10:09am June 26, 2014

Why is it that every time I get really laid low by pain…

…I always think “The pain can’t be that bad, I’m just a wuss.”

I mean first off, I would never think that about anyone else.

But also, it’s like… I know that I lived with really horrible untreated pain from the moment I can remember remembering anything at all about the world, like my first memory of having a body involves pain. (Not my first memories, but my first memories where I could feel my body. I have memories from before that where I can’t feel my body at all, and I suspect that’s from pain-related dissociation or something, because I have later ones that are very similar in type.) And I know that pain never got below a six, but that I went on and went to school and did all this crap anyway that people would not normally do.

And I know that I have many times in my life pushed through pain until it completely broke me, and yet still believed that, at the point that it broke me, it wasn’t the pain that was the problem, it was me for being too weak.

And now every time pain gets that bad, I downplay it to myself.

“This isn’t an 8, it has to be a 6, or maybe a 5.”

Things like that.

It gets to the ridiculous point where I’ll never say anything is over a 6, at least when talking to a doctor. And then it’ll be like 6.25, 6.5, 6.75, 6.8, 6.9, MAYBE 7, when I really mean 6, 6.5, 7, 7.5, 8, 8.5. It’s like some part of me is completely reluctant to use an accurate pain scale. Because I refuse to ever believe pain is as bad as it is.

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