Back pain! I didn’t want it. I didn’t need it. But there it was anyway, disturbing my sleep, demanding that I sit when there are no chairs, lie down when I would rather sit. The psychologist in me had a question. It’s a question I have asked of people who are in pain. Are you controlling the pain, or is it controlling you? But somehow that question was not quite enough to make a difference. Funny, it sounded like such a good question when the pain belonged to somebody else. But what are you to do when you acknowledge that the pain is controlling you?
I tried to explain my pain to others, walking that tight rope between being a whiner and giving enough information. My listeners were sympathetic. ”Oh yes,” they’d say, ”that can be bad. I know a woman named Laura and sometimes Laura has such bad pain that she has to take a week off work.”
And there we’d be, talking about Laura. Now how did the conversation turn to Laura? Could they not see that my pain wasn’t the kind of pain other people get? It was really, really big, and I’d be off work too if I didn’t have so much to do.
I kept going back to the doctor. The doctor had a question. On a scale of one to ten, with ten being the most pain imaginable, what number would I give my pain?
”Ten,” I wanted to shout. But then I remembered the time when I woke up from surgery feeling like a truck was parked on my chest, and the hours in the Emergency ward waiting for somebody to look at my broken arm. Maybe this pain was only a nine. That confused me.
The doctor said, ”Please, just pick a number.” I didn’t want to pick a number, but I clearly remembered asking others to pick a number. So I picked seven, just in case I was over-estimating. Nobody likes a whiner.
But I was still hurting. My husband said he’d join me at the doctor’s office. Maybe he’d read the articles about taking a loved-one for support. He reminded me that our poodle once had back pain. That suffering dog screamed all the way to the vet’s, then stopped screaming the moment we laid him on the vet’s table.
“Don’t worry,” said the vet. It was all in a day’s work for him. “The stress of getting here has likely given him an adrenaline rush that temporarily killed the pain.”
Just to prove he knew what he was talking about, he knew how to get the screaming started again. We were grateful for that. We left the vet’s office with painkillers and vitamins. I don’t recall our poodle thanking us for any of it.
We were huddling in the cramped little examining room, remembering all of this, when the doctor came in asking, “How are you today?”
“Fine,” I said bravely, and then, sensing this might not be enough, I added, “I’m still having more pain than I’d like.”
Here is the point where my husband took over. Maybe he read the articles that tell you to give your doctor a functional description of the limitations your pain imposes. “I want to say,” he said, “that she has a lot of pain. In fact, she has so much pain that I have to wash and dry the dishes myself because she can’t stand up long enough to do either, let alone both.”
It might have been my imagination, given that I was not at my best. But I sensed a real bond forming between these two. And it might have been coincidence, or possibly the X-ray results, but that was the same day I got the prescription for a painkiller that really worked. And I’m still wondering if or how I might be helped by vitamins.
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