Living With a Trifecta of Pain and Cancer With Personal Reflections of COVID-19

The purpose of preparing this Feature Article was to explore and share my lived experience of living with multiple layers of chronic pain, with a diagnosis of advanced, aggressive and metastasized prostate cancer, and COVID-19. My exploration begins with the manifestations of chronic pain from a bicycling accident, psoriatic arthritis, with cancer treatments and the pain it creates during a panademic has added to the challenges of social distancing, isolation, and medical treatments. As with many patient experiences, we the person as patient outside of health care sometimes struggle to find the right words, the proper sentence structure and as Tamas writes about the expectation of others to provide, “Clean and reasonable scholarship about messy, unreasonable experiences is an exercise in alienation.” I write this while living with extreme chronic pain, continue cancer treatments while the threat and additional anxiety of COVID-19 looms over me. This is my story.