For three days this week, I could not think past the end of my nose.
A flare of chronic pain arrived with complications from diabetes riding alongside it, and the two of them together cleared my calendar without asking. I stayed in bed. I waited. My only job was to let my body do whatever it needed to do, and to hope it would do it soon.
Marianne lived those three days with me — which is to say she lived a different version of them, the version where you watch someone you love disappear behind their pain and there is nothing to do but stay close and wait. Once, on a better hour, I made it downstairs to the table, and she sat with me while I ate what little I could, my body still arguing the whole time. She did not try to fix it. There is nothing to fix. She just stayed. A flare does not happen to one person. It happens to a marriage, to a household, to whoever is in the room. The patient gets the pain. The partner gets the long hours of helplessness, which I am not convinced are any easier.
(Marianne, I owe you one. Maybe several. I am saying so in print so you can hold me to it.)
When you cannot work, the work does not stop accumulating. The minutes. The agendas. The critiques. The letters. The articles. The people waiting on a reply. All of them kept their appointments even though I could not keep mine. I am retired. I left the military years ago. And yet I am busier now than I ever was in uniform, which is its own kind of joke that only the retired will understand.
So here is the question that greets me on the morning I can finally think again: where do I even begin?
There is a strong pull, after a setback, to make up for lost time all at once — to leap back into the saddle at a full gallop and ride hard until the backlog is gone. It feels responsible. It feels like apology, to the people waiting and to the days I “wasted.”
It is also the fastest way to crack the pitcher the rest of the way through.
My grandmother had a saying for this. “You can’t pour water from a broken pitcher.” She meant it plainly: you cannot give what you do not have. If I empty myself trying to catch up, I will have nothing left to pour next week, or the week after, and the short flare becomes a long one.
The hard truth of chronic pain is that rest is not the reward for finishing the work.
Rest is part of the work.
So I know the rule. After enough flares, anyone would. Choose one thing. Do it. Stop before you are empty — not after.
And here is my confession: I do not know how to stop.
No matter how disciplined I am, I keep working. The body shouts stop and I tell it just one more — one more edit, one more reply, one more line of an agenda that could have waited until Tuesday. Discipline, it turns out, is not my problem. Discipline is exactly what keeps me at the desk long past the point where I should have closed it. The art I have never mastered is not pushing harder. It is putting the work down while there is still something left in the pitcher.
So this next part I am writing as much for myself as for anyone reading.
The first thing I want to get back to is not on any list. It is sitting with Marianne. Smiling at her again, instead of grimacing through a sentence. Being well enough to fix whatever her computer is doing to her this week. Giving her the ordinary, unhurried time that the last three days took and did not give back. That is the work that matters most, and it is the work the backlog is forever trying to crowd out.
The minutes and the letters and the articles will still be there when I am able to think.
Marianne is here now.
The views, positions, and recommendations expressed in this article are based on my personal experiences and independent research. They are solely my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, policies, or positions of the American Chronic Pain Association (ACPA). AI was used for research, editing, and organizing; final text is my own.