Well basically the breathing is the one that really works for me, you maybe take three big breaths but you put four out and that’s you using your full capacity, your lungs, and that actually slows down your heart rate, so your tension, the tension eases, stress eases.

Because if you get up tight, if you get angry, the tension, stress all goes to you so that when you get keyed up and people that suffer chronic pain when they get into that state their pain runs riot that is it at full swing. So you’ve got to try and cut out the tension and the stress, so if you get into your breathing it slows down your heart rate and your blood pressure so then your body is more calm and then it definitely lowers your pain level and its definitely one as I say works for me.

If I’ve got the time I lie down and I listen to music, some people like listening to the tapes, sometimes they can drift away and visualise they’re in Portugal or in their favourite place, and by doing that you’re lowering the blood pressure, lowering the heart rate to what it probably should be, so then the tension and stress drifts away which definitely helps your pain, and I can’t say it often enough but it definitely works for me.

Once you sort of stop doing that, I mean the pain is still there but it’s back to that sort of level that you can maybe call it your working pain because its there all the time, it’s when you get that initial build up of this can give you tools to help you fight that, it’s definitely worthwhile.

They have other much more interesting and specific techniques, I can’t remember what the technical term was but they taught us a sort of visualisation technique which you can, in which you can engage your brain yourself to produce a chemical called serotonin which is a natural painkiller.

And so for example you can, they, one of the exercises we did every day, usually after lunch, we all lay on a mat on the floor and they’d play us gentle music and we were invited to imagine our pain as a something, say for example a bright light or a glaring sun or something, and imagine that is your pain and then if it’s a bright light imagine that you’ve got control of the dimmer switch and you just dim it down, dim it down and it’s quite amazing with practice that worked.

You could actually learn how to use that technique. If it was a glaring sun well you could have imagine the sun was setting. I had a, because of this problem with my, the skin on my legs where I’ve got this burning sensation in my legs, I imagined in one of these exercises that I was standing in a clump of nettles and then I stepped out and, again with a little practice, you could make that work and it, it sounds fantastic. It sounds unbelievable but with training, with practice, you can make that technique work for you.

And I go up now and lie on my bed and just, and just completely relax, imagine the pain away. And so that again is a clearly psychological technique but it is connected with actual physical mechanisms that exist in all of us but of course I was completely unaware. I didn’t know what serotonins were.

And another thing we talked about related to that is that the fact that the body produces something called endorphins and that exercise, when you exercise the body produces endorphins naturally and they are related to morphine. They are like a painkiller but it’s produced by your body for your body so it’s obviously completely natural and everything and exercise such as going for a long walk up the mountain produces a lot of endorphins and they have an expression, joggers high, when people go jogging and have a really good run and they feel very up and excited and happy and all the rest of it. That is from endorphins produced by exercise.

So they, the whole process of pain management is a series of, it’s immensely, practical, straightforward stuff that anybody can understand, but it’s a constantly integrated approach of mental things and physical things that work together.

We used to listen to tapes for relaxation, now I was very, very sceptical of anything like that, and we, you know you listened and there was a voice and it was taking you on a journey and that was fine, and I would sit there with my eyes closed and this particular Tuesday morning anyway my thumb, oh my god if I could’ve cut it off I would’ve done it.

So this is called visualisation and we were taking this journey through a meadow to a glass building and then were invited into the building and up to this other glass wall where you were asked if you wanted to put all your pain behind the wall or some of your pain behind the wall and then retrace your steps back and I remember thinking now who in their right mind would say ‘oh well I’ll just put some of my pain behind the wall, and I’ll take the rest back with me.

So, but that was the day we called it the miracle of [CP01’s] thumb, because believe it. And I mean I could hardly believe it and yet I was the one that was suffering the pain with this thumb and by the time the visualisation exercise we had gone into it with the deep breathing and preparing and all the rest of it and we had gone on this journey and we came back again, as we just got back into the flow of a meeting again, you know, like you were so relaxed and then you just come out of the relaxed state, you come back in with your eyes wide open and I could not believe that I had no pain in my thumb.

Have you tried things like relaxation at all?

Yeah. I’ve done relaxation tapes and I find it very hard to do that because of the pain, when they say, you know ‘Well just imagine you’re on a beach and all you can see is the blue sea and the golden sand’ I can’t do it. I just cannot see that in my mind and I think that is just because the pain is there all the time, you know.

But I’m not very good at visualising things with my eyes shut. But yeah, I’ll do the, you know, the relaxation where you know you think of your fingers and then you think of your arms and you relax them as you go up your body, I can do that. But I’m no good putting a picture, and I used to be able to do that, I could do that but I can’t do that anymore.

The only thing I think that helps the pain is distraction. Just somehow find something that will distract you from the pain. Nothing makes the pain go away. Whatever you do, nothing makes my pain go away. Yeah perhaps you can say oh well you can ease it if it’s something warm or something cold, but then that’s something different and I think that is because you’re thinking about ‘Well will this work or won’t it work?’ So you think ‘Well perhaps it does feel a bit better like that’ but no I truly think you’ve just got to distract yourself from it somehow and find something that will do that.
What do you find is the best distraction?

Probably, I started doing cross-stitch, which I didn’t do before all this, but I find with that I can pick it up, I can put it down if I’m doing a good, big project or something, then I’m eager to get back to it and see it, you know, evolve and then to see peoples faces when it’s finished. That’s very satisfying, that’s something that, you know, I can, that I can do now, that I get the same sort of feeling as doing something well at work.

You know, it’s something that I am proud of and I will say that, I am proud of, you know, what I do and it is good. But then I like to, I’ve always liked, I can’t fail, I’m not, I hate failing, and I know I can do that well and so, you know, that does distract me from the pain.

And the family, if my grandson comes round then yeah you’re obviously thinking about them. But that’s the only, the pain doesn’t go away, it never, ever, ever goes away. So just try and distract yourself from it.