Sunday Inspiration: Acute Pain vs Chronic Pain

Each Sunday I share something from another blog or website that made me really think. This week I’m sharing a post from Kate, The Almost Great, on the topic of acute pain vs chronic pain. She dislocated her knee and the responses she got were interesting, as was her post. Here’s a quote:

“But their next comment (said by 90% of the people I told) sort of stopped me. “Wow, that must have hurt.”

You’re right. It did hurt. It hurt so much that I cried in the middle of the day. However, it didn’t hurt so badly that I left work early. And, as a whole, I’ve been in much more pain before. The days when I didn’t go into work because I was in too much pain? More pain than dealing with this.”

This post brought to mind several things:

1. Chronic Pain is invisible. No one stops to say “Wow that must really hurt” when we say that we live with chronic pain, Fibromyalgia, Lupus, whatever. They just shrug and move on. They can’t see it, so they don’t really understand it. People do however equate knee braces, casts, etc to pain. They’ve been trained through years of television and media that those things mean that someone got hurt. They may never have experienced a dislocation or a broken bone, but they understand that it hurts.

2. And this is the big one, chronic pain hurts worse than acute pain. Sort of. I think the reality is that living with chronic pain allows forces us to increase our pain tolerance. The longer you live with chronic pain the more you get used to it, for lack of a better description. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt anymore, it hurts just as bad as it did (if not worse). We’ve just learned to tolerate it, because we have no choice in the matter. In order to proceed through life we have to cope with the pain. Whether we opt for pain meds or not, our tolerance levels will increase. Now, returning to the dislocated knee / acute pain. Because we have increased our tolerance levels to such a high level, something like becomes something we can almost ignore. It’s something that doesn’t hurt as bad as our terrible chronic pain days.

Sadly, this is true for pretty much all of us who live with chronic pain. Almost every one of us has a story (or will have) of some acute issue that we ignored because we were just used to dealing with pain. We shrug it off as just another Fibro symptom, when the reality it’s something more, something we should get looked at. But, we figure, why bother… it’s probably nothing. We walk the delicate balance beam of worrying that doctors will just dismiss us because of our Fibromyalgia and the need to make sure that it’s not something more.

So, what’s your line? What do you compare all other pain to decide if it is worthy of an ER visit? Or even a trip to the doctor to have it checked out? I know for me, everything is now compared to the month I spent dealing with TMJ (before we knew what it was) causing massive migraines that put me on the floor, an ulcer, and my gallbladder attacking me. That combo sent me to the ER three times in a month. I know that month increased my pain tolerance and now everything else is compared. If it’s not as bad as that I probably won’t go to the ER. As for when to go to the doctor? It’s a crap-shoot. I try to trust my gut, but I still put it off as long as possible.