Your Pain Management Toolkit

Pain in any form can be tiring, debilitating, frustrating, anger-making and scary. Sometimes all at once. You may also feel alone and misunderstood.

This is for anyone living with ongoing pain, whatever its name ~ chronic pain, fibromyalgia, arthritis, endometriosis, hypermobility, long covid, nerve damage after surgery or pain that nobody has yet managed to label.

I live with and manage intractable pain because I have scoliosis plus an ilio-transverse pseudarthrosis (often called Bertolotti's syndrome) combined with sacroiliac issues from an out-of-line pelvis. During surgery to stabilise my sacroiliac joints the surgeon pushed a surgical screw into my L5 nerve root (you couldn't make it up). This left me disabled with secondary pain plus foot drop, neuropathy, spinal arthritis and a variety of other 'stuff'. I have other spinal issues but this is not all about me 🙄

Using the techniques that I share with clients I am able to have a full-ish life as an ambulatory wheelchair user.

What is Pain?

Pain gets sorted into two kinds. But it is not set in stone and depends on who you are speaking to 🤷

Primary pain is a condition in its own right ~ fibromyalgia is perhaps one of the best known examples. There may be no injury to point at and nothing that shows on a scan, but the pain is real and it is the illness itself, not a symptom of one.

Secondary pain comes from something else: nerve damage, arthritis, surgery, endometriosis, cancer. Mine is secondary, the result of a spine that was already awkward and a surgical screw that went where it should not have.

Neither kind is more deserving than the other and neither one hurts less. The tracker does not care which you have.

But let's get real about this ~ no amount of magical thinking will stop it.

I am not a member of the 'pain does not equal harm' club. By which I mean I have never found comfort in being told that hurting and being harmed are different things. It may be true on paper. It is no help at three in the morning, and it has never been a good enough reason to push on through, "distract yourself, Dear" or "smile more". If you know, you know.

One of the most annoying things about pain is that it fills your thoughts. If you are living with chronic pain it takes over everything you do, because you have to think about the effect something might have on you: whether you will hurt more or be unable to take part. It is hard to be spontaneous when you are hurting. An event as exciting as a shower can take an immense amount of planning.

Another difficulty is that if you do not have an obvious injury or disability, it can be hard for the people around you to understand how debilitating pain can be. And if they see you smile one day, they tend to assume all is well.

Bad Days

When pain is shouty, decisions are hard. You know there are things that help. You cannot always remember what they are, or find the energy to look.

The toolkit opens with a Wayfinder. What do you need right now? Anxious and wired, go here. Pain flaring, go here. Cannot settle, go here.

Or ignore it completely and do your own thing.

Why keep track

I live with secondary pain and know first-hand that monitoring your symptoms, moods and triggers helps maintain some semblance of control.

Patterns can emerge. You might notice a flare coming instead of being caught by it. If one arrives you can look back at what you did last time ~ what helped and what did not.

Also, if you are under the care of a doctor or a medical team, a filled-in tracker answers "how have you been since I last saw you?".

Your pain journal ~ also on your phone

Included is the link to the pain tracker web app, a browser-based tool that saves your entries, tracks your history and shows your patterns over time. It lives on your phone like an app and your data stays on your device.

Everything you write is saved on that device only, so it will not follow you to a new phone on its own.

The three buttons :

Save a backup ~ a copy of everything, kept wherever you choose.

Restore from a backup ~ puts a saved copy back into the app, on this phone or a new one.

Print or save as PDF ~ a tidy record to take to appointments.

A personal message

I do not want cost to be the thing that keeps this from someone who needs it. If you are struggling financially please get in touch. I will make it available to you free of charge. No proof is needed. We have trust.

Email me with 'toolkit' in the subject line: barb@barbaraford-hammond.com

What you receive when you buy

One zipped folder, sent as soon as you have paid, containing nine numbered pieces.

1. Start Here ~ your Wayfinder. One page that asks what you need right now and points you to the right piece. A plain list version is included for anyone who would rather not use a flow chart.

2. About Your Toolkit ~ what everything is, four ways to use it and a guide to every section of the tracker.

3. Daily Pain + Comfort Tracker ~ daily pain levels AM and PM, overall mood, energy level, sleep, self-care, stressors and triggers, coping mechanism, quality and location of pain, food and drink, medications, changes or glimmers. Print it, or duplicate it each day in GoodNotes, Notability or Xodo.

4. Pacing Tips ~ ten reminders for spending your energy well. Print it, decorate it, laminate it. Use it as a screen saver. Or make it into a paper plane.

5. Pain Soothing Mind-Loop ~ audio, 5 minutes, to soothe and settle when pain tries to win.

6. Healing Colours Meditation ~ audio, 20 minutes, an 8 minute meditation followed by soothing music.

7. Relaxing Music ~ audio, 20 minutes, a longer track to rest and restore. This one contains alpha tones, so please use headphones for the binaural effect. Everything else plays fine however you listen.

8. Your Pain Journal App ~ the web address, your passcode and how to save it to your home screen on iPhone or Android.

9. Notes ~ free writing. No rules, no headings, nothing to fill in. Do and be you.

There is also an all-in-one file with every printable together, for anyone who would rather import the lot at once into GoodNotes, Notability or Xodo.

All printables are A4 and print cleanly in black and white.

Small print that no-one reads

Nothing in this toolkit is intended to replace medical help or treatment.

If your pain is new, changing or worrying you, please speak to your doctor.

Relaxing Music track and background music by Julians Taylor, used under licence.

All other audio recorded by Barbara Ford-Hammond.