A Harder Life is a Better Life
Bill is a middle-aged man from Northern British Columbia. He lived with debilitating chronic pain for 15 years, and in the past year, he has found himself in a place where he feels like he is “living life again.” Through the Construction Industry Rehabilitation Plan (CIRP), Bill attended a treatment centre for 3 months and quit drinking alcohol. Bill sees quitting drinking as the catalyst for the change he has experienced in the past year. After attending the treatment centre, he was able to access a pain clinic through CIRP. He found benefit in the therapeutic yoga, dry needling, and regular exercise that this clinic offered. As I tell you more about Bill’s story, you will see how he roots his current experience of doing better in his daily choice to do the things that are harder to do.
Working Hard and Playing Hard
Before Bill lived with chronic pain, he worked hard and was quite active. The expression “work hard, play hard” captures his early life well. He has always worked in camps, and as Bill put it, “There was always big money involved, so we were always doing stupid shit.” Bill has been run over by a car twice, he has been in eight “vehicle totals,” and he has broken both his leg and his ankle. He has had a total of 243 stitches from the various surgeries and accidents he has had over the years. Despite his history of getting hurt, Bill’s life was not negatively impacted by chronic pain until he was badly injured at work around 15 years ago. In this accident, Bill broke and dislocated his shoulder and had a complete rotator cuff tear. It was after this bad injury that opioids came into the picture for Bill.
Stuck in a Vicious Cycle
For the 15 years that Bill was struggling with chronic pain, he describes himself has having been in a vicious cycle with alcohol and opioids. When he was stuck in this cycle, he could see how the substances were making things worse, but they also made life liveable. Bill would use opioids when he needed to go out and get something done, but then he would end up in more pain as a result of doing too much and then feel like he needed to take more opioids to manage that increase in pain. The way this cycle played out left Bill wanting to do nothing but sit on his couch because doing nothing was a way to avoid being in pain. But those circumstances kept leading Bill back to the substances so he could go out and live.
Bill found alcohol to be much more effective for the pain than opioids. He told me that the “only thing that I found that works for the pain is alcohol.” He continued: “I tried dilaudid, morphine, eh, Percocet, oxycodone—none of that stuff helps with the pain. It hides it. Alcohol eliminates it.” So, Bill would come home sore from a physically demanding day at work and drink to manage the pain. Being under the influence of alcohol would then limit what Bill was able to do in the evenings, but perhaps the most significant impact of drinking alcohol was that it led to Bill repeatedly getting hurt. When he was drinking, he made choices that resulted in him having new injuries to recover from.
A Mindset of Fuck It
For the 15 years that Bill was stuck in these vicious cycles, he describes himself as having a mindset of “fuck it”; he just didn’t care. He gave the example of thinking nothing of going to a wedding and leaving after half an hour. He felt done. He didn’t care. He just wanted to go home and sit on the couch. It was like he always felt a gravitational pull to his couch. Again, sitting on the couch and doing nothing was a way to avoid pain, and Bill did a lot of nothing. Sometimes he would stay home for three to four days a week and do nothing. He was isolated and disconnected, and he just did not care.
Breaking the Cycle
Quitting drinking was the thing that broke Bill out of this vicious cycle. To access the CIRP treatment program that supported him in quitting drinking and managing pain, he had to leave his life in Northern British Columbia and go to Vancouver, Canada for 3 months. He felt like the CIRP treatment program taught you how to deal with life without alcohol. But when he quit drinking, he was left with the pain and without the one the one thing that helped. Bill needed better tools. As he put it, “When I quit drinking, it was, uh oh, right, now you gotta fix it.” Through CIRP’s pain clinic, Bill began to find tools that helped without making things worse in the long run. He found the dry needling done through the program helpful, but it is the therapeutic yoga and regular exercise habit that are currently maintaining his “very, very low” pain levels now.
Living Life Again
Bill finds himself now in a place where he feels like he is living life again. When I asked him what it means to be living life again, the first thing he said was, “I can put my socks on.” He went on to talk more about being able to get out and do things without having to be drunk to do it. The things he can do now include tasks like cutting the lawn and enjoyable activities like fishing, camping, and swimming. He told me that before getting hurt he was family-oriented and that doing better has allowed him to return to that way of life. When he was struggling and in the “fuck it” mindset, how he lived his life did not reflect what mattered to him and what he cared about. He spoke with regret about times he didn’t show up for things like birthday parties with his kids. He is now in a place where he is doing more of what is important to him and spending time with people that are the most important to him. Bill spoke of prioritizing spending time with his 14-year-old daughter—and of being able to do more active things with her. His parents are 90 and 92 years old, and he has been able to play a more active support role in their lives. There has been a shift from the mindset of not caring to an active practice of caring. Part of what doing better means to Bill is living his life in a way that aligns with what he cares about.
Easy is Not Going to Work
Bill made it very clear to me that what he is doing now is “technically harder” than what he was doing before. Maintaining his low pain levels and active lifestyle requires consistent effort. It takes him about an hour of yoga, stretching, and meditation per day to be able to do everything that he does. He told me, “If I went a week without doing what I do, I’d probably barely be able to get off the couch and all the pain would start again.” He used to stay home doing nothing for days on end, and now he makes a point of getting out of the house every day. He actively tries to avoid falling into depression because he sees the way that could derail his progress. Over and over again, Bill emphasized the importance of mindset and focusing on what you can do. He emphasized that it “would be easier for me to fall back into the cycle than what I am doing now.” It was a lot of effort for him to address the pain, and he says it was easier to cover it up with drugs and alcohol. Although the idea that easier is better seems to intuitively make sense, Bill maintains that this harder life is a much better life.
A Recent Example
Bill and I spoke on a Monday morning, and he shared with me that just that weekend, he had worked a hard day on Saturday and found himself in pain on Sunday. He had been on the couch for four hours on Sunday morning, when suddenly he remembered—he could do some yoga and feel better. So, he got up, did 30-45 minutes of yoga, and then went and cut the grass, but he assured me that staying on the couch and watching television all day would have been easier. It is easier not to do the things that help, it is easier to sit on the couch, and it is easier to say, “Fuck it.” When I asked him about what helped him to get off the couch, he brought up the importance of mindset again, but he also emphasized what he referred to as the reality of the situation. He told me he thought, “Why the hell are you sitting inside when you can do this for a little while and feel better?” The reality was that he could do some yoga and completely change his day. He continued, “Because if I don’t do that, well, then I will sit on the couch and feel sorry for myself. And what good is that, right?”
A Person’s Gotta Do the Work
Bill has a friend who was eligible for the CIRP program, and even with Bill’s success, it took him 7 months to convince his friend to do the program. His friend eventually went, and within an hour of his friend’s first treatment, he called Bill and said to him, “Holy shit—this works!” Bill watches the people around him “drink and smoke dope and do opiates” to manage life with ongoing pain. Based on what he sees, Bill strongly asserts that “the stuff I went through to deal with the pain, most people will never do.” Witnessing people around him choose the easy path with pain is something that motivates Bill to continue doing what is harder. He can see the place he was at in the people around him, and he knows he does not want to go back there.
Decide What is Important in Your Life
When Bill reflects on what advice he would give to his former self, the answer is clear: quit drinking. For him, that was a clear turning point. When he reflects on what advice he would give to others, it centres around the importance of putting in the mental and physical effort to stay better. He told me: “If a person doesn’t want to step up and do the work to fix it, it’s not gonna work.” The focus on mindset that has been woven through our conversation comes up again as Bill emphasizes that “your mental state is what controls everything.” He tells me: “You have to look at the good and bad of each side to decide what’s going to be important in your life.” And from everything Bill shared with me, it is clear that this decision is one you have to make every day—over and over again. Bill shared his experience with this decision-making process when he told me about being in pain and sitting on the couch for 4 hours the day before our conversation. In that moment (and every day), Bill has to decide what is going to be important in his life, and if he decides to prioritize the things he has been actively caring about for the past year—family, an active lifestyle, taking care of himself and others—he has to keep doing the hard work to make that possible.