Kindness Makes a World of Difference

After thyroid cancer, Crohn's disease, and other autoimmune diseases defined her twenties and thirties, FRANCESCA GROSSMAN was left feeling alone with chronic pain. This invisible companion affected her whole life intimacy, motherhood, friendship, work, and mental health - but after more than twenty years she started talking to others and discovered that her story was not unique, and neither were her feelings of loneliness and seclusion. Francesca decided to help her fellow chronic pain sufferers feel a little less alone, and her latest book, Not Weakness: Navigating the Culture of Chronic Pain, is a testament to their ability to live and love with chronic pain.

I have lived in chronic pain for most of my adult life. One thing I can tell you with absolute certainty is that the difference between living with it and giving up has almost always lived in kindness.

The first time I lost control of my bowels, I was on the platform of the Number 6 train. I was twenty-six, and a cup of coffee I’d sipped led to stomach pain I can only classify as agonizing. Though I did everything I could to get up the subway steps and into a nearby restaurant, my cold shaking body let go three steps from the top. The problem in a situation like that, I have since learned, is walking makes it worse. And stopping gets you nowhere.

I sprinted in shame to my gym, a place that had been my salvation. I rushed into the shower with all my clothes on, peeled them off, pumped bright green body soap into my jeans, and threw away my underwear in a naked dash from the scalding shower to the metal bins.

A young woman wearing a black staff T-shirt approached me in the locker room. I had seen her many times before, folding towels mostly, mopping the floor, and I always nodded my hello. She always nodded back. “Are you okay?” she asked. I was unable to speak. “Do you want me to wash and dry those for you?” she asked gently, pointing at the heap of wet clothes on the bench beside me.

I sighed, nodded my thanks and sat in tiny white towels for the next forty-five minutes while this beautiful woman did my laundry.

While the moment remains one of my most humiliating, I think it’s important to reflect on the kindness this woman showed me. She didn’t have to help. She had a lot to do, she was at work, she had a life that did not include cleaning up after me.