Most People Don't Understand How Pain Affects A Person

Job 16:1-2, “Then Job answered and said, I have heard many such things: miserable comforters are ye all.”

Most people haven't a clue how chronic pain adversely affects a person. I was severely rear-ended by a church bus in 1992. My neck felt like an iron rod was shoved down my spine. I was sent to the hospital. X-rays showed that nothing was broken, but they didn't notice that my neck was crooked. The severe accident permanently misaligned my neck, a condition called Reverse Cervical Curve. This abnormal alignment places undue pressure upon the cervical and thorax area of the spine, which causes the disks at C5-C6-C7 to slip out of place and protrude in 2004. My condition worsened so that by 2009 I required neck surgery. I underwent the same surgery in 2010 to correct deficiencies from the first surgery. Unfortunately, the second surgery made me much worse, leaving my upper body afflicted with burning nerves.

Since February of 2004, my life has been adversely affected by constant agonizing neck pain, neck stiffness that never goes away, and the entire right side of my body feeling half asleep continually. Since my second neck surgery that didn't go well, I have also suffered from constant burning nerves throughout my upper body, and both arms feeling inflated with air all the time. To say the least, I am miserable all the time in physical pain and discomfort.

I have tried my best over the decades to kindly explain to people how my pain adversely affects me, but they just don't understand. Very few people, unless they are suffering them self, or have a close loved one who has suffered horribly in constant agonizing pain and afflictions, can know what I suffer through. I never feel like going anywhere. I don't want to do anything. I don't feel like playing my musical instruments. I don't feel like talking to anyone. I don't want to talk to anyone on the telephone. I let my voicemail filter all oncoming calls 100% of the time. This is my miserable life.

That being said, I am grateful to God for what remaining health I do have. I am overall healthy, other than my permanent neck injury since 1992, and Type II diabetes which my doctor has kept under control for the past couple years (my A1C is holding steady at 5.7%; it was 10.8% in 2023). I take a 15 mg weekly injection of Mounjaro which has helped me very much. It is a remarkable medication.

That all being said, I live in a lonely world of constant neck pain, burning nerves, and related bodily afflictions. Although these ailments became “the new norm” a long time ago, they cease to suppress my ambition. I don't want to go anywhere or do anything, including going to church. As much as I'd like to live a normal life again, I cannot. These are the cards in life that I have been dealt.

Ecclesiastes 9:11, “I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.” I was in the right place at the wrong time in 1992 when I got hit by that church bus. And then in 2005, I fell 15 feet down conveyor slide at work which worsened my neck injury. And then in 2010, my second neck surgery made things even worse. Time and chance happens to everyone. Like Proverbs 27:1 says, we don't know what another day may bring.

Permanent pain changes one's life permanently.