Walking through my pain

I am so tired of living with pain!  I have been dealing with muscle pain for twenty years.  It comes and goes, and no doctor can decide what exactly is causing it.  Fibromyalgia? Who knows. All I do know is that every test has been done and still I hurt.

Now for the last couple of years it has also included my lower back/hips.  My hips have always hurt on the sides, now it is also including the upper part of my butt.  Talk about having a pain in the ass!

We used to do a lot of walking and hiking from April through at least October.  Two years ago when I got breast cancer we were cheated out of that.  Surgery was in early April and then most of May and all of June I had radiation.  I was so tired for months afterward that the most excitement I could take was sitting on our deck watching birds. 

So, last year I thought we would finally get back into the long walks of at least five miles.  Not so.  My back had different plans.  We would sometimes walk a mile and I would be in pain the whole time.  Nothing ruins a walk in the woods like pain.  You can't notice any of the beauty because your body is just hoping to sit down.  It sucks.  Another spring, summer and fall without the woods, except in short visits.  Visits where I wanted to cry the whole time I was there.

I am praying that this year will be different.  We did a two mile walk yesterday and brought baby Gideon along.  It helps some to have something to push and lean into.  Four ibuprofen did not seem to help, though. I had to stop several times and bend over to relieve the pain a bit.

Really, I am convinced it is because those lower back muscles have become weak.  There is nothing else wrong with me.  Because of that the only solution I can think of is to just walk through it and hope that after a month or so the pain won't be there, or will be so much less that we can enjoy long walks and hikes in the woods again.  That is where I find God.  In the woods.  I miss that communion.  Yes, I can get it if I just enter and don't walk far, but there is something quite wonderful about truly getting into the woods.  I am going to commit to trying to get back there regularly again this year.

I am running out of "middle age".  As I get older, who knows how long I will be able to hike on dirt paths where sometimes it is steep and many times it is easy to trip? I can't wait forever to try again...or time will pass me by.  So, I will try to walk through the pain.  Wish me luck that it really is only weak back muscles and as I use them they will get strong again and the lower back pain will go away.  The muscle pain everywhere else is bad enough.  I don't want the woods taken away from me besides!

I can't wait to get in there and hear the spring bird songs, see the trees and shrubs sprout and flower, enjoy the woodland animals.  These are things that I really hope won't be taken from me.  They are my peace and my rebirth.
They are my salvation.