Happy April Fool’s Day! Instead of pulling a practical joke on you today, I have a fun challenge lined up; some CRPS-related word puzzles ‘-) Although it does seem kind of funny to use the word fun in the same sentence as CRPS, or Complex Regional Pain Syndrome…
Do you like word puzzles? Circle-the-word or crossword puzzles, for example? I’ve always liked playing with letters and words in those ways, but mostly to create puzzles rather than to complete them.
Yesterday I had another particularly nasty CRPS pain flare, and was trying to find some way to distract myself from the pain. I’d usually try mindful meditation, but it was too noisy for me. I usually need relative quiet for my meditation to work well, but there was some road construction going on near my house. Not only a lot of noise, but also vibrations from the heavy equipment being used to dig up part of the street.
My other go-to for dealing with pain flares is doing aerobic (also called cardio) exercise, but I’d already done 30 km on my stationary bike early yesterday morning. My legs were getting sore, after a few consecutive days of sprinting on the indoor bike!
Running out of ideas, to try to distract myself from my pain, I decided to see whether I could create a new type of word puzzle. It’s called a REBUS puzzle; I’d seen a few, but had never tried to create one:
also called Frame Games or Word Picture Puzzles, a REBUS is a picture representation of a name, work, or phrase.”*
Each rebus puzzle below portrays word or phrase, relating to CRPS or to chronic pain in general. Can you guess what each one is? As a clue, the placement of one word to another can be a key to the solution. Good luck! You can scroll down to the end of the post for the solutions ‘-)
Puzzle 1:
Puzzle 2:
Puzzle 3:
Solutions to the puzzles:
1) Limb on fire; the word limb is on top of the word fire
2) Life changing; the case of the letters in the word life change with each word
3) Painful; the box is full of the word pain
I hope you had some fun with these, because I had a lot of fun thinking them up! Creating these puzzles didn’t get rid of my pain, but it did force me to focus on something other than my pain… at least for a few minutes.
If you know any kids who’d like this type of puzzle, the US National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) has several on their “Kids Pages”; click on the link at the end of this post to see them.
As always, thanks for reading and have a lovely day ‘-)
*Reference:
US Government. Rebus Puzzles Brainteasers. NIEHS Kids’ Pages; Kids Environment, Kids Health; National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS). 07 Feb 2017. Online:
https://kids.niehs.nih.gov/games/brainteasers/rebus-puzzles/index.htm