Chronic Pain - Dealing with the Guilt

Hello, and welcome to this episode of The Ankylosing Spondylitis Podcast, I wanted to take care of a couple housekeeping items. First and foremost, I got a download the other day from the 91st country to have at least one download take place. And that was a download, a single one that came out of Iraq. So to whoever did that, I hope you enjoy the show. Welcome. I hope you download a bunch more to listen to and are able to interact through the spondypodcast.com website. Let me know who you are and if there's anything I can do to try and answer any questions, I look forward to interacting with all the listeners across all 91 different countries where downloads have coming from. That just blows my mind. It's just such an amazing thing to think of that we're all connected by this one thing called Ankylosing Spondylitis.

And with that I had a review come in and I wanted to touch base on this and read it because it's also going to delve into something to do with the topic today. The person wrote “Finally a diagnosis. Thank you for your podcasts. Yesterday I was diagnosed with AS. It only took them nine and a half years. I’m practically bedridden at this point is advanced so far. Can it get better?” From Gigi Goodwitch in the United States, GG, go to spondypodcast.com and reach out and let me know if it starts to get better for you. My answer to that is, you know, can it get better, maybe maybe with the having the diagnosis, you can finally get the medications that you need to help alleviate the pain, the inflammation and bring you some benefit and no longer be bedridden. So again, I really hope that you reach out through the website spondypodcast.com so that I can get an update and know how you're doing and then for anybody listening, I've seen the numbers going up again and it's fantastic. Go out to spondypodcast.com, sign up for the newsletter, and I'll be sending one out here in the next few weeks. And I've got some special items coming up, we're going to do something a little bit different with listeners from few different countries to bring you an episode that I think will be really unique.

But on with today's show, well, when I looked at the websites, because I like to read a lot of the posts that get done on the various forums on Facebook, and one of the things that I saw discussed over and over recently, is something that I can really understand and empathize with. And that's with all of us having chronic pain, how do we deal with the burden of guilt? And I had come across an article from a website called despite Pain(despitepain.com) that I had been wanting to work into a show, and you'll find a link to the website in the show notes but the website is Chronic Pain. How can we overcome the burden of guilt? This was done back in December of 2018. Again, from the website despite pain, it was pretty interesting because I really can understand this, you know, the guilt of why me the guilt of, I can't do what I want to do. I can't run around with my friends the way I want to run around with them or my kids or my spouse. All of these things about why am I the one dealing with this? And I can tell you, that's something that I dealt with for a long time, especially pre Internet days. I was diagnosed a long time ago, 36 plus years ago, and there was no Internet, there was no way to connect with other people that had Ankylosing Spondylitis. I was just given this diagnosis. I was 14 years old, kind of put out there. You know, good luck. And it really changed a lot of the trajectory of where I had envisioned my life as a young man going and what I ended up doing, it's completely changed everything. And now, with going on disability, it's brought me to the ability to do this show and connect with so many people, but back to guilt. You know, we struggle with the pain. We all have different levels and different styles of pain. And we struggle with the stress that that pain brings about, and...