kaberett | [pain, food] victory! (Reply)

I have finally successfully got my head around when the local supermarket reduces the prices on its pastries, which means that we are now well-supplied for doing a batch of pistachio croissant strata to get us most of the way through the coming week. It is not going to be a tomorrow (Sunday) morning breakfast, though, because we have half a cherry clafoutis from this morning, made using allotment cherries.

To my very great surprise I went back for seconds. I have A History with cherries such that these days, courtesy of having the tree on the plot, they are slowly being rehabilitated -- they're fine and even enjoyable when I'm actually eating them but mildly aversive to contemplate eating. Except that, as I say, this round of clafoutis had me going "... actually can I have some more", and I'm looking forward to finishing it up, so -- progress on the rehabilitation front!

All of which is relevant to pain because of conditioned responses, right. My History with cherries involved poor life choices leading to being (briefly, transiently) really quite unwell. Similarly there is, I understand, an experience common to a wide swathe of Young Adulthood of "well I'm never drinking that specific alcohol again*: the thing where the body just says NOPE. NOPE THAT IS NOT [SAFELY INGESTIBLE]. NOPE NOPE NOPE. Which makes a great deal of sense, aids survival of the species, etc etc etc.

Except! that the body will also exhibit this kind of associative learning erroneously. A little while back, having eaten a persimmon, A had an Extremely Bad Day for the completely causally unrelated reason of Passing A Kidney Stone, Probably. But the body knew the (slightly unusual) persimmon had been eaten, and it knew that Bad, and persimmons are now Not An Adam Food (though they're working on rehabilitation; currently we're at "mostly doesn't shudder involuntarily at the utterance of the name, on good days can sniff suspiciously").

And that's the thing with pain, and especially things like allodynia, which I am currently thinking about a bunch because I'm prodding at the concept of somatosensory rehabilitation and how it might interact with my constant background headache: you can learn to associate [sensory input] with [probable tissue damage] (i.e. pain) even in the absence of tissue damage. Like the persimmon: very gently brushing the hair on that side of my head does not cause a level of tissue damage that is in any way proportionate to the pain I experience (if I'm not actively tuning it out) associated with that sensory input. Nonetheless: sensitisation means that genuinely harmless stimuli get interpreted as dangerous.

To my very great surprise, via the Pilates I trained myself to reinterpret sensory information coming from my abdominal nerves: lots of very gentle very slow movement, that did hurt but that I was genuinely and with good reason convinced was not causing damage, resulted in a massive overall reduction in abdominal pain as I (both consciously and subconsciously) learned that this kind of nerve signal just meant I was using my muscles, in a way that was safe, and that didn't need treating as an emergency.

(I'm sleepy and not doing a great job of putting all the explanation I want to in here, but hey, words is words.)

And if I can pull off the same trick with the greater occipital nerve allodynia then that mitigates at least one risk factor for winding up back in Constant Migraine. I've got proof of concept; the interesting variation here is that I've not meaningfully got voluntary conscious muscular control over the parts of the scalp that it serves, so retraining will by necessity be, mm, I'm not sure of the terminology here, but -- locally passive? I'm not going to be able to generate sensation locally to compete with the existing sensation; it needs to be externally imposed. So. You know. More very gentle hair brushing; more head scritches; more poking at explanations of somatosensory rehab.

Cherries; persimmons; pain.