Pain

I just found out the other day that this past Wednesday through today a multidisciplinary pain management conference was held in Las Vegas. Why it's called Pain Week when it's only 4 days I don't know. That's half of a week.

PAINWeek is the only national pain conference that has been developed to meet the educational needs of physicians, nursing professionals, physician assistants, dentists, pharmacists, psychologists, and podiatrists.

PAINWeek offers a diverse curriculum and multidisciplinary faculty who will present courses in the following areas: addiction, complementary & alternative medicine, geriatrics, health coaching, hypnosis, medical/legal, narcoterrorism, neurology, pain & chemical dependency, palliative care, pediatrics, pharmacology, physical medicine & rehabilitation, primary care, regional pain syndromes, and rheumatology.

So I thought I'd write a little about PAIN--something nobody likes.

One of the popular questions about CP that gets asked to me (whether in a formal awareness setting or not) is if it is something that hurts. Good question. My standard answer is "not unless I do something stupid" accompanied by a laugh on my part and a confused look on the part of others. I then go on to explain how I should not do things such as walk around with a heavy backpack or purse or blog while I'm in bed (guilty right now). But the truth is that CP does hurt. More days then not (like right now, um, blogging in bed, yeah...) I experience minor pain for at least a few minutes. It's so minor that I don't even notice it anymore. I get up out of bed in pain most days but by the time I am dressed it is gone. I just need to move a bit is all.

Most days (like right now, ahem, blogging in bed) my pain level is at a 1, not like after surgery, like after I had every bone in both my legs broken at the same time and my pain level might have been at a 15 had I not been kept completely numb from the waist down (epidurals ROCK!), or when I was at the apex of my anxiety issues and I would wake up in tears with a pain level of maybe a 12 (baclofen & botox helped the pain lesson some but not the intensity of the pulsing spasms).

When I was in high school I walked around with a heavy backpack all the time and thus had significant pain all the time. Unlike now, where it takes 14mos or more to go through a bottle of 30 2mg tabs of valium, it used to be standard for me to ask for a refill every 4-6mos (no wonder I was depressed). But even then I would have told someone "not unless I do something stupid" like let my backpack fill up with crap.

Before it was my back it was my right leg that used to hurt, although not all the time and not every day. When I was a kid we kept an industrial sized prescription bottle of children's liquid advil in the house (that was before it was OTC) because I could tolerate the taste and refused to take tylenol due to its taste. However, I'm not sure if I would have flat out told someone that CP hurts. Maybe I would have said "just sometimes."

When I went for botox 2 weeks ago they take your blood pressure and what not and it seems like a new standard question is "do you have any pain?" I laughed in my head the same as when I went for a follow up with my orthopedist a few years ago and the nurse asked me if I'd had any falls. "Nothing more then the usual," I answered this time. "I've been on my laptop in bed." [it puts my neck in not the best position] But seriously, I was there for botox, a pain procedure; of course I had to have been having some pain somewhere or I wouldn't have been there.

If to me pain is as synonymous with CP as falling is (it seems like falling goes with the kiddies and us old folk get the pain, but at least my frequent falling has stopped) why am I then so reluctant to admit to TABs that YES it DOES hurt (if even just a little)? This is not something I have thought about before. I gather I don't want people to associate CP as something negative, something fearful, something that makes my life bad, because it isn't. The truth of the matter is now that I'm out of high school and I don't have to carry around heavy backpacks ever again, pain isn't something I think about all that much.