It’s 2022 and I can barely breathe because the pain is so bad. 18 months ago I had a total hip replacement on the right-hand side to address painful osteoarthritis which was significantly impacting my quality of life.
Like any surgery, there’s a risk of complications.
With this particular procedure (which is fairly major — it involves dislocating your hip, lots of bone saws and big pieces of precision engineered titanium prosthetics) the risk of complications is about two per cent.
Yet risk is a part of being alive, and in exchange for a vital life of enjoyment and adventure risk is something I accept every day. I often ride a bicycle to get around, I commute on a motorcycle sometimes, I even stand on ladders operating power tools on the weekends. I do all kinds of things which are dangerous, accepting the risk in return for the reward.
However, a low risk of complications isn’t no risk of complications. And when complications occur, it’s not unexpected. That’s just what two per cent looks like.
Everyone did everything right along the way, sometimes these things happen. I accepted the risk, and now I’m in chronic pain all day and night, which sometimes flares up in to catastrophic pain.
Yet I’ve already begun shooting two huge TV shows back-to-back. How am I going to keep pushing forward with a constant “fairly painful, sometimes agonisingly painful” feeling in my body?
I need to get up there and work, get on camera and do my job. I need to be a dad and a stepdad and a husband.
Holding my marriage together is difficult when I walk around with a ‘The fuck you just say?’ look on my face.
You could have asked me ‘Did you see Real Housewives last night?’ or ‘How’s your garden looking?’ and my response — whatever it was — would have come with a spiky edged tone of voice and the scowl of someone who’s underlying feeling is ‘The fuck you just say?’.
Even when I answer ‘Yes! The Caroline v Kate thing is just out of hand!’ or ‘Oh lovely, my wife’s daylillies are in full bloom’, you would think that your simple question was at best beneath me, or at worst an absolute offence.
Yet I don’t feel this way about your question or your presence at all, in fact I’m thrilled to discuss Real Housewives Of Sydney or our garden. I am responding this way because the chronic pain sensation is changing the way I speak and respond to the world.
On top of this I am overwhelmed because I think there’s no way I’m going to be able to finish making these TV shows feeling like this. I can’t stand up for more than 10 minutes at a time without being in agony and my face contorting from the pain.
I’m convinced they’ll replace me, and my TV career will be over. As I catastrophise, the pain gets worse as every tiny amount of pain that comes through my leg is was amplified by that fear.
Chronic or persistent pain is a very different beast to the kind of pain when you bang your thumb with a hammer or step on a Lego on a cold morning.
It’s a combination of a bodily sensation and what your brain does with that sensation.
I needed to reconsider my relationship to pain.
When you’re a kid, pain means that mum or dad or a sibling will come running to you, scoop you up and give you a big cuddle tell you it’s gonna be okay.
If it’s really bad, they’ll go and get a Band-Aid.
If it’s really really bad they’ll pick up their phone, dial three simple numbers and a big van with lights and sirens will come tearing through your neighbourhood to come and help you.
If it’s really, really, really bad, a helicopter will come in land next to you and fly you and your parents to a massive building full of expertly trained people whose only job is to stop this sensation from happening.
However, pain is an important thing. How else will we know if we’ve hurt somebody’s feelings?
How many times will we put our hand on the hotplate without it?
We don’t want to eliminate pain altogether – yet to be afraid of it in my experience only made it worse.
As a sober person who’s got a history using painkillers, so far off-label, I’d later discover that it was ‘abuse’, I wasn’t able to rely on heavy pharmaceutical artillery in my situation.
I knew I was out of ideas, so I sought out the help of a pain psychologist.
The things she taught me absolutely blew my mind.
When I discovered what our brains can do with long-term pain sensations, and what happens when we experience something called amplification or sensitisation, I had to share what I had learned.
Some of my pain, not all of it but some of it, actually was in my head. The most insidious part about it, the pain signals were being generated and received in a part of my brain which was out of reach from painkillers.
Yet my heart went out to people who were experiencing similar sensations to what I was, but hadn’t met someone like my psych, and in their desperate quest for relief were taking who knows how many powerful drugs to take the pain away.
The cruelty is that if they were trying to get relief from the kind of sensations I am talking about, they would still feel them — albeit now as a constipated zombie.
Nobody wants to be told that the pain is in your head. When I discovered that some of my pain (not all of it) was being manufactured inside my brain, it took about three days to come to acceptance of that.
The great news was that if I used the tools my psych had given me, in combination with the strategies I learned from my physio – I could handle nearly all of the biggest flare ups.
For me the biggest lesson was being taught to focus on the impermanence of the pain. Being willing to attend to exactly where in my body it was, as intense as the feeling was. Noticing if it moved at all. Checking ten seconds later if it felt different. Reminding myself that yes it’s an intense sensation, but if I breathe, down-regulate and make space for this sensation, I can now make room for other things in my life. Things like joy or laughter or connecting with my family.
Eventually I need more surgery. Then more surgery. Writing this today, I’m sitting on hip number one and hip number five.
I got lucky in two ways.
For a start, the pain I’m in day to day is something I can handle. Using the skills I learned from the psych I can get by mostly without any painkillers at all. Secondly, I am a high-value employee and was able to keep working thanks to the support of my medical team, workplace and my family.
Not everybody has that. When I learned about the economic devastation that chronic and persistent pain has on our country, and the magnitude of the numbers of people who suffer — I had to make a film about it.
I was utterly lost, trapped in my own body with the walls closing in on me. Learning what I learned lit up a pathway forward, and made the sensation tolerable.
I wanted to make this movie so I could show other people that pathway, to give others who are in pain some hope, and to help those who love them understand what they’re going through.
Osher Günsberg: A World of Pain premieres Thursday 21 November at 8.30pm on SBS and SBS On Demand
