When your body is really messed up, like mine has been recently with my abdomen, you have a difficult time thinking of anything else. So when the gut gives you a few days of relief you somehow have some available focus.
So I started thinking about dealing with the nagging wart on my foot, tried to do a lot of hip exercises for that deterioration and figured out how to get rid of a bunch of the itching issues.
Unfortunately my gut is back to having pain and distension but for those few days I was focusing on some of the lower priority afflictions.
Which on one hand was great, on the other hand it taught me something.
In going through this process I reminded myself that often much of your pain and the side effects can be managed with a little focussed distraction.
If I can push aside some of the small things while focussing on the big things then I can certainly push aside the small things when I put my big mind on the task.