4:33am December 28, 2012

➸ Intro to Central Pain: The Pain Beyond Pain

Clinicians are often impressed at what good historians normal patients can be regarding pain, but the opposite can be expected pertaining to pain which the patient knows is not normal pain, yet is severe. Central Pain, in its fully developed form, is persistent torture. Humans chronically tortured often become alienated and withdrawn. It is so severe that, lacking a vocabulary, they may be very poor historians and may be reluctant to reveal the inroads the pain has made into their humanity. Poor verbal skills may also be impacted by the thalamic shutdown in this disease, making it difficult to prioritize and stick to the appropriate comments, with the appropriate emphasis, in the flow of conversation. The vagueness and strangeness of the symptoms are also factors in poor descriptive performance.

If my DPA hadn’t read this article and gotten me to see a doctor, I’d probably still be curled up in a ball on the couch indefinitely, doing nothing, because that’s how bad it got before I sought treatment. They still don’t know if it’s some kind of sensory neuropathy or central pain, but either way it acts the same and to this day I forget to describe it as pain because it’s so different from any normal kind of pain. I notice I can’t do things, but I forget to look for pain and get confused. This is why I wrote the other day that I was exhausted in the aftermath of pain rather than that I was exhausted and incapable because my pain was still an 8. It was, again, my DPA that figured out why I couldn’t do anything that day.

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