Suffering from acute chronic pain is like being eaten alive from the inside out by an unseen parasite or disease. While on the surface the body looks fine, underneath the physical, mental, and emotional core is gradually being hollowed out. Resources normally committed to taking care of life as most people know it are turned inward in an effort to keep the pain at bay. Humans don't have an inexhaustible store of energy and gradually the will and ability to resist the pain erodes and it will continue to increase incrementally unless the cause is rooted out and eliminated.

When you suffer from chronic pain you begin to despise the body that causes you so much suffering and you long to escape from it in any way possible. Drugs are the usual means for most people to leave their bodies when the pain becomes too much to handle. Morphine, Demerol, and the rest of the narcotics become close allies and dear friends and are often the only ones who truly understand the need to escape. Some people have the ability to find an external focus that they can utilize as a means of escaping the pain. It becomes a point outside of their body where their awareness can reside temporarily giving them respite from the creature eating away at them.

As a writer and a chronic pain sufferer I know from experience that the times I'm most pain free are those moments when I'm able to lose myself in whatever story or article that I'm writing. Even the drugs I take can't match the relief offered by being able to truly escape my body into the world that's being created on the page. While you can almost say the pain is feeding the creativity because of the manner in which it motivates the escape, there does come a point where the pain is too great for that escape. The frustration of having to surrender those moments of freedom to the reality of the body's prison is nothing compared to the fear that you might never manage the escape again.

Mexican artist Frida Kahlo spent almost her entire life suffering from chronic pain. From the time she contracted polio as a child to the end of her life her body was wracked with physical pain as a result of the disease and a horrific traffic accident she was involved in as a teenager. During her lifetime she underwent thirty plus operations as doctors struggled to literally keep her body from falling apart. Gangrene would gradually take the toes of one foot and then her leg as if the pain decided to actually eat her alive.