Your First Steps to Healing

After you’re hurt, you need to heal.  Depending on how you got hurt can often alter how you start that healing.  Sometimes, there’s such a denial of the initial pain or suffering that you delay getting the proper care; that’s not good.  One of the worst things that can happen is for your initial care to take forever because they don’t believe you, or don’t know what’s wrong, or you don’t have money so you don’t seek out treatment.  Then you have cases that offer you an enormous amount of care up front, but then it seems to fade away.  The journey to healing can take several twists and turns.  I know for me, I was put on the “bad-back bus”.  There’s a lot of buses our there, headache, backaches, jaw pain, different cancers each have their own buses, the cardiac bus, and the list goes on.  Right when you need to be looked at as an individual, you get stamped with a number and put into a queue.  I know it can be tough, having to try this medication, that physical therapy, or have this surgery; all without feeling better. 

So, you’ve just come into an injury or illness and you need to be treated.  You’re dealing with doctors, and possibly pharmacies, physical therapists, radiology, maybe other offices in the hospital, then there’s insurance companies, maybe lawyers, and even your job.  All in all, you need to be cared for, but you’re sent all over and have to deal with all this craziness.  Certainly far from the day ol’ doc would come to the house and offer some help and tell you to convalesce; unless of course you need to be bled out a little, so maybe newer medicine isn’t all bad.  If I can offer any help at all, I ask you to do three things:

1. Don’t go through this alone.  If you don’t have an immediate family member, find someone that can be your anam cara (soul friend),  You need someone you can be totally honest with, then you must be totally honest with them.
2. Keep two detailed books, one needs to be a calendar with all your appointments, pharmacy visits, physical therapy, etc..  The other, although it might be the same one if you have enough room, needs to be a journal of sorts.  Trust me when I tell you that you will not remember what worked when.  Keeping a journal of your pain, suffering, and sleep, as well as medication, intake, and activity will help your healing greatly.
3. Make peace with God and others.  God may allow this to have happened, but that doesn’t mean he wants you to be miserable.  All things happen for a reason, “I know the plans I have for you, plans to prosper you, not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”  You also can’t spend time angry at others.

How about you? Have you found something that made those early days more bearable?  Did you feel like you were treated well in the beginning or was it an uphill battle?  What would you say to someone who just entered the pain realm?

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