Week two of school has started, and we are finally finding our groove again as fall sets in.  It’s been good getting back into a routine but at the same time things are starting to get busy. I’ve started to notice that my other symptoms are starting to creep up on me. The implants are doing a good job though, keeping things at a much more manageable level. It’s at this time of the year that I need to go into what I call “awareness mode”, trying to manage all the different angles that stress creeps into my life.

It’s never easy because there is always going to be stress that affects your day to day life. There are ways however that you can control the amount that you let it affect you. So how do you manage things and reduce how CRPS affects your life? There isn’t an easy solution! Stress is always around you and always will be, but it’s what you do to manage it that matters the most. What you can do is look at all the various triggers that increase the stress in your life, and put plans together to start dealing with them.

For a person dealing with CRPS their stress level goes from 0 to 100 in a second! There is next to no time to try and bring your stress level down because certain triggers are like a bomb going off and before you know it your in crisis mode! At that point all you can really do is hold on and ride out the storm. Lots of times the discouragement can reach unthinkable levels, and a person can lose the desire to keep fighting!

So as a person dealing with CRPS you need to find ways of dealing with those triggers before the stress increases. I’m not saying that your going to be able to manage ever single trigger but you can effectively control some of the worst triggers and as a result you may see a bit of a reduction in your pain. So if noise makes your stress shoot through the roof then you look at ways that you can control it. What I mean by that is that you look at ways you control the sources of noise around you. Family gatherings used to be really hard for me because we have a large noisy family. So I had to put some limitations on the amount of time I could be at a family gathering.

It really comes down to putting in the effort to control and effectively manage the different sources that fuel your CRPS. When they fight a forest fire what is one of the most important things that they do. They take away the trees and other shrubs around it that feed and fuel it. They make a fire line around the fire and try to contain the fire within. Well CRPS works in the same way in that you need to take away some of the things that fuel it in order to effectively manage it. So instead of letting the fire and the pain burn out of control try to manage it to bring it under control. I’m not saying that everyone is the same and will get the same results, but you’ll never know if you don’t try.

The single most effective way that I’ve seen results is to have God take control. If I didn’t allow God to deal with this fire then it would be burning out of control. I’ll see you all soon!