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The Pain of Being DisabledNo matter what your disability is and no matter what part of your body is impaired, we all share a common pain. This is what I like to call the pain of being disabled. What do I mean by this? It’s not the physical pain that our bodies are giving us. It’s emotional pain that our minds are giving us. Have you stopped and thought about it lately? Who are you now that you are disabled? What are you now that you are disabled? What will you be or become now that you are disabled? Have you taken any time to ponder these questions? I have, and I hope that you will benefit and help get some resolution from the rest of this article. There are three ways that I see it that all of us have become disabled. We were either born with a disability, our disability came on gradually or our disability came on suddenly such as an accident or a catastrophic event. In any event, there was a defining moment when we realized "My God" I have a major problem. Admittedly, this may not be a problem for individuals who were born with a disability because living with their disability is all that they know. However, for individuals whose disability came on either gradually or suddenly, there was that defining moment when we realized that our lifestyle as we knew it was over. Myself, I was a practicing doctor who was having back pain. The pain became so intense that I ordered a MRI of my lumbar spine and found out that I had two herniated discs. Following that, I went to a neurosurgeon and after examining me he ordered more studies, this time of my thoracic spine. He found four more herniated discs and a couple of them were compressing my spinal cord. Needless to say, this was no good. At that office visit, I was informed that I could no longer work and that I was totally disabled. Within a two week period, the life that I had worked so hard for was gone. To say the least, I was stunned, distraught and confused. My first reaction was denial. "Who me"? I asked. "I can’t be disabled". The term disability means inability to perform work. This I know because ironically, at the time I was a state appointed disability evaluator. I thought to myself, this doctor is saying that I can no longer work, no longer see patients, no longer be a doctor. He is crazy, I thought, as the pain in my back was unbearable. This can not be happening to me. Or can it? Does this sound familiar to you? Did you deny your disability at first? If you did then you pretty much acted normally. I think that most of us who had either a gradual or sudden onset of our disability when our defining moment came went into a state of denial. The denial lasts for a while and only a while with individuals who are totally disabled for whatever reason because it becomes obvious what you can and can’t do physically. However, for you guys with a partial disability that is permanent you say to yourself but I can still do this and I can still do that so am I really disabled? I can tell you from experience and I am sure that there are many of you out there who will agree that until you say the words "Yes, I am disabled" that you can not move on with your life. Then comes the question, OK so I am disabled so what life do I have to move on to? At this point in time, anger starts to set in. Why did this happen to me? Why me? Why me? You can either internalize or externalize you anger at this point. If you externalize it, you start yelling at the people that you love and quite frankly need the most right know. Marital and parental relationships become very strained because of this anger. You see, you don’t know who to be mad at but you feel that you have to be mad at somebody or someone so you pick the safest people that you know to be mad at and they happen to be the people that you love the most. The other thing that you can do is to internalize you anger. You make like everything is OK but on the inside you are being eaten up by the fact that you are now a disabled person. This usually leads to other illnesses and you withdrawing from your family emotionally. Anger, either internalized or externalized can destroy your marriage and your life. It was about this point in my disability that my wife while reading our church bulletin noticed an advertisement for a church sponsored seminar on personal losses. For some reason it caught her eyes. My wife told me about it and we talked it over and both of us agreed that it would be good for me to go and see what it was about. You see I thought that I was going because I had lost my job and livelihood. Maybe I was stupid to think that a loss seminar could help me. But I went anyhow. Boy, was I ever wrong. I went to the seminar the first night thinking hey this person is just a therapist, I am a doctor what could she possibly tell me that will help me. As the meeting started off, the therapist went around the room asking each person to describe their loss to the group. There were about 15 people who attended. I was sitting at the end of the group and so I heard most people tell of how they lost the dear mother and how it hurt, or a mother loosing a child and the pain or a woman telling of her divorce after 20 years of marriage and how she can’t cope. After each person, the therapist would make some kind of comment and then continue onto the next person. By now I was thinking to myself what was my loss compared to the losses that these other people had experienced. I thought that I didn’t belong there. As a matter of fact when it came my turn to tell of my loss I was embarrassed to say that I was disabled and had lost my job and livelihood. It just didn’t seem as important as the other people’s losses. You see financially I was still OK even with my disability. I still had my family so I thought did I really belong here? When it was my turn I told everyone what happened to me, almost shyly. To my surprise after I was finished the therapist looked me straight in the eye and said, "of course, you lost your identity. You don’t know who you are anymore". "That’s it" I screamed as tears streamed down my face. Without being the doctor that I have worked so hard to be most of my life, who was I? I only went to one more group meeting because I knew that I had to see the therapist one on one. She explained to me that becoming disabled was a major loss in my life and that I had to treat it like I would any other loss of a loved one. "A loved one" I asked? "Yes" she said "you". "You lost yourself, the person that you made of yourself, the person that you presented yourself as". I couldn’t do anything else but agree. She said that I have to mourn the loss of my identity if I was going to heal emotionally and deal with the physical disability that I have and move on with my life. She said that it wasn’t going to happen over night. It may take six months or a year for you to grieve. Don’t rush it. But certainly grieve. With that, I realized that a part of me was gone forever, but that it was OK because there still was a lot of me left. Slowly, over the next year and a half, I began to heal the emotional scar of being who I was now. Throughout my entire life I have been scientifically oriented, as I wanted to be a doctor. I was a left -brained person. By dealing correctly with my disability by grieving properly, I have discovered that there is another side of me, as I am currently enjoying drawing and writing. Right- sided brain functions. Emotionally, I am still healing. I don’t think that I will ever be completely healed because being physical was a very important part of my life. But I learned how to adjust and I can honestly say that I have adapted to my disability. My relationships with my wife and children are wonderful and we all understand what has happened to me and we all accept the changes that have occurred. Our life situations may be different. However, please don’t miss the important fact that we all and I mean all of us who have become disabled in our lives need to mourn our disability like we would mourn the loss of any loved one in our lives. I believe that this process will help most everyone. Right about now, you might be saying to yourself mourn my disability. How do I do that? My suggestion would be to seek professional help and or pick up a book on grieving at any local bookstore and read it through. Remember healing is a process that will take time. It doesn’t happen over night. Good luck and may God Bless you. |
