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 near by 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.

We have this assumption that in shameful situations most people will be cruel; they will point and laugh, they will walk away disgusted, and/or they will not help. I’m not sure if that comes from the playground, the horrific news cycle, bad TV, or our own insecurities, but in my experience it is mostly false.

This example of kindness and help is just one of many I can recount. A woman stopped what she was doing to help me clean up. She looked at me naked and shaking, sitting next to a pile of wet dirty clothes, and she held out her hand to take them. She washed my clothes, and in doing so washed away some of the shame that had covered me too. Her kindness was a work of grace.

At the time, this was the most humiliating day of my life, and my response was to bury it deep within me. It was only the beginning of the shame I would experience in the next two decades living with a number of autoimmune diseases, which triggered and caused severe everyday pain and the total breakdown of my body.

We have this assumption that in shameful situations most people will be cruel;
they will point and laugh, they will walk away disgusted, and/or they will not help,
but in my experience it is mostly false.

Living in chronic pain can leave you feeling like there’s no goodness out there, that no one can understand and therefore no one cares. I have experienced – and the women I’ve interviewed have also – repeated dismissal, silencing, and shame by some of the people who were supposed to care for us. But many people have been saviors. I have had many doctors, nurses, aids, therapists, instructors, and friends who have done everything in their power to make me well. My gratitude runs deep.

The women who spoke to me for my book lit up when I asked them to tell me about their experiences with kindness. In almost every case, they were happy and eager to recount the moments and people who changed their lives simply by being kind.

Samantha was in a near-fatal riding incident in the mid ’90s, which left her with severe, constant chronic pain in her leg and shoulder. She told me,“ I’ve run across many kind people. Too many to count. A couple jump to mind.

“The first was a nurse who figured out a way to wash my hair in the hospital after my accident, without me having to ask. She knew it was bothering me to have dirty hair. Her name was Sophia. I’ll never forget her.

“The second was a paramedic who held my hand in the helicopter on the way to the hospital. Never got his name, but I do remember his smile, and the way his simple human touch made me feel that everything would be okay.”

Studies show that delivering health care with kindness leads to faster healing, reduced pain, increased immune function, lowered blood pressure, and decreased anxiety. According to Dignity Health, “In a randomized controlled trial of patients with irritable bowel syndrome, patients who were treated by warm practitioners who listened actively and expressed compassion for their condition experienced less pain, less severe symptoms, and greater health improvement than other patients in the study… leading to a general conclusion that better communication and listening have a positive influence on controlling pain.”

Love is big. But kindness is often small. Reaching out instead of recoiling. Checking up instead of writing off. Texting, nodding, smiling. A one-armed hug. A calming song, a cool cloth. A sweet phrase. A compliment. Small gestures that in retrospect make huge differences.

To the nurse that washed Samantha’s hair, it is probably just something she is happy to do. To the woman in the black T-shirt, maybe I’m a funny anecdote or maybe I didn’t register much at all. I’m sure it seemed like a very small thing to her.

But to me, it was huge. And there is no doubt that small acts of kindness like these helped save my life.

Love is big. But kindness is often small.
Reaching out instead of recoiling.
Checking up instead of writing off.
Texting, nodding, smiling.
A one-armed hug. A calming song, a cool cloth.
A sweet phrase. A compliment.
Small gestures that in retrospect make huge differences.