Seeing Purple — On My First Experience With Pain Management
When avoidance just isn’t going to cut it.
In the “topics you never expect to be talking about” department, I’m currently dealing with a random urinary tract infection. If you’ve never had this (and I’m speaking from the male perspective here, but I’ve heard it’s similar), imagine that every time you have to pee, it feels like you’re trying to push a fire hose worth of liquid through a coffee stirrer worth of “tubing” and that it burns like you cotton swabbed the insides of your most intimate body parts with the worst hot sauce you’ve ever dared to try. Yeah, that.
This sets up a weird situation: every time I have to pee, I have to face the dread of knowing that it will, without a doubt, hurt in ways I’m not used to feeling — let alone, every time I have to pee, which as I’m currently drinking 2 gallons of water a day for my fitness training happens to be, um, all the time.
Hence, I’m learning a lot about pain management.
The Color Purple
I have no idea why I picked purple. I had heard that sometimes, when working through pain, it benefits one to think of a color. So, as I stood there, hissing and trying to breath through the first and worst part of the pain of peeing with this stupid infection, I decided I would think of… purple.
Oddly, immediately, I found myself “tying” the sensation of intense burning to “purple.” This is… purple. (Maybe because “pain” and “purple” are plosives. puh puh).
And, almost magically, it’s not that it hurt any less (c’mon, let’s not kid anyone here). But instead, it was like the pain had a “place” inside me. It had a seat at my table. (Believe me, I wish it would get up and leave, but that’s on the other side of a few days of antibiotics, and some pure cranberry juice — not the delicious cocktail kind.)
Find the Bridge
Jacq and I are both fascinated by mental toughness and pushing through. We both push for one more rep at the gym, and we do the work that the coach has given us (she does it far more faithfully than me), and that makes us no stranger to working through pain and soreness (two vastly different experiences).
What I learned from this experience, of dealing with the pain I’m feeling at least eight to twelve times a day, is that pain “works” better when I give it a bridge from the raw and unexpected into the welcome and mentally accounted for experience that I’ve tried to make it. (Let me just side-note this to say that “welcome” was a really difficult word to put down. But it was a choice. I have welcomed this pain that will visit me for the next little while, insofar as I know it’s coming no matter what, and I might as well accept that it’s my body’s way of communicating something important to me.)
Believe me, I know that a urinary tract infection is nothing on the scale of several chronic pain sufferers. I have no comprehension of what some of you might have dealt with. The only lingering pain I’ve ever dealt with is recurring lower back pain, which is often far more in the “throbby” and “sore” category and nothing like, say, a burn victim’s suffering. But I wrote this to share what I’d learned, in case it might be helpful to people looking to bridge some of their efforts.
Would love to hear your take on this.
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Chris Brogan is publisher of Owner magazine, a business magazine dedicated to growing your capabilities and connections.
