Chronic Pain Changes Your Landscape

You were relatively healthy (that's an 'attractor' in Complex Adaptive Systems terms) you broke your leg, the leg mended but a tangle of endocrine, immune and neurological out-of-whackness has now set in. Post-injury, you are in a second attractor, one that you don't like but can't get free of. Think about pain as though you were running a fever—your body is distressed you have a fever so it raises your temperature (a reinforcing cycle, classic 'attractor' territory) while at the same time, your temperature gauge is screwed up by the accident in such a way that you read 'fever' even if you don't have one. You can have residual problems at the level of your basic data collection, your data transmission, your data integration—and that means your assessment of where you are/how much of a crisis it is and what you need to do about it—, and then, to top it off, this whole tangle alters your execution of what is probably a misguided internal care program to begin with. And none of it shows. You aren't bleeding.... but you also aren't the person you were before. Chronic pain has changed you.

[and so you need to learn forward...]