1:45am August 26, 2013

The difference between my pain levels and ordinary pain levels.

Due to the mestinon I’m increasing the dose of, I am finally able to get up a bit without collapsing.

I’ve been working on a jigsaw puzzle with my mother.

I’ve always had chronic pain but it’s gotten worse over the years.

The difference?

I used to have a job shoveling horse crap into a wheelbarrow and transporting it into a nearby pasture in up to 100+ degree heat. Really the only paying job I’ve ever been any good at. (Don’t ask about the disastrous bookstore job.  The horse crap job also involved painting buildings and fences, hosing things down, animal care, and miscellaneous other stuff, but the horse crap was the most strenuous part of it.)

The way I hurt right now after working on a puzzle is worse than the way I used to hurt after doing that job all day. Which was considerable enough given I’ve never had much ability to build arm strength.

I wasn’t in my wheelchair while doing this.  My wheelchair is designed to fit my body exactly. But even going out in my wheelchair and doing art for two hours is enough to bring on this level of pain.

So people who think that when people discuss chronic pain conditions, we are talking about ordinary levels of pain? When doing something that would never cause pain of any kind to most people, for a couple hours, is enough to cause pain as bad or worse than physical labor?  It’s not the same.  Not that laborers aren’t in pain and don’t develop chronic pain due to doing hard work all their lives, but there’s a difference physically between someone who hurts all over from something that you’d expect to cause someone to hurt all over, and someone who hurts all over for no apparent reason at all or from minor activity.

(I have pain from several sources: sensory neuropathy, joint hypermobility, migraine, trigeminal neuralgia, muscle spasms, tendinitis, assorted injuries, and arthritis.  So I’m always in pain whether I’m doing something or not. But doing things rapidly makes it much, much worse.)

Note that this post isn’t about stupid “my pain is worse than yours” contests. I have no use for this. It’s just a response to people who say everyone has pain so chronic pain isn’t any different.  I’ve always had pain, but even now versus when I had that job over fifteen years ago, is a considerable difference.

(And I think anyone who has pain of any kind, of any intensity, for any reason, should be able to discuss it without being told to shut up because everyone experiences pain. Last I heard, people describe near-universal experiences, such as love, all the time. I think the existence of severe pain makes a lot of people uncomfortable so they try to stop anyone talking about it.)

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