I can only relate my experience with pain as I did in the journal entry Lightning Bolts of Pain. I don’t understand the processes involved.

I spend all my waking hours managing pain either through conscious activities such as distraction, keeping my feet elevated and warm, through anti-seizure medications which seem to hold back the pain, or unconsciously.

Occasionally I make a mistake, maybe it’s more like an overload of the stress involved holding back the pain. I sometimes accidentally allow the pain to come through and actually feel it in its full force. It’s horrible. This only happens about a couple of times a month. It is a lot of stress to hold back my pain but I’m not really conscious of the scope of it. Let me try to explain this.

Yesterday evening after a particularly stressful day including more activity than usual and constant higher pain levels I was in bed trying to get my feet “stable” again. Sometimes I hold off going to sleep in till a reasonable hour so that I don’t wake up at three in the morning. I have to hold off at least until 9 PM when I am due to take my nighttime medications.

This was the situation when I made a mistake, or overloaded; I stopped holding back the pain. All of a sudden there was a surge of pain that was almost a whole body sensation. It was mostly my feet and hands of course, but several other areas also that I had forgotten about. It was as if every area of pain that I was holding back just let loose, a surge of pain. It was horrible as if a sudden disaster came upon me. I immediately turned away from whatever it was I was doing and had to consciously push back the pain. That wasn’t an easy thing to do. It was as if I was pushing it back into a box where my subconscious could take over and do its part to manage it helping to keep it at bay.

The event only lasted a few seconds, maybe 10 or 15 seconds, but unlike a lightning bolt of pain where I had no control this was something that I had to make quite a conscious effort to get it back under control.