#less pain
When Leo Tolstoy said “Is anything - not even happiness but just not torment - possible?” And Charles Bukowski said “We don’t even ask happiness, just a little less pain.”
im so sick of tiktok nurses and doctors trying to mock their patients for coming in and saying their pain is at a ten but not performing the pain for them
every time ive been in the hospital near death i was simply too exhausted to perform pain for these people. it was a ten on the pain scale but they thought i was faking it for whatever reason until they got my lab tests back and realized i would need to be checked in for quite a while
like maybe you, able bodied young doctor/nurse who has never experienced chronic pain and disability cannot fathom me rolling up near death and a flat expression unable to scream and holler about my agonies but I assure you some of us are just too fucking tired to scream about something we generally live with every single day
on god wanna punch the smug off their faces.
where do these people who have never experienced the pains theyre trying to judge others rankings get off mocking how chronically ill people express themselves?
one video in particular drives me up the wall, as it is some young nurse pretending to do patient intake in the ER and he is both the patient and nurse so he asks himself
what would you rank your head pain?
and he the patient flatly without emotion is like “ten”
so skeptically he as the nurse is like “so ten is the worst pain youve ever felt, like if someone with a chainsaw cut off your arm right now how would you rank your pain knowing that”
and he as the patient flippantly is like “9.5”
and the whole ~joke~ is “yeah youre lying”
but this situation really happened to my brother, he has a brain tumor and brain swelling to where he was dying, but was in too much pain to express it in a way an intake nurse would recognize as legitimate pain, so ofc they blew him off and he did get way too close to death because of that.
not all of us express extreme pains the same.
also need i fucking remind anyone, head pain and head injuries specifically can alter how you express your emotions and moods
theres a case of a man being literally shot in the head and he said he was in a lot of pain but everyone ignored that because he kept forgetting to act out the pain.
I have Cerebral Palsy. I walk and stand in eays that are not natural for our bones and after 28 years, that shit hurts. All the time. Its hurt my entire life, so I have a God damn HIGH pain tolerance.
Add onto that that my parents actively told me not to perform my pain. I was told that expressing or showing that I was hurting was selfish, annoying and needy. What’s the end result of that?
I get to an 8 on the pain scale and the only ways I perform that high of a pain are:
Deep breathing
Closing my eyes against it
Pinching my nose
Maybe rubbing the bones that hurt if I can reach it
I spent the last 5 or 6 years with my daily average being a 6 and I would hit an 8 at least 3 times a week.
Constantly being in that amount of pain means that you earn to mask it very well. And yeah, when I’m in terrible pain, seeing double, about to puke, my voice is flat as fuck. I turn really pale but I keep my mouth shut.
I’ve had doctors not believe my pain levels were that high regularly and all it did was make me reluctant to reach out for help managing my pain. They also refuse to believe my pain is that bad and yet I’m not taking opioid-based pain medication. I dont because I’m an addict. Same reason I dont keep a giant bottle of vodka in my house, I wont, but I also CANT. I promise if I did I’d become a raging alcoholic, just like one of my grandmothers.
My point, though, is that people are sometimes taught that they aren’t even allowed to perform pain or discomfort and fuck those doctors and nurses who mock their patients or dont believe them.
I literally had my back broken in four places as a kid and had to wait for my dad to essentially force the supervisors where I was working to take me to the hospital, because all I could do was sit and cry silently and they insisted I’d be screaming my head off if it was “that bad.”
My older brother has Downs Syndrome. He’s really good at masking his pain. Like, when he was 7 he had tonsillitis and my parents didn’t know until he passed out, because he didn’t tell them he wasn’t feeling well. We have to watch him to figure out if he’s hurting, and it scares the shit out of me that a doctor or nurse might not believe that he’s in pain because he doesn’t show it.
Would like to again point out my experience from being a firefighter/emt who has had to do triage at multi-car pile ups:
Dead people don’t scream.
The more hurt someone is, the quieter they are. People who are screaming are breathing. People running around and shouting for help have brain and motor function. It’s the person quietly sitting still on the corner who is going into shock from internal bleeding.
Also some people are just built different. I’ve had a person with a broken leg offer to limp themself to the ambulance. I had a woman complain of foot pain, apologized for calling 911 over something trivial, and when we put her on the 4 lead heart monitor she was clearly having a minor heart attack. The heart attack was presenting weird symptoms, which is not unusual for woman as they have higher pain tolerances than men. If we had assumed she was just being dramatic and skipped the ECG part of the assessment protocol she could have fucking died.
This is why when you go to the hospital every medical person who sees you keeps asking the same questions. We don’t know if the last asshat who did an assessment missed something important.
also, like, if I performed my pain according to expectations, I’d probably be shouting all day and crying all night
instead of doing literally anything useful, entertaining, or even distracting
I feel like this would start annoying my housemates fast and me faster
so like, how about I save expressions of intense pain for when it’s acute pain, something that needs immediate attention, not merely the chronic nonsense
Performing being in pain takes energy; pain itself also takes energy. At a certain point, the energy you would need to perform how much pain you’re in is deemed less important by the body than the energy needed to deal with the pain itself and/or the cause(s) of pain—or, depending on your circumstances, the basic acts of living. Medical and emergency professionals need to remember this.
