. It hurt. I did not receive medical treatment. I just kept my neck still and didn't move it. It still gets stiff and achy, but it doesn't cause me constant pain.

Actually, none of the injuries of my childhood cause me pain or problems anymore. Back then, like most kids, I got hurt and healed. Some kids didn't, of course, but for most of us, healing was something we took for granted.

These days? Well, as someone in her 40s, I heal when I get injured, but never completely. I keep re-injuring my shoulders. They never seem to stop aching. My lower back has been hurting since I fell when I was 22 and my elbows (also injured during falls) will sometimes calm down, but often do not. I mean, I can move them right now. I can move all of it. But it isn't easy.

This isn't unique to me of course. Basically, every adult I know is in pain. I know people who spend whole evenings with heating pads, slather pain cream on themselves, or spend hours in the bath just to either loosen things up or keep things from swelling.

This isn't just the unhealthy adults either. Even the most healthy people I know, people who run Iron Man stuff, are in pain most of the time. For many of us, it seems to never go away, just subside a little from time to time?

What the hell is this? Is it something in our diets? I might believe that, but I know a lot of people who eat in a lot of different ways and even then they're in pain. And again, you can't exactly say it's just lifestyle because I know people who are everything from people who sit on their asses all day to people who are in as good a shape as a human can be. They are STILL in pain.

No wonder we have a drug crisis in this country. People are trying to just not hurt all the time. Something needs to be done about this.