#425 Caregivers and Chronic Pain (Part 2)

Welcome back to Hope for the Caregiver. I am Peter Rosenberger.

This is the nation's number one show for you as a family caregiver. By the way, I was negligent on this, John. I'm going to say something to the audience. This is the God's honest truth. And I want you to just bear with me and just indulge me.

We're going to get back to our conversation about pain. I have watched John Butler for seven years. And this is a man who loves being a father. He truly loves, this is Father's Day and he loves being a dad. And he is so engaged.

And I mean this with all my heart, John. You are so engaged with your children in the learning process. And it's almost like you're watching, you're discovering the world with them as they discover it. Well, it's a curious world out there and there's a lot to discover. Yes, but you're not looking at it like, you're not looking at it detached. You're in there in the trenches with them, learning it and excited about it as they see it. To me, that's what it looks like to me.

Well, and I mean, that's what it looks like to me too. And I don't know how other people do this. I just know what I do. And I'm very flattered that you see that because that's kind of my goal in all of this. I always wanted to be a dad and I got to be one. And it's, by the way, happy Father's Day.

So thank you very much. And I love being a dad too. By the way, the Babylonian Beast said there will be a spike in dad jokes today. Oh, I'm sure.

Before we go any further, do you have a dad joke for us? You know, I've got a couple of them here. Do you know where you can get chicken broth in bulk?

No, I do not know where I can get chicken broth in bulk. Well, the stock market. Okay. All right.

All right. And one more. One more.

It's Father's Day. I'll give you one more. Oh, you got one? Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hit me, hit me.

No, no, no. I'm giving you one more. Oh, giving me one more.

Okay. It's Father's Day. Do you know why? Oh, well, I got to get a couple of them on here. Um, but, uh, uh, so, you know, why is, this is from the book that you got me for Christmas, by the way. So dad jokes that Peter got me for Christmas. Uh, you know, next year, I'm going to give you a heads up. I'm gonna get you another one, but it'll be a Celtic.

It'll be the Celtic dad jokes. Oh man. That's fantastic. Now I have to sit there and translate it all. Oh, oh, this is good.

This is good. Uh, how much does a hipster weigh? How much does a hipster weigh? Correct. Yes. I don't know. An Instagram. Uh, that's a little bit of a stretch.

Even for a dad joke. A little bit. Okay. Okay. Okay. All right. Um, uh, let's see.

Uh, you know why milk is the fastest liquid on earth? I give up. Yeah.

It's past your eyes before you even see it. Oh, okay. All right. We need to stop. Yeah. Yeah. We're done.

We're done. But we're talking about sincerely thank you for the shout out to dads. And I've, uh, you have, uh, you and Gracie have, have raised two very fine young men, um, that are impressive in all ways and with no small credit towards both of you. So well, I will take, uh, take that because they are and I, uh, in spite of me, they have turned out all right.

So I, uh, uh, I'm grateful for them. John, did you, um, you and I have, have had this running conversation for seven years. You've been, you've been, uh, with me on this show now for seven years and this has been a running thought on pain and how it affects the family, the relationships, all the above.

And we're going to, we'll take it all the way to the bottom of the hour and then we'll, we'll kick it around some more the next segment. And I am of the mindset that pain permeates every relationship. If you are a chronic pain sufferer, then understand that your pain will permeate every single relationship you have, uh, of, of any significant relationship.

How about that? Not every relationship, not the relationship you have with the guy at the gas station necessarily won't be, but you know, if this one, but all the significant relationships, but it also prohibits, it is prohibitive, it is permeating, it is prohibitive and it is persistent. Those three P's that we, we need to really spend some time in helping caregivers understand what does this mean? And then we have to, we have to dig the psychology.

Okay. What is the goal here? What are we trying to accomplish? And we get calls here and I've gotten emails and calls and so forth for low these many years, you know, but what do you do about this? The end of life things and so forth.

And you and I broached the subject of what's the philosophy, where are we going? Because anybody can get out of pain immediately right now. There are so many different types of devices and substances that can help remove the pain, but that doesn't necessarily solve a problem.

It creates a set of problems. Well, pain is a symptom of a larger issue and you're going to be treating these symptoms no matter what. And that, you know, you can't, if it's, if you have a condition where you're not going to correct the source of this pain, you know, you can, you can, you're just, you're putting a, you know, I hate to use this, but like putting a Band-Aid on it, it'll be temporary. It'll help, but it'll fall off eventually.

You can't, you can't, you got to put another Band-Aid on it after that. And that's a, that's a, it's a rough place to be. And the philosophy of how we deal with pain, like you were saying, sometimes we forget how that all works out and we really need to kind of dig into that. Well, pain itself is not necessarily a bad thing. It lets us know that something is broken so that we can, we can treat it. It lets us know that there's danger so we can avoid it like fire, heat, something sharp, those kinds of things. And so when you look at pain in the sense of, okay, this is a mechanism we're equipped with to deal with scary and traumatic things in our lives, we get that. But when the pain doesn't leave, that's a much different conversation. Right. And so we're going to take that up after we come back from the break. This is Peter Rosenberg and this is hope for the caregiver 877-655-6755.

We'll be right back. Hey, this is Larry the Cable Guy. You are listening to Hope for the Caregiver with Peter Rosenberg.

And if you're not listening to it, you're a communist, Peter does. 15 years ago, Gracie and I started an organization called Standing with Hope. And this was part of a vision that she had after losing both of her legs. And she wanted to provide quality prosthetic limbs to her fellow amputees as a means of sharing the gospel.

We've been working in the country of West Africa for many, many years. And part of that involves a prosthetic limb recycling program with an unusual collaboration. Gracie, when you envision doing a prosthetic limb outreach, did you ever think that inmates would help you do that?

Not in a million years. When you go to the facility run by CoreCivic over in Nashville and you see the faces of these inmates that are working on prosthetic limbs that you have helped collect from all over the country that you put out the plea for and they're disassembling. You see all these legs like what you have, your own prosthetic legs and arms. When you see all this, what does that do to you? Makes me cry because I see the smiles on their faces and I know what it is to be like someplace where you can't get out without somebody else allowing you to get out.

Of course, being in the hospital so much and so long. And so these men are so glad that they get to be doing, as one man said, something good finally with my hands. Did you know before you became an amputee that parts of prosthetic limbs could be recycled? No, I had no idea.

I thought of peg legs, I thought of wooden legs, I never thought of titanium and carbon legs and flex feet and sea legs and all that. I never thought about that. As you watch these inmates participate in something like this, knowing that they're helping other people now walk, they're providing the means for these supplies to get over there, what does that do to you just on a heart level? I wish I could explain to the world what I see in there and I wish that I could be able to go and say, this guy right here, he needs to go to Africa with us. I never not feel that way.

Every time, you know, you always make me have to leave, I don't want to leave them. I feel like I'm at home with them. And I feel like that we have a common bond that I would have never expected that only God could put together. Now that you've had an experience with it, what do you think of the faith-based programs that Core Civic offers? I think they're just absolutely awesome. And I think every prison out there should have faith-based programs like this because the return rate of the men that are involved in this particular faith-based program and other ones like it, but I know about this one, is just an amazingly low rate compared to those who don't have them.

And I think that that says so much. That doesn't have anything to do with me. It just has something to do with God using somebody broken to help other broken people. If people want to donate a used prosthetic limb, whether from a loved one who passed away or somebody who outgrew him, you've donated some of your own for them to do. How do they do that?

What do they find out? Oh, please go to standingwithhope.com slash recycle. Thanks, Gracie. Welcome back to Hope for the Caregiver. I am Peter Rosenberg and this is the nation's number one show for you as a family caregiver.

We're glad you're with us. That is Gracie singing from her new record CD. Now, not record, John, it's CD. The CDs came out in the 80s, John.

You would think I would know this. Right. Well, this is the new all digital MP3 release. That song I think is available to download, but I got to put the whole CD out there, the whole recording. And Gracie was just fussing me about that earlier today because she can't send people to go download the whole CD.

And so, well, I've assigned that to an associate. Oh, that would be you, John. So all the comments about why you can't download Gracie's CD to be directed to John Butler at the internet. We're working on it, but if you want a copy of that CD right now, we'll send it to you. Go out to standingwithhope.com.

You've heard her story on what we're trying to do with standing with hope and for any donation to that ministry, we'll send you a copy of it. All right, we're talking about pain. John, there are lots of different kinds of pain. And so before you start this conversation as a caregiver, this is something I have wrestled with and it may be helpful to you. I'm not going to tell you what to do.

I don't tell you how to live your life or how to take care of your loved one anymore than you can tell me how to take care of mine. But here's some things I've thought about and I've learned along the way, and I'm going to throw it out and John and I are going to kick it around. Yeah. Some tools you picked up that, Oh, Hey, this is a great tool. Let me put that in the chest, you know, and share it with other people.

More than just tool, just perspective, I think. Yeah. Okay. Uh, I've lived with the woman for now 34 years. Who's not known a day without chronic pain, severe chronic pain for 34 years, not a single hour, not, she told me one day she said, she woke up, she said, I dreamed I was dreaming and in my dream I was in pain. And I thought, you know, that just, that sucks.

I hate that for her. Okay. That's what it is. But as I said earlier in the segment, she could be out of pain today, right now we could sedate her, we can numb her up and all that, but she wouldn't be able to function. So I came up with these two things. Are we there to escape?

Are we there to equip? And to me, this is the conversation that you have when you're in, or at least it's a conversation that would be helpful to have when you're in a chronic pain situation, escaping or equipping. And in Gracie's case, she's not terminal. Her body, well, we're all terminal, but, um, death is the final destination, but we all make stops along the way. And some of us got the pedal to the metal to get there, but it's, but she's not terminal. She's hurt. She's just orthopedically a train wreck. So how do you, what, what's, what's the goal? Does she just stay in a bed all day long?

Because if you do that, the terminal thing gets accelerated because everything starts to atrophy. So then you do, so what do you do? And you can't keep her on an enormous amount of narcotics. We went down that path. We had one doctor who got her so filled with narcotics and man, it was tough on her, tough on me, tough on the kids, tough on everybody. And I've, I've said this in news interviews. I had, she had seven figures of, of opioid put into her body over a period of, you know, a short period of years, but certainly, um, um, an enormous amount of narcotics and not one doctor, not one nurse, not one pharmacist, not anybody in the medical profession ever pulled me aside and said, dude, we're putting a lot of chemicals, behavior altering chemicals into your wife's body. Have you thought about getting some help for you?