Just Say NO - Train Your Brain
Hi All,
Well it has been a long week since my last post where I was officially diagnosed with the herniated disk. I am so glad to know what I am dealing with - and that I now know it is not some strange inflammation that takes years to recover from and no one can treat. That said, I am also feeling frustrated and impatient with our wonderful world of Western Medicine. In this world, you can get seriously addictive drugs at the snap of a finger to treat the symptoms, but it takes weeks (if not months) to actually determine and treat the true cause.
It will have taken me a full month to finally get an appointment with a Neurosurgeon and maybe longer to get the issue addressed and fixed. During this time, I have been prescribed everything from Steroids to Percocet - but nothing has been done to actually get me back on track with recovery... AND I AM A BLOODY PAIN IN THE ASS!!! I call my doctors daily because if I don't, it may be a week before they get to me in their pile of patients...
One word of advice to other who are beginning this process - BE YOUR OWN DOCTOR, the internet is available to us all and don't let a doctor (who doesn't really care about you) tell you about your body. Second, BE A PAIN IN THE ASS. I have found that in this world, the squeaky wheel gets the grease and I have been screaming like a worn fan belt.
Well, I also refuse to become a pain med addict, I refuse to habituate to muscle relaxers and I refuse to carrode my Kidneys and Liver dealing with the pain. So what I have I done (or am beginning to do) - train my brain.
Time to get honest - three nights ago, I realize that I was inappropriately using my muscle relaxers to get some sleep. I would take two before bed (regardless of whether or not my muscles were cramping) just for the narcotic effect. The pain didn't diminish - I just didn't care about it as much. This would ware off at about 4:00 AM anyway and I would wake up getting only 4 hrs of sleep. What did I do? I quit!
The first night was brutal - I was wide awake until about 4:30 (watched "We Were Soldiers"). I woke up again at 5:30 and felt like a zombie the rest of the day. I did allot of mediation that night but to no avail, my body (in just 3 weeks) had become habituated to the drug.
The next night I took things seriously and spent an hour mediating before bed and got to sleep at 10:30, waking at 5:30 - this was like sleeping in for me at this point and I was ecstatic. Last night I did the same, adapting a mediation technique I read about from a book by Deepak Chopra. This technique was called (or is referred to as) the So Hum Mantra Meditation. It was absolutely amazing!!! Further research today into the mantra reviled that it geared to the Spine Chackra - here is some instruction:
The traditional method from what I understand incorporates 108 repetitions of So Hum mantra in about 17 minutes of meditation practice, at a rate of about 6 1/2 breaths per minute, which is extremely relaxing both for meditation and reducing stress in the autonomic nervous system. The Hummmm... sound is intentionally somewhat longer than the Sooooo... sound, as this increases the effect of the relaxation and meditation by releasing the autonomic nervous system.
- Inhale silently with Sooooo...
- Exhale silently with Hummmm...
I slept last night for 7 hours - much longer than I have slept in the past 3 weeks with drugs. The pain I am experiencing has not decreased or abated.
The feeling of freedom from the prescription drugs is so liberating - I am so terribly excited about this new found tool to not only control pain but decrease stress, quiet my mind, get present in my life and eventually (once I am through my recover of this) adapt my meditation to my training and competing.
If you are a doctor out there - please consider the power of Eastern meditation and homeopathic ways of healing. If your a patient - please know, there are other alternatives that allow you to deal with pain/sleep/stress without the little understood but terribly powerful world of pharmacological treatments.
Note - I am still on the anti-inflammatory (non-steroidal). These really do seem to decrease the amount of constriction on the nerve, minimizing the paralysis in my triceps and the amount of radiating "fire" pain down my arm.
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