It isn't the pain, really
The most difficult part of living with chronic pain is not the pain itself. After some decades, you learn to live with pain; you move differently, sit, rest and sleep differently, use tools and the laws of physics to perform everyday tasks, like rearranging a few pieces of furniture or opening those goddam inner bags. After some decades, your pain-threshold can become exceptionally high.
So, for me, and probably a lot of others who live with chronic pain, the hardest part is not the sensation of pain, but the sensation of being in a body that weighs several times more than its actual weight.
I don’t know what this phenomenon is, but it is how I feel every day for three to five hours before it’s time to take my pain medications. I take them three time a day. So, for a total of approximately 12 hours during the day, every day, I am moving a body that seems to weigh several hundred pounds.
To be precise, it’s my bones that feel heavy, as though each bone weighs about forty pounds, and my worn, weak body has to move them constantly when I’m not at rest. It’s a strain, and it’s exhausting. It’s why people in chronic pain need to sit for a while, intermittently, throughout the day.
Pain medication doesn’t make the pain go away. There is always pain. But medication does reduce the sensation of it, sometimes by a good 50%. And while you feel less pain, you feel lighter, and you can move like a normal person. Except you don’t completely, because you’ve trained your muscles. But you are quicker and less clumsy.
You are also more focused on tasks at hand and more aware of your environment because you aren’t focused on the weight of your pain and the chore of simply moving.