Free Pass

I’ve been feeling crappy. My daughter has been sick and I think I might have caught her bug. But still, I dragged myself out the other day and visited my new chiropractor. I told him I felt sick with a headache, body aches and that my youngest was sick with a bad cold. He said it was the perfect time to visit him! Huh? He is really good at explaining stuff to me. It may be because I am new and I gave him the heads up I was a bit sceptical. I have some serious hardware in my spine so I was nervous and expressed my reservations. But he has been very open and descriptive. He explained to me that when your nervous system is not firing at its optimum, it is hard for your immune system to do what it needs to do (heal!). Your body has an innate capacity to heal itself but for this to happen, the message channels in your central nervous system need to be working properly. Another interesting thing he told me was that your body puts a specific amount of energy into healing. This may cover my day to day aches associated with my chronic back pain. But when inflammation, viruses or other sickness attack, this innate healing needs to be diverted to the “emergency” situation. There is no leftover energy for masking any ongoing pain. So it made sense that I had a bug and I had a pain flare at the same time. I really wanted to just check out and give my body the time to heal itself. I needed to rest. It reminded me of something....

When my daughter was younger we were often trialling new bedtime routines (Ummm, she is nearly 7 and we still haven’t found one that works!). She has always been a night owl and never seems tired when it is bedtime. So for a while there, we would read her a story, do the teeth, toilet and all that stuff, tuck her in and say goodnight...then we gave her this strict rule. If there was some very necessary (borderline emergency) reason then she could come out and talk to us. We called this a free pass. Then she was supposed to stay in her bedroom after that and go to sleep. Anyway, it worked for a while....

So it comes back to how I was feeling yesterday, in pain and on verge of tears. This situation could have become worse if I had have let my thoughts get out of control, continue with blame and guilt and feeling bad about myself. But I took myself out for a walk and cleared my head. On my walk, I recalled the “free pass” rule. There will be days when I don’t feel crash hot. That’s true for everyone whether you have chronic pain or not. So I decided it would be OK to allow myself a free pass every now and then. I needed to just breathe, ditch the stress, give in to the need to re-charge. So, I gave myself a free pass. I had a PJ day, complete with nana nap and movie!

Obviously free passes are for borderline emergency purposes....so not to be used too often. My body was telling me something and I had to listen. I also acknowledged that after this “free pass” I need to still be committed to returning to my self pain management routines….but that’s tomorrow.