Every since my bike accident almost two weeks ago, I have been in chronic pain. My shoulder is having difficulty healing, and even more so my right wrist. I’m likely to be in this situation for at least another month to come.

The pain is never unbearable, but it’s there all the time, and it gets worse from time to time. It’s been an interesting experience; it makes me really feel a lot more empathy for those who have back pain or other chronic issues. There’s a few things that I don’t think I ever realized about this kind of pain. One is that it just sort of makes you tired all the time. I’m not surprised that pain would be annoying or make you irritable, but I am surprised at how physically tiring it is to be in pain.

The other thing which is much more insidious is that the pain - and in particular the kind of pain I’m experiencing right now - serves as a sort of “tax” on doing anything. Some things I just can’t do yet, like swim. But for those things I can do I’ve made an active decision to keep living my life and to push it a little bit. But everything I do I know will incur a cost of pain. Even typing this blog post hurts, and I will have to take a minute and let my wrist “cool off”. And so the inevitable temptation is to just stop or slow down doing things. And that sucks.

I don’t have any deep conclusions here. It just sucks.