Learning From My Screeners (or Maybe My Pain Isn’t So Bad)

I’ve been spending a bunch of time lately watching my screeners for the SAG Awards. A majority of them have been digital screeners so I’m watching them either on my Apple TV or on my iPad.

I’ve been lucky that my day job has a lot of downtime. There are a bunch of days where my work setup looks like this:

I’ve got my computer running all my work websites and my iPad next to it playing my screener. I have to pause the movie whenever a customer calls or starts a chat, but I’ve been watching a movie a day the last few days.

Obviously, all the movies are amazing otherwise they wouldn’t be nominated for the SAG Awards. And some of them are hitting me a little harder than others.

I watched “Cake” with Jennifer Aniston yesterday. Without getting too much into the story, it’s about a woman who is living with chronic pain.

I have always considered myself someone who deals with more pain than the average person. I don’t think I would ever say that I have chronic pain, but a majority of the time I have to take at least one painkiller to get through the day. Before my hip surgery, I was maxing out on two different types of painkillers every day and I was still in very intense pain.

Even though I know that the actors were pretending to have this sort of pain, it really made me realize how lucky I am that my pain isn’t worse. I hurt a lot, but I can still walk around pretty much every day (there are a few rare days where it’s difficult for me to get out of bed or off the couch). I’m able to work out even though on the treadmill I have to take breaks every so often to take a break from the pain.

Watching the movie has also motivated me to be a bit more proactive in seeing what other things I can do to put off the next few surgeries that I need. I’ve already done well by not doing activities that make my situation worse and have gone well past my surgeon’s guess that I would have needed my next surgery by 2009. I also haven’t shown signs of arthritis yet which my surgeon thought I would have by now.

I haven’t scheduled my appointments to meet with new surgeons yet, but I will be doing that in the next week or two. And when I spoke to my dad about this, he advised me to go in with an open mind. The original plan for me was created in 2006. A lot has changed medically in that time and while I will still most likely need a hip replacement on my right side one day (being bone on bone will cause that to be an issue eventually), maybe there are new things I can try to prevent me from needing the same surgeries on my left side.

Seriously, all this motivation and new perspective came from watching a movie.

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Feeling The Pain With The Weather (or The Full Story About My Hip Problems) Accepting Some Help (or Hope This Helps The Pain) Ten Years Ago (or Another Big Milestone) Doubling Up On Pain (or Physical and Mental Pain Together) A Full Doctor Afternoon (or Pain and More Pain) Enjoying Movie Nights (or Watching My Screeners)