Hi Rosie
Something that might help is mindfulness meditation. It has its roots in Buddhism, but you don’t have to have any religious/spiritual tendencies to engage with it. I’ve just taken part in an 8 week long study on it that was funded by the MS Society, and found it really helpful.
At its most basic, it simply involves noticing what’s going on right now - what our body’s are feeling, what we’re thinking/feeling, what we can hear or taste etc. Much of the time we’re rarely in the present moment - we’re not paying attention to what we’re doing right now, instead our minds are wandering off, thinking about the past or the future, or wanting what we’re feeling to change. So a typical mindfulness meditation would be a body scan, where you scan your body from head to toe and noticing whatever the different parts are feeling, and try & let go of the desire to change any of the feelings. It can be tricky to get the hang of, but with practise it can get easier. And strangely, it can help with pain management. It sounds counter-intuitive - I would have thought that noticing the pain in my leg, exploring what it feels like, without judging it, wishing it was different or doing anything about it, would be torture. But although initially it can be, I find the pain lessens and passes quicker. Part of it is that it can be easy to say ‘I am in pain’, but actually that’s not true. In reality, only a tiny bit of my leg is in pain, and it’s not even in constant pain - it comes and goes, and the rest of my body is feeling lots of other things. It’s almost like zooming out of a map - it somehow removes me from it and makes the pain smaller.
And similarly with noticing my thoughts & feelings, I feel removed from any worries or anxieties I have, and I feel more in control. An analogy I had for it when I was doing the course, is that when I’m feeling stressed or anxious it’s like I’m on a ship during a storm, being tossed about, and I’m feeling seasick as a result. But by noticing the thoughts I’m having and naming them (e.g. I’m feeling worried about the effects of this infection, I’m feeling angry about being ill etc), it somehow removes me from the ship. I can (metaphorically) see the ship being tossed about by the worries etc, but I’m now no longer on it in the same way, and so I don’t feel seasick. Something to note with doing the meditations is that if I was to start one wanting to feel less pain or more calm, I probably wouldn’t - the aim is to simply notice and let go of the desire to change.
I’ve no idea if that makes any sense, but I’d highly recommend it, and (if you do) to stick at it for a while. One website you could try is called ‘Get Some Headspace’ - google it and you’ll find it. They have a free ‘Take Ten’ programme, which is ten meditations to use. If you like it you can pay to unlock more meditations, but if you sign up to it you can re-use the free ones as many times as you want.
Hope that helps - if you have any questions, give me a pm.
Dan