When Is Pain Not Pain?
/By Carol Levy, Columnist
“Pain is not pain.” So says my new pain management doc. And he's right.
My main pain right now, the pain that keeps me disabled with trigeminal neuralgia, is from eye movement. Anything that requires sustained eye usage for more than 15 minutes results in horrific pain.
If I tell myself (what I think most of us tell ourselves when we are doing what we know will hurt later) just five more minutes, just four more emails or just one more chapter; I end up with horrific eye pain and become nauseated. It is all I can do to walk the 20 steps to my bedroom and lie down.
It can get so bad that I often end up laying on my bed for 2 to 3 hours; working to not move my eyes and forcing them to stay completely still, an almost impossible task. I wait and wait, and wait some more, for it to calm down.
“Oh my God!” I cry out to my empty apartment. “The pain is so bad. I don't know what to do!”
Sometimes pain meds help by taking the edge off, but the wait for them to kick-in is excruciating. “When will this stop?” I demand to the air. “Why can't someone fix this for me!”
The answer never changes. Total silence.
My new pain management specialist starts appointments with the question we all know only too well: “What does the pain feel like?”
I think about it. I visualize how my eye feels and what physically happens when it is bad.
“It feels like pulling against the skin and a pushing of the eye against the lids, sometimes burning. Sometimes, it feels like if I could just shut the eye hard enough, which I never can, that would help,” I tell him.
After all those words, I realize there is one word I have not used: Pain!
We all know what pain is. It's the feeling you get when you break a bone, stub your toe, cut yourself, or eat ice cream against a bad tooth. That is what most people think of as pain.
What I feel, what many of us in chronic and intractable pain feel, is not “pain.” Not in any normal or accepted sense of the word.
Why do we not see new pain treatments, outside of the usual drugs and opioids?
It could be because the medical and research community is not studying or addressing our pain.
Carol Jay Levy has lived with trigeminal neuralgia, a chronic facial pain disorder, for over 30 years. She is the author of “A Pained Life, A Chronic Pain Journey.”
Carol is the moderator of the Facebook support group “Women in Pain Awareness.” Her blog “The Pained Life” can be found here.
The information in this column should not be considered as professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. It is for informational purposes only and represent the author’s opinions alone. It does not inherently express or reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of Pain News Network.
