Latest / Giving Pain Purpose with Lyndsay Soprano / Academy Award Winner with Lyndsay Soprano
Transcript
- Lyndsay Soprano (00:00.238) This is Giving Pain Purpose, where we talk about the game of living in and with chronic pain and trauma. Getting to the heart of how to heal. I'm your host, Lindsay Soprano. On this show, I sit with the warriors, loved ones, doctors, holistic practitioners, and those who've walked through hell and want their voices heard. It's messy, heartbreaking, occasionally depraved, but always human. It's where relentless healing, intense empathy, and dark humor beautifully collide. Because sometimes laughing through the wreckage is the only lifeline. You don't have to heal quietly, and you don't have to fight alone. Lyndsay Soprano (00:47.692) Welcome to season five of the big show. This episode is dedicated to my sweetie and my besties for never losing hope and for always being my biggest cheerleaders, even when I want to give up. For those of you that are new here, it is awesome to meet you. Thank you for joining us. And to those who have been here from the very start and somewhere in between, thank you from the bottom of my butt for sticking with me here. So If you guys are living in and with chronic pain and illness, you know that this is not a game. We are not playing around here. For four seasons, my show, our show, The Pain Game Podcast, has been filled with real, raw, unfiltered conversations with people who are living in and with chronic pain. The ones where we talk about what it looks like to keep going when your body keeps saying no. A place where we have deep conversations with healers. Coaches, holistic practitioners, doctors, and our loved ones who refuse to sit in silence, who advocate and hang on to us with their dear lives, even when we are hanging on by the last harpstring. But after these four seasons of the Pain Game podcast, the show caught up with the mission. So I'd like to actually welcome you to the same show, just with a new name, Giving Pain Purpose, a place fully dedicated to finding purpose in all that we do. Where we refuse, refuse to white knuckle our way through it alone. So why did I start this show in the first damn place, right? Well, I couldn't find a show or a place that was talking about pain and trauma, the way in which I needed to hear about it. Something that I needed to hear was not being heard. So I set up a mic right in the middle of it all and started talking. And I had no idea that it would end up turning into my life's work and mission. So I was diagnosed with something called Chronic Regional Pain Syndrome, CRPS, almost 10 years ago. CRPS, four capitalized letters. It sounds fake, it sounds made up, but that couldn't be farther from the truth. It is one of the most painful diseases on the earth. Lyndsay Soprano (03:06.71) On the McGill's pain scale, it is higher than natural childbirth and amputation. And it's also called the suicide disease because we lose way too many people to it each year. I like to say, yeah, I'm just walking around having fucking babies all day. I laugh at that, but that is how painful some of these days are for us in the CRPS community. And you'll quickly learn if you're new here that as a host, depravity is quite literally at the center of how I giddy up every day, all right? So settle down if you don't like an F-bomb here and there. CRPS causes something called central sensitization. The nervous system gets stuck in a loop, firing pain signals continuously, even when there's no new injury and no reason for it. It's like a car alarm that won't turn off. My bed sheets at night against my skin feel like knives. That's the allodynia. And each step Feels like I'm walking on Legos, gravel, hot coals, broken glass, you name it. And when standing and walking feels like you are being burned alive all day long. It's exhausting. The name CRPS sounds like a bunch of old white dudes sat in a room and threw a few names out about something they knew and know very little about. And we're like, sure, that sounds about as vague as possible. And we just don't care. At least that's what it feels like, right? When we go to all these doctors' appointments and see all these different practitioners and we're up late because we can't sleep and we're on Instagram and we're looking for things for pain. Do any of these guys that we go to give a shit about who and what they are diagnosing? Because I can tell you some days it feels like they are working against us. Do any of them go home at night after work, sit down for dinner, talk with their sweeties and say, you know, I had this poor gal come in today. She was in her wheelchair, sobbing. Handed me this mini novella of everything that she's done and tried to heal. Do you then go and research thoughtfully about who you just met today? Or are we just another number that you can bill against after spending a whopping like 15 bloody minutes with us? Maybe. The medical gaslighting, especially as a woman in pain, is unconscionable. And I'm not discounting the guys out there, okay? It's just that statistically, women get ignored more than a dude does. Lyndsay Soprano (05:31.852) I mean, unless we're wearing short skirts, right? Chronic pain and illness take over your whole entire life, your relationships, your work, your play, your love life. It hurts to shower. It hurts to chew, to sit, to stand, you name it. Always grasping for the right words to explain it. The sensations they tell us to call our pain. Well, this ain't sensational. I can tell you that much. You're always living on the edge of. What more can I possibly take? Today was more horrific than yesterday for crying out loud. How can it get any worse? And then it does. You want to give up, and then you don't. And the cycle just keeps repeating. Over and again, we must tell our stories. And most of the time it's on deaf ears. It's as if the world around us has put us on mute. But this show isn't a Zoom call where you can mute our voices. Hail to the no. Because pain isn't just something to manage and survive. It's something you can use to connect, to heal, and to build something that truly matters. And with this season, it's gonna be our biggest yet. We have so much in store for you. I can barely stand how excited I am for all of us in the chronic pain and trauma space and for our loved ones as well. No matter where you are on your journey, we got you. I got you, babe. Or if you're a doctor or a practitioner that listens to this show and a light bulb turns on about a patient or a client of yours, praise little baby Buddha. If you are the boss or a coworker of someone like us, thank you for listening and understanding your employees and contractors. Please listen to them and believe them because they aren't making this shit up. And if you're a loved one, the parent, the sibling, the bestie, the daughter, the son, the spouse, the sweetie, Please keep holding on for us in times that we cannot do it alone, which is more frequent than you know. That's because we have become Academy Award winners of faking it, right? I always like to say, Meryl Streep ain't got shit on me, and I can tell you that much. And Meryl, if you're listening, I would really love to meet you because it's gonna be up against me and you for the next Academy Award performance. So stay aboard the Giving Pain Purpose and Lindsay Soprano train here because it's gonna get wild. Lyndsay Soprano (07:59.266) And it's gonna change you. And it's gonna change me. A few things before I let you go here. We can only help others if you share our episodes and the show with anyone who just might need to hear what we have to say. Give us a five-star review, because nothing would be better for us than a five-star review on the platforms that you listen on. Get more engaged in social, share these posts. Don't just like them. In addition, we just launched our merch store called The Giving Pain Purpose Shop. So be sure to check it out at thegiving pain purpose shop.com. And even more exciting, if that is even possible, we also are launching a new online community for women, built by women, called the Pain Hub. It is a bold new community built for women who are ready to transform their pain into power, where your stories are shared, support is real, and pain is given purpose. It's a community for women who've survived or are fighting to what changed them and live with the aftermath every day. The Pain Hub is a community built on shared truth, real support, and giving pain purpose together so that no one has to carry it alone. So head on over to the Pain Hub and slap your email address into the subscription form for updates and early access to this incredible community that I am building for you and your loved ones. I can't wait to see where the season takes us and how it changes you. You are exclusively invited to share this purposeful VIP pain journey together. Let's get to the heart of how to heal with you by my side. Please follow Giving Pain Purpose wherever you digest your podcast content. We will be there. Visit us at giving painpurpose.com and follow us on all the socials. Thanks for listening, my little VIPs. Catch you. On the other side.