2. What am I experiencing?

In my second year of engineering, I was unfortunate enough to develop a form of chronic pain syndrome. Chronic pain is described as any pain that lasts for more than three months, as it persists for a period that is considered longer than the normal healing time. It differs to acute pain (like a cut healing, or a bruise healing) because the cause and effect of the chronic pain is a blur within your nervous system, therefore making it difficult to pinpoint the causes and also the treatment of the pains.

This chronic pain really took over my life to the point where I became incredibly restricted in terms of what I could do each day, due to the pains overtaking my ability to function normally. No matter what I do, how I move, how much I DON’T move; the pains would come onto me. It changed every day too – sometimes I felt excruciating pain in my hips, lower back, or mid back, while sometimes it stretched to my shoulders and neck along with extreme migraines. It would often be a combination of these too, preventing me from standing or sitting up for even 10 minutes at a time. They unfortunately did not subside either if I sat down or even if I lay down and rested. I couldn’t sit up long enough to ride even the one-hour bus ride into uni, hence I couldn’t go to lectures, I couldn’t sit up and study, I couldn’t sleep because of the pains, I couldn’t enjoy my previously-thriving social life, I couldn’t walk, I couldn’t stand; I essentially could not do much without feeling some sort of those pains. Normal pain killers wouldn’t help because they only target pain at where you feel it, but my type of pain was different to this. And on the scale of 1 to 10 when my pain was at least a 9 every day, there was nothing that I could do to subside the pain.

This may all sound like I’m complaining, but this is just purely me explaining to you what my story is. This is all a crucial part of what I am experiencing at THIS point in time.

With me being so physically, mentally and psychologically limited by my chronic pain, it was no wonder that I began experiencing the typical negative thoughts that are related with depression. With my physical condition restrciting me in so many ways, I felt not only hopeless, helpless, useless and frustrated, but also sad, angry and disappointed in myself. And being a 20-year old where having such complicated health issues are rare, I felt so alone, felt like no one could understand me, and felt so different to others. I kept comparing myself to my peers and felt disappointed and frustrated at how underachieving I felt compared to them.

Later on down the line, I found out that it is actually quite common for people with chronic pain syndromes, especially the condition that I have, to develop mental health issues such as depression and anxiety. It would have actually been even more unusual for these people to NOT have suffered depression along the way, with all the emotions and thoughts that come with suffering this form of pain.

But the most important thing was that I did not even know at all that I was going through this thing called depression throughout my second and third years of university. Although I was quite aware of what depression was (initially from reading the book “I Had a Black Dog: His Name Was Depression” when I was very young), it was just a far away concept for me, nor something that I ever thought I would experience myself. I visualised depression as a label by itself, as the most extreme end point in the scale of sadness. Therefore whenever I was feeling sad or down, or frustrated and helpless, it never even crossed my mind that I was in fact going through depression.

This situation changed when I visited the university health counsellor, one week before university started this year. (Details to come in another post.)

Therefore to directly answer this post’s question “What am I experiencing”, I answer with saying that I am currently going through chronic depression and anxiety (a post will be dedicated to this, later down the week), which stemmed from my chronic pain condition.

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