Playing With Pain

If you don't like it when people mix their personal lives with their wow blogging, then come by for a visit on another day and I'll do my best to make you happy. Today is definately not that day.

I believe so much of ourselves is revealed through the games we play I cannot, in good conscience, ignore the interplay between the two at times.

For those who have not followed me long, know that I suffer from a mix of genetic and injury related back pain. Genetic is bad enough, but when an injury targets what genetics already fails at, the compounding consequence is often very difficult to live with.

I have no idea how I hold down a job, but every night when I get home I load myself with pain killers, get into a comfortable chair, and begin my gaming night. It's a real solace and can often help me get away from a world that not only can't offer solutions to my unique pain, but also deny me the healthcare that could have any hope of providing some measure of relief (seriously, I hate insurance companies).

But there are nights when my pain meds don't work very well and I'm left to my willpower to get me through the raid. Saturday night was one of those night, but my guild never knew it. When I'm in pain it's omnipresent, I can't avoid that. Being a healer in many of the ICC fights I have to be super alert, super aware of the mechanics of the raid as well as my healing duties in keeping those pesky health bars as full as possible.

Dispite the pain we were able to manage to get past a particularly troublesome fight for our casual guild and continued our progression into ICC. Our guild leader wasn't with us, for whatever reason I don't know (he was on, he just didn't want to go). So I took the healing lead. I had to teach our new Pali healer all the fights and coordinate everything from a healing standpoint. This responsibility helped drown out some of the pain, I'm not sure I could have endured if I wasn't forced to speak up and lead so much.

Maybe this is a great thing, I'm sure it is. I play to help me forget my pain, yet there are times when my pain keeps me from playing at the top of my game. Perhaps then this is the secret, to keep my mind so occupied with thinking and leading and directing that my pain can somehow fall into the background.

At the end of it all I could barely stand up from the chair, but as a guild we had progressed. So in the end it was a proverbial "good and bad" thing.

I live with some comfort knowing that another guildie of mine suffers something similar, we can empathize with each other. I can only imagine how he feels yet he too never says a word about it. People play this game and many others with weights on their lives that at times seem insupportable. But guess what? You are not alone. I know that only too well. Just because nobody in your guild is going through what you are, doesn't mean there is nobody.

I'm lucky, very lucky to have met somebody that can truly understand what I suffer through. I know that not everyone will. But I guarantee you that someone in the world does, so take comfort in knowing that somewhere, somebody knows what it's like to play with pain - whatever kind of pain that is.

Stay strong!