Join me on Pinterest

I love social media... It's an awesome way to gather inspiration and stay in touch, especially when you live with chronic disease or chronic pain which severely impacts your mobility.

Blogs, forums and different patient groups and communities can be great both for gathering information, learning about your condition, and sharing the understanding that you may not receive from your immediate family.

Recently I started using Pinterest, and I'm loving it! Pinterest is a new social media experience, which in contrast to many other new media sites actually has genuinely new functions. A picture says more than a thousand words they say... and with a Pinterest profile you organize and share images and links with people all over the worlds with a simple click.

Join me there and add the 365 Pain Free Days pinboard to keep sharing pain-free inspiration!

Stuff we learn...

”Life is a lot like jazz... it's best when you improvise.”

-George Gershwin

Making friends with pain

When I'm constantly fighting the pain, my body becomes a battle ground... so I've decided to be buddhist about it and embrace my enemy :)

Feeling electric!

It's been a pretty intense year. After spending 2010 working mostly on this blog and my book, this year I have been in worse shape physically - and have had time for reflection. After I got the grant to start a Norwegian blog about the health care system  I've been getting more involved in politics concerning chronic disease, patients rights and freedom of choice. With more pain, there is less energy, and I've also had to rethink many of my viewpoints on chronic disease and the biomedical paradigm (which I used to criticize abundantly). Things are changing, and I guess I'm learning and developing.

Today is a great day, because I've just received a new shipment of TENS electrodes from my sister in Austin. My last TENS electrodes were wearing thin already in May, and with a new cold season approaching and rapidly increasing pain levels I've been trying to get new ones, but they are hard to come by and ridiculously expensive here in Scandinavia. But with some help from my globetrotting family I have now received 48 new electrodes, which should keep me supplied for atleast a year:

These things aren't easy to find where I live...
but they work wonders for my chronic pain!

So for the next few months I'll be wired and electrified daily. I wear the TENS unit while working, driving, reading, resting... whatever I need to do - and it immediately diminishes my pain and helps me keep intake of medication low. I'm training a lot these days, following a pretty strict physical regime with ashtanga yoga and physiotherapy and I hope that will help me manage to stay on my legs through the winter!

With the TENS on my belt I am fully mobile 

Understanding pain - video

This educational video sums up the new pain paradigm in just 5 minutes. Maybe a bit simplistic for many of us, but great to share with our friends and family as an introduction!