Pain

[freddiefraggles]

I've been thinking recently about trying to describe pain. Describing pain has never been easy for me. I think this probably stems from being quite young when this whole thing started and not having the vocabulary for it. And possibly also that the best way to describe it is in relation to itself ("Worse than it was yesterday," or "More achey than last week," for example).

Let's try describing how it feels at the moment. Stiff in the joint with dull stabbing pains when moving or applying small pressure and more acute stabbing pains in the joint when putting full weight down. It's quite complex and it changes depending what time of day it is, how much exercise I did yesterday, how long I've been sitting down, if I've sat in a way that cuts circulation off to my legs, how many spoons I think I have... yeah, the list goes on a bit longer.

I started off thinking I'd write a post entitled The Pros and Cons of not taking painkillers explored but I seem to have veered off course somewhat. I have noticed that the problem with not taking painkillers is that when I have a headache I can't take anything for it. And I've had some pretty awful headaches this week.

Comments

[fearmeforiampink]

I was thinking something broadly similar recently. Amongst other things, one of the things that annoyed me about FailDoctor was that he didn't seem to want to listen to me trying to describe the level of pain.

I tend to look at things in terms of the level of distraction/effect on activities, probably as a result of both having a fairly high pain threshold, and a tendency to not go specifically to the doctors about something unless it's actually feeling impossible to work around it. As an example, I find my general level of joint pain slightly distracting, when I was writing my medical CV my knuckles and elbows were noticeably distracting, and when my hip shifts it's heavily distracting and a reason to cut short what I'm doing if possible.

Rolled into that is the duration and reaction to other actions of the pain – a short sharp spike of pain is annoying, but once it's gone I can just carry on doing whatever, whereas a pain that's ongoing, and spikes with a particular neccessary repeated movement can be rather less 'sharp', but much more distracting.

On the one hand, that tells you how troubling the pain is to me, on the other hand, it's possibly less useful for actual diagnosis of cause.

While it may be more for children and people who don't understand a given language, I think the faces pain scale gets used quite a lot. I quite like the one I've linked to because as well as "Moderate" or "severe" it also includes a "How ignorable is it"

[freddiefraggles]

Thanks for the link, I think I'll print that out.

[(Anonymous)]

[Aardvarkoffnnord]

Although to do with insect stings: Schmidt Pain Index (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schmidt_Sting_Pain_Index)

[freddiefraggles]

That is also interesting :) I think 3.0 "bold and unrelenting," is a good description.