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5 CRPS Awareness T-Shirts You’ll Love | Complex Regional Pain Syndrome Tees

July 26, 2018 by Elizabeth Pain Leave a Comment

5 CRPS Awareness T-Shirts You’ll Love | Complex Regional Pain Syndrome Tees

5 CRPS Awareness T-Shirts You'll Love | Complex Regional Pain Syndrome Tees | CRPS Tee | CRPS tshirt | CRPS awareness items | RSD Tshirt | RSD Awareness | Orange Ribbon awareness Tshirt

5 CRPS Awareness T-Shirts You’ll Love | Complex Regional Pain Syndrome Tees – Most of us know the key to understanding is awareness. These next few t-shirts are a great way to spread the word about Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS) while showing support to those who are affected. CRPS affects so many people and it can be diagnosed in any age, any gender, any race!

Most t-shirts are available in many sizes and colors and some even have youth sizes available.

  1.  This first shirt is for the CRPS Warrior, it’s made form soft material and can be shipped right from Amazon. If you have Amazon Prime you can get it in 2 days! Grab yours today : HERE 5 CRPS Awareness T-Shirts You'll Love | Complex Regional Pain Syndrome Tees | CRPS Warrior T-shirt
  2.  This next 2-sided shirt is also great for awareness and one of our best sellers! It comes in a few different colors and sizes, creates awesome awareness and lists the symptoms of CRPS on the back of the shirt! You can grab your T-shirt HERE or the long sleeve HERE

CRPS Awareness Shirts You'll Love | CRPS Tees | Complex Regional Pain Syndrome T-shirts | CRPS Awareness items

 

3.  The next shirt is a newer design and already off to a great start! “Strength of a Warrior” grab yours HERE

CRPS Awareness Shirts You'll Love | CRPS T-shirt | CRPS Tees | CRPS Awareness items

4. This next shirt “Strong is Beautiful” comes in a hoodie HERE or the T-shirt HERE

CRPS Shirts You'll Love | CRPS Awareness | CRPS Tees | CRPS T-shirts | Complex Regional Pain Syndrome T-shirts

5. This next shirt is perfect for RSD/ CRPS Awareness month, which is in November. Grab one for you and your friends HERE.

CRPS Shirts You'll Love | CRPS Tee | CRPS T-shirt

 

 

Thank you for looking! If you ever have a design you want printed for your group e-mail us and we would love to work with you on it!

 

5 CRPS Awareness T-Shirts You’ll Love | Complex Regional Pain Syndrome Tees

 

Filed Under: Blog, Fashion In Pain Tagged With: CRPS Awareness, CRPS Tees, Fashion In Pain

Benefits Of Meditation To Reduce Anxiety

July 3, 2018 by Elizabeth Pain Leave a Comment

Benefits Of Meditation To Reduce Anxiety

Benefits Of Meditation To Reduce Anxiety

Benefits Of Meditation To Reduce Anxiety – Meditation is a great tool to help you calm down and get back to thinking clearly when you’re feeling particularly anxious. It can instantly calm down the overexcited nervous system and have you feeling more centered and ready to face whatever live throws at you. As helpful as it is in reducing anxiety on demand, it’s even more powerful when it comes to prevention.

There are two components of anxiety that relate to the brain. The first is those random thoughts and worries that keep running through your head, and making you feel anxious. The second part is that as a person that worries and gets anxious a lot, you are using the amygdala, the part of your brain that’s associated with regulating emotions a lot. This particular area of the brain lights up more on scans with people struggling with anxiety. Since you are essentially rewiring your brain to increase activity in this area, you may think yourself into worse and worse anxiety. Thankfully meditation can help with both.

First I want you to realize that this isn’t the only aspect of anxiety. While meditation will greatly benefit you, it may not be a cure all. That being said, meditation is simple to do and something that can be done by anyone. I encourage you to give it a try. If you find yourself struggling, it may be helpful to find a meditation teacher who can guide you through your first few sessions. This will help you calm your mind enough so you can continue to practice this ancient technique on your own going forward.

For many of us, listening to a good guided meditation, and simply practicing it daily is enough to see results. Start by reading up on the benefits of meditation and how to do it. There are many different ways to start meditating. The easiest one to get started with is a short guided meditation. You can find online recordings, cds, and even smart phone apps like a play list, that will get you started.

Sit or lay comfortably, listen to the recording and follow the instructions. Don’t worry if your thoughts start to drift. Gently bring yourself back to the meditation. It’s surprisingly hard to focus on nothing but the meditation. Start with short sessions of 10 minutes or less. Once you get comfortable, you can extend your meditations as needed. The key to getting better at meditating and reaping the benefits of calming down those random thoughts and worries, as well as rewiring your brain to be less anxious in general, is daily practice. Get started, and then make it part of your daily routine.

 

Have you found meditation helpful for your anxiety?
Please comment below and tell us about it.

 

Benefits Of Meditation To Reduce Anxiety

Filed Under: Blog, Mental Health and Chronic Pain Tagged With: meditation to help anxiety, tips for anxiety

Chronic Mom Overwhelm – Parenting a Child With Chronic Illness

June 29, 2018 by The Unbroken Smile Team Leave a Comment

Chronic Mom Overwhelm – Parenting a Child With Chronic Illness

Chronic Mom Overwhelm - Parenting a Child With Chronic Illness - Raising a Child With Chronic Pain | Child With CRPS

Chronic Mom Overwhelm | Parenting a Child With Chronic Illness – Having a sick kid is hard. It is hard on the child who doesn’t want to be sick. It is hard on siblings who crave the attention given to a sick sibling or whose normal life is interrupted as parents scramble to find support. It is hard on Dads who have an instinct to protect and fix the problems they encounter and it is hard on Moms who hold things together and care for the whole family and all of the pieces independently. I cannot speak to the burden of Dads except to say that it is heavy and can collapse an entire worldview and set of life expectations. I also cannot speak for all moms or all families as roles vary and some folks are just stronger than me. But, as a short term illness becomes something, or maybe multiple things, with no cure or clear path of treatment, the strain on all involved seems to grow exponentially.

 

I remember the first time my son was sick. He was about 3 months old and wound up with strep throat. He was miserable and I was on full time mommy duty. It was exhausting to see him in pain and have a limited number of things I could do for him. But, it was strep and we know what to do for that. As he began to run a fever and not eat well, I took him to the doctor. The doctor looked at his little throat and sent us home with an antibiotic and instructions on what to do to keep him comfortable. When it turned out he was allergic to the antibiotic and wound up still sick with strep and covered in hives it was a curveball, but one that was managed easy enough.  Within a week he was back to normal. I breathed a sigh of relief and went back to normal. It was stressful but, short lived and while, at the time, it seemed a bit flustering, looking back, I see it was just a tiny bump in the road.

 

“Life curves, learn to swerve.”

 

Chronic Mom Overwhelm - Parenting a Child With Chronic Illness | Parenting a child with chronic pain

These paraphrased lyrics from Rascal Flatts have long been a favorite saying of mine. At our wedding when we danced our first dance to “Along the Broken Road” we knew already that life rarely goes the way we think it will and that learning flexibility is vital. Inflexibility leads to sadness and anger because it doesn’t stop change from happening, it just makes your adaptation slower and more painful. The road, all the roads, are “broken” and learning to handle and occasionally even find joy in your place on the journey can be incredibly hard, especially when, instead of a short jaunt on a challenging road requiring a white knuckle grip, you find yourself on a road trip with no end in sight along an incredibly broken road. That is what is like for me as a parent of a child with a number of chronic illnesses, some of which are genetic, that will be a part of his life, of our lives, forever.

 

Forever.

Chronic.

Life-long.

Forever.

 

We are no longer in a short skirmish with a health issue that folks know how to treat. We have wound up in a world where doctors look up your condition in a textbook or on the internet as you walk in the door, doing their first research in order to advise you. Advise the momma who has logged serious research hours, we’re not talking about just WebMD type sites, but reading the current study data from the medical journals and attending conferences put on by specialists in the field. Because, that’s what we do. Moms (and Dads) of sick kids need to know more than their doctors might know in order to be prepared to advocate. It is our JOB to protect our child and sometimes that means protecting them FROM the folks that should be there to help.  Sometimes that means advocating for your child against doctors, hospitals, schools, and even family. The burden that falls to us is being the sentinel that determines on the best information and resources possible what treatment to try, what doctor to trust, what therapies to attend, and how much you can do with the resources available. And sometimes, we make the wrong choice. And that, more than anything, nearly breaks us.

 

It is our job to be strong. To be comforting. To be supportive of our sick kid. To balance the needs of multiple relationships with other kids, spouses, family, friends, all while single mindedly working to give our impacted kiddo a quality of life that is worth living. We may have to work to provide income and health insurance. We may have lost our job or had to quit due to caretaking needs. We may struggle to keep a marriage alive, we may have a strong partner, we may be on our own, we may have had this change due to the demands of raising a sick kiddo. It is our job to minimize the impact that our financial situation or other struggles have on our kiddo, to protect them and allow them to be a child as much as possible, even if we feel like the world is coming apart.

These are the expectations and they are terrible. They are impossible. They are our lives now. We are no longer mom – the lady that gets them up and ready for school, provides food and comfort and homework help and goes about life taking care of the needs of children, which are already a rather extensive list. We are now, not only all of that, but we are a chief researcher, a provider of therapy services like OT, PT, and Speech. We are a taxi service to the wide range of therapies, doctors, and specialists. We are the keeper of medical records, the tracker of allergies, the educator responsible for not only educating the public about a disease they don’t know about but also an advocate for our child to receive an education despite their health challenges.

 

So, if you are feeling overwhelmed, if you at times feel so defeated that you cannot see how you can possible live up to these new roles and expectations, know that that is okay. Turns out you’re human and you’re not alone.

 

We are, like that little fluff ball in “Horton Hears a Who”. Our voices may not always be the loudest, but we are here.  You are not alone in feeling overwhelmed, in searching for help, or for needing it. Please, know, whatever you are going through as a mom (or dad), there are parent support groups out there hollering, “We are here!!” at the top of their lungs from that teeny tiny speck. We don’t know everything and we can’t always ease the burden, but sometimes knowing you are marching in line with others engaged in the fight, can be enough to help us keep on carrying on.

 

Sending you, moms and dads of sick kids, so very much love!

 

About the Author:

My name is Meg Boland. I’m a married momma of two, twice exceptional kiddos. I’m a special educational teacher and president of Ferocious Fighters. Ferocious Fighters is a non profit that wisely spends all the money given to us for supplies and shipping/postage to support the programs we run in bringing comfort to kids with Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS) or Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy Syndrome (RSD).
Check out our Donation Page for information about our programs!

 

 

Chronic Mom Overwhelm – Parenting a Child With Chronic Illness

Filed Under: Blog, Parenting with Child In Pain Tagged With: parenting a child with chronic pain

My Mother, With RSD/ CPRS – Complex Regional Pain Syndrome

May 21, 2018 by Guest Writer Leave a Comment

My Mother, With RSD/ CPRS | Complex Regional Pain Syndrome

My Mom With Complex Regional Pain Syndrome | Mom With CRPS | Mom with Chronic Pain Condition | A letter from a teenage daughter about her mom with CRPS

My Mother, With RSD/ CPRS | Complex Regional Pain Syndrome – Most people will never have to understand the stress of having a loved one, let alone a mother, struggle everyday while even trying to move around the house. Sometimes, I don’t even know how to explain this pain condition to people who ask. I can’t ever fully understand it and why my strong, brave mother had to be diagnosed when I was only 6. However, this pain condition (Complex Regional Pain Syndrome) changed everything my family once was, for the better. We all have become closer throughout the doctor appointments, her trying new medications, and helping her on the bad days.

My Mother, With RSD/ CPRS

It’s hard to make plans with other people. Never knowing if she will feel good enough to go out anywhere, but it makes for the best movie/ snacky days when I’m not in school. Throughout this life changing dog bite mistake, it made my mom and I closer than we ever would’ve been and taught us how to turn the worst situations into the best. Since my other siblings are in college, my mom and I have each other. I have her back when she needs any help. My mom is one of the most stubborn and independent person you will ever meet, she refuses for help most of the time but you must push past and make sure she’s going to be safe. And on the rough days, she doesn’t like to be seen, gets down on herself and gets moody, yet she will still make sure to ask how you are feeling and how school was. She will always make sure you talk before she does.

My Mom with Complex Regional Pain Syndrome

It really is amazing how much you have to adapt to unexpected things. I saw my mom give up everything she wanted to be once she was in pain. Growing up, I never knew what they meant when I heard “pain condition” and “meds.” I had thought my mom was too young to be in pain, I thought it was for people over at least 60. I could not wrap my small brain around the fact that she was in pain so I would always ask the most of her. She always gave her all with me and now it’s me giving her my all. I admire the strength and determination she has had throughout this long journey. My mother runs two Facebook pages, a website, a Twitter, a Pinterest and an Instagram all about RSD/CPRS and other chronic pain conditions. She writes on her bad days, which makes her hurt even more. But she wants people to know that they are not alone and will never be alone.

 

mom with complex regional pain syndrome

Click here to learn more about Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy/ Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (RSD/CRPS)

 

About the Author:

My Mother, With RSD/ CPRS

 

My name is Jillissa and I am 14 years old.
I like volleyball, poetry, and drawing.
My future plans include writing and traveling.

 

 

 

 

My Mother, With RSD/ CPRS – Complex Regional Pain Syndrome

Filed Under: Blog, Parenting In Pain, Relationships

When Pain Makes You Mourn Your Future | Ehlers Danlos Syndrome

April 12, 2018 by Guest Writer Leave a Comment

When Pain Makes You Mourn Your Future | Ehlers Danlos Syndrome

When Pain Makes You Mourn Your Future | Ehlers Danlos Syndrome

When Pain Makes You Mourn Your Future – In the past 6 months I went from being a thoroughly healthy 22 year old on a teaching fellowship in Thailand, to moving back in with my parents and battling debilitating pain as my full time job. I transitioned quickly from navigating my post-college life in a new culture, to navigating how to get help for my Ehlers Danlos Syndrome. In that time, I’ve started becoming familiar with the wild cycles of grief and acceptance.

 

Some days it’s fear—fear that comes in waves. What if I never get better? What if I’m never well enough to work outside my home? What if I can never get pregnant? What if my condition causes my partner to stay with me out of sympathy? What if my pain swallows my life and I never live? What if I wasted my whole youth preparing for an able-bodied future that I will never have?

 

Other times I’m at the mourning stage. When I first came home, I mourned having to leave my kiddos in Thailand, being torn away from my new community with no closure. But the longer my condition lasts, I mourn my future. Going out and dancing with my friends, moving somewhere new, beginning my career– I mourn it all.

 When Pain Makes You Mourn Your Future | EDS

Other times it’s clear to me that I can’t put my life on hold just because I can’t live it in the ways I want to anymore. Maybe I’ll get better, but maybe I won’t. The bottom line is that this is my life now. I need to modify my expectations, and be creative in finding ways to still do things I love.  That’s my acceptance phase. On those days, I hang out with friends, call my grandma, try out a new recipe. Maybe I send out a remote job application or make a protest poster for someone with a more able body to march with. I hurt pretty bad still on these days, but I try not to dwell on it. I accept it. I’m grateful to be having more and more days like this.

 

But some days I just can’t handle the pain. Today was one of them. I know movement helps with pain relief so I went on a slow, short walk. By the end I was so fatigued and in so much aching pain. So I took my Tramadol and laid upstairs in my usual side position with a pillow in between my legs. The pain had taken all my energy. I passed out in an instant, with only moments of energy to cry before going unconscious.

 

Rinse, wash, repeat.

Written By: Miriam Kelberg

Do you have Ehlers Danlos Syndrome?
Please leave us a comment and let us know what you have found helpful.

When Pain Makes You Mourn Your Future

Filed Under: Blog, Mental Health and Chronic Pain, Teen & Young Adult Tagged With: chronic pain and emotions, EDS

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