Living with chronic pain is never easy; explaining it to someone who doesn't live with it can be even harder. I have had people ask me what it feels like, or how I cope with it. A lot of the time, I just look at the person like I have lost my mind. Pain is such a subjective thing, and telling someone else what it feels like is almost impossible, especially if the other person doesn't have a frame of reference from which to work.
We have all had a healthcare professional ask us to rank our pain from 1-10, and to describe what the pain feels like. I always find this so difficult. What may be a five or six for me, may be a three or a ten for the other person. My pain is mine, and it isn't easy to have someone else relate to that perception. I once told a nurse that my pain was an eight. She actually looked at me and told me that it couldn't be that bad because I wasn't in tears! I looked her in the eye and told her that when you live with intense pain, day in and day out, it takes about an eleven to bring me to tears these days. I could tell she wasn't buying what I was saying, but at that point, I didn't care anymore.
Ranking the pain isn't that hard for me anymore. I'm very in tune with my body, and I can tell when the pain changes even slightly. I function well at a five or six, but an eight starts to cause me to shut down. And, ten isn't high enough when the pain is really severe. Most people never experience a pain level of ten, so they can't grasp how those of us with chronic pain keep going. I believe that a lot of people don't take us seriously because they don't have a field of reference for this type of pain.
Describing my pain is much harder for me. How do you tell someone what agony feels like? A dull ache? Well, a dull ache sounds like a good thing most days! I have tried telling people that it feels like someone is taking a sledge hammer and slamming it into my back repeatedly, to which they respond, "Is that stabbing, burning, throbbing, or a dull ache?". Usually, I simply tell them yes, and then I am asked which one I'm saying yes to. The answer is simple....I am saying yes to all of the above!
Honestly, I'm glad that other people don't understand what living with chronic pain is like. I've often said that I wouldn't wish this condition on my worst enemy, and I mean it. That being said, I do wish that I could educate other people about what it's like to live with a chronic pain condition. I want people to understand that the condition is debilitating, but most of us force ourselves to keep going. It's the only way we can have a semblance of a normal life. I want people to understand how strong people living with chronic pain are. I want them to know that we have learned to function despite the pain.
Everyone living with chronic pain wants one thing....a cure! We don't want to live this way. I would give just about anything to still be working and living a normal life. But, until the day comes that they can cure chronic pain, I want understanding. I want people to understand that we didn't choose to live this way. We aren't exaggerating the amount of pain that we experience on a daily basis. We aren't lazy, and we aren't looking for the "easy" life of disability. We don't want people to feel sorry for us, either. We simply want people to understand that this is the life we were dealt, and we are doing the very best that we can.
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