Well I’m back in writing mode again today. It was a busy week that started out last weekend, celebrating Ethiopian Christmas with a group of other adoptive parents. There isn’t a day this week where we haven’t had something on the books with our kids. Throw in my daughters 11th birthday and it made for a really crazy week! Somewhere in there came trying to find a way to manage my pain. With flare ups being frequent at the moment I need to stay on top of things. As I mentioned in my last post its a new year bringing with it new strength, hope, and vision.

This week I kicked off my plan to be more aggresive in bringing awareness CRPS. I did some snooping around to see where we stand not only in my province of Saskatchewan but in Canada in regards to chronic pain. What I found I had already come to expect to a certain degree! What I found made me mad and in a lot of ways I’m even more fired up about making a difference and creating change. I want to find some answers when it comes to CRPS and chronic pain in general. Sure we know a lot more than we did five years ago but we are barely scratching the surface when it comes to answering a lot of the harder questions.

To tell you the honest truth I had half of this post written and decided that I had to go back and change everything because I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to write this. I had started listing specific faults and mentioned specific names of organizations when it really wasn’t about that. After my blood stopped boiling and a level head returned, I deleted everything and started fresh! My intentions were not to lay blame but to find the areas of opportunity that need to be fixed or improved upon. Trust me when I say there is room for oportunity in so many different areas when it comes to the fight against Chronic Pain and CRPS! One of the things I will point out is that several websites of organizations were not up to date or lacked information on events, or information on chronic pain. In my opinion these are key areas that you can’t ignore or forget about. What we can’t forget though is that in order for these organizations to function they rely heavily on volunteers to help them.

So when I look at it with this perspective then it takes on a different light. Without volunteers that information sometimes can’t be filled in on websites. It then leads me to what am I trying to do to make a difference? Am I giving time of myself to try and bring about change or am I just sitting back waiting for other people to make it happen? Nobody is saying that you have to take on a major role! Maybe a strength of yours is organizing, and you could put together an event in your community. Even doing the simplest of things like writing a letter can make a difference. After going through a few sites that’s exactly what I decided to do. I wrote a letter to the Minister of Health here in Saskatchewan asking a few questions about what’s being done here in my province to fight the battle against chronic pain. I took it one step further however and wrote a second letter to the Minister of Health for Canada asking a few of the same questions just on a larger scale.

Unless we take a good hard look at what’s being done at all levels, then we really don’t have our finger on the pulse to help raise awareness or changed to help facilitate a cure. Change can take place but it takes a team effort to make that happen on all levels, meaning right from government to those of us that suffer and all the others in between. After digging a little deeper however it couldn’t be more evident that as a community of sufferers of chronic illness that we need to raise our game! I will personally state that I don’t do enough and need to find a way to raise my game. I think its easy to sit around and wait for change to happen, but difficult to push yourself to become involved and be a part of the change!

So my challenge to you is this. Do whatever it might be no matter how big or how small to get involved to do your part and bring about change!