Day 17: Give me meds

3am. I bleary eyed the clock on the headboard of my bed.  The stubborn 80s red digits glared back at me a they often do on nights like this.  Three extra bodies nuzzled into me,  moaning and crying.  

"Let's just turn on a show" I said to them.

We were at that point in sickness that was too uncomfortable for sleep.  

I stumble for the remote and flick on Octonauts. 

I turn back inwards.  I had weird cramping in my abdomen, my bones hurt, my fever seemed better.  If I could get sleep,  I'd be on the mend. But sleep seemed a little unlikely at best. 

Should I take something?

I debated myself for a moment then unglued my three year old and hobbled to the bathroom where I fished for Tylenol by nightlight.

Later this evening I saw the bottle on the counter and started thinking about what a marvel modern medicine is. I thought about people who underwent amputation with nothing but a bottle of gin and a leather rope to bite on. I am so grateful not to live in those times.  

But I also began to think about pain the way I thought about convenience. It it's another huge message that marketing sells us over and over.  We deserve to be comfortable. Life should be pain-free. But yet,  there are times when modern medicine fails us and we find ourselves living in pain bitter that the bag of lies they sell seems to apply to everyone else but not us. Chronic pain is so difficult for people who live in a world where pain is so often and so easily solved and yet so out of reach for them.  

On the other hand... pain-free easily shifts to a desire to be discomfort free. What number on the pain scale do I draw the line and say,  this hurts bad enough that I should take something for it. 

Pain and discomfort are not things to seek out,  but they can be gifts to us. I remember feeling like I could survive anything after having my first baby.  I felt my soul deepened and my courage strengthened.  I could walk into the fire because I had been there before. 

There have been seasons when my autoimmune disease flared and I felt full body arthritis.  Every. Joint.  Hurt. I didn't realize I had so many joints. And day after day is trying to solve it I began to absolve myself to pain as part of my life, and while at first I felt betrayed by a world that displayed a solution to pain on a shiny silver platter in a store window,  I began to see past that.  I looked around to see how many other people lived with pain and felt a deep compassion for them and I found ways to set pain on a shelf for a moment to be there for my kids. In learning how to set pain aside for moments I developed a new relationship with my body. One where I don't always have to live based on how I feel.  And that felt powerful.

If ibuprofen fixes it.  I'm on board with fixing it. But I do not discount some of the deeper growth that comes from being uncomfortable or even from suffering.  While it is not the road I would choose,  I cannot deny that pain has taught me things nothing else can and has given me a compassion for other that nothing else could. Pain is a part of the human condition.  And so inevitably a post about ibuprofen was bound to happen one of these days.