NCWN

Beat Chronic Pain, An Insider’s Guide by Maren O. Mitchell

Line of Sight Press
$9.75, paperback
ISBN: 978-0985311902
November, 2012
Healing, Memoir
Available at www.Amazon.com

Within this book is help for those with chronic pain who do not have information on drug-free alternatives. Often chronic pain sufferers search haphazardly for too long on their own to find the help they need.

While touching on a variety of methods, Beat Chronic Pain, An Insider’s Guide is intentionally brief, with short chapters, as the capacity to concentrate and retain information is greatly reduced in those with pain.

The “Introduction” offers reasons why chronic pain is not always recognized, described, and treated. Chapters have personal examples of the author finding a tool, a method, and using it to rebuild her life. These tools can be used by anyone with chronic pain to improve chances of surviving the stress of constant pain, and reclaiming one’s life. Included are suggested readings and resource contacts.

Please share this information with anyone you know who may be interested in fighting chronic pain by means other than drugs. This is also an excellent resource for primary caregivers, and those who live with, or interact regularly with chronic pain sufferers.

Maren welcomes email comments and/or reviews online.

Since 1987, due to a spinal cord tumor and surgery, Maren O. Mitchell has had chronic pain, termed “central pain.” For years, through trial and error, she searched for ways to live a sane and full life again. For over twenty years now, without relying on drugs, she has been accomplishing her goal.

One of the methods Maren found for coping has been writing. Her poetry has appeared in Southern Humanities Review, The Classical Outlook, The Journal of Kentucky Studies, Appalachian Journal, Red Clay Reader, Volume 4, The Richmond Broom, The Arts Journal, and the anthologies Sunrise from Blue Thunder, Echoes Across the Blue Ridge, and Nurturing Paws.

Poems are archived in online journals Wild Goose Poetry Review and Pirene’s Fountain, and forthcoming in The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume V: Georgia, Pirene’s Fountain, and Wild Goose Poetry Review. Her poem “Not the Poem” won this year’s 1st Place Award for Excellence in Poetry from the Georgia Poetry Society.

Maren reads at several different poetry venues each month. She has taught poetry at Blue Ridge Community College, Flat Rock, NC, and catalogued at the Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site. Another way of dealing with her pain is through the Japanese art of paper folding. By teaching, she shares her knowledge of origami.

A native of North Carolina, in her childhood she lived in Bordeaux, France, and Kaiserslautern, Germany. After moving throughout the southeast U.S., Maren now lives with her husband and two cats in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Georgia on the edge of a national forest.