You step on a Lego and yank your foot back. Your hand strays near a hot stove and you pull away.
Pain is a dynamic event linking space, sensation and time with emotion, behaviour, memory, hormone production through complex pathways in the body — all integrated into a powerful experience. Most of the time, pain is temporary, a warning that something has caused or may imminently cause damage to our body.
But in some, the pain persists even when the painful trigger is gone. Pain persisting beyond 3 months is defined as chronic pain. The pain sensing, processing and modulating pathways become distorted, and pain becomes an illness in its own right. All the science aside, having chronic pain is a significant burden.
1 in 5 Canadians lives with pain as a daily part of their lives. It carries a huge economic toll, consuming 10% of the healthcare budget by itself.
More than that, the Canadian Pain Task Force Report states, “Chronic pain is largely invisible, and those affected often feel disbelieved and stigmatized.”
And they’re right. There is no lab test or x-ray that shows chronic pain. All there is to go on is the patient’s story. And patient stories vary — the same trigger, a broken bone, in some will resolve completely and in others, will evolve into unbearable pain. Some people will writhe and weep from pain while others will appear calm and collected. Some people will be unable to sleep, work, function while others will. It is an unpredictable illness. And although management exists — medications, physical and cognitive therapies — it doesn’t work for everyone and it doesn’t work to the same degree in everyone.
Living with chronic pain is a constant struggle to find an explanation for the pain, to navigate a skeptical healthcare system, to feel valued and to rebuild one’s identity and take back control over their future.
Acknowledging and bearing witness to this struggle by refusing to abandon the person living with chronic pain thus becomes one of the most compassionate acts we can perform.