Exactly i get nasty pain whenever I walk up hills or on Uneven terrain (Hypermobile Ehlers Danlos Syndrome has fucked up my legs) so my scale of pain is fucked
I have a whole list of reasons my reaction to pain is screwed, HEDS, Fibro, Occipital Neuralgia, Migraine… you get the picture; I also have a mast cell disorder and it’s left me with tons of medication allergies including almost all the heavy hitting pain meds. Unfortunately drs and nurses across the internet have been pushing this idea that if a person comes in and says they’re allergic to all but the strongest opiates then they clearly are just drug seeking, I’ve resorted to resetting my own dislocations/subluxations just to avoid being treated like an addict when they see that my only real pain med options are the big F, D, and K. One particular ER visit stopped me from seeking any help if there wasn’t a clear injury, my pain mgmt sent me to the ER after realizing that my pain level had gotten beyond what she could offer in office… instead of being treated for the insane level of pain I was in I was placed on a psych hold because apparently I was muttering “Please kill me so I don’t feel this” and the doctor took that to mean I was going to commit self-deletion. Show me one person who hasn’t had a “kill me now” or “put me out of my misery” moment and I’ll sell you some ocean front property in Kansas.
THIS. It’s so hard when you’re in pain everyday and you manage bc you have to and when you finally admit your pain is worthy of a hospital trip, they tell you that “you can’t be in that much pain, you look fine” and nurses are even worse with that. I’ve also had two different hospitals tell me “they don’t admit for just pain” and I’m like, I’m completely bedridden rn and nothing is working for my pain and u want me to go home???
I'm autistic and in all seriousness I had to FIGHT for my back surgery and was trapped on my couch for 6 months. I don't express pain "properly" I'm always more pressed to explain my situation than to roll around or cry. It took months not only for proper pain medication but also just scans and surgery. It took forever. I literally couldn't sit up for longer than 2-3 minutes but because I was always calm, no one cared.
I fully understand. It's the same for me. After injuring my shoulder an accident it took me 6 months to find out, what was wrong, bc I wasn't checked properly. By now I have learned, that when it feels more like pressure, the injury is severe. Pain is what I feel, when someone scratches my skin softly. Pressure I feel when seriously hurt. Took me years to figure this out.
Same! I went 15 years begging for help for extreme pelvic pain and being told "period pain is normal" "suck it up, other women have it worse" etc. Turns out I have endometriosis, adenomyosis, PCOS, and interstitial cystitis. Two surgeries so far and looking at a 3rd in 5 years. But I was always calm and articulate during appointments so no one believed me
Autistic here as well! Just over three years ago, I did something stupid and my reward was a compound fracture in my left arm. I screamed, ran inside and started to go into shock... And then I didn't. I was very articulate and didn't cry for 1½-2hrs. Sang, chatted and sat in agony until I was put on happy gas and bawled my eyes out from relief. During that time I also had to negotiate my arm (which looked like Harry's in chamber of secrets after Lockhart, but with bones) onto a plate for an x-ray and had to turn it 90°. ~4 years before that, I went around for three days with a fractured wrist that I broke on a school outing and my principal (RIP) thought I was being dramatic because there was nothing visibly wrong. My mother drove to where my father and I were fishing at a nearby pier (or, rather, he was) and my wrist was ballooned. I also broke my thumb as a baby and no-one realised until after it had healed the wrong way and the doctors had to rebreak it. Thank you for coming to my TED talk
@@absolootlynot Thank you. I'm also neurodivergent with ADHD and probably autistic as well. It might not classify as a high pain tolerance per se, but more like you said interoception issues. Feeling pain differently and expressing it differently than most people is what causes the problem.
I came into the ER with horrible pain. But I'm not the type of person to cry and carry on. I told them my pain was a 9. After blood work and an ultrasound the doctor came back in with morphine in his hand. I had a gallstone blocking a duct and pancreatitis. I needed emergency surgery. The doctor said usually ppl with my lab results are balled up in the corner screaming in pain. I was like I told you my pain was a 9.
I had a similar experience Told the nurse my pain was about an 8 … because I had given birth 4 times, once with very little pain meds on board. And I’m guessing I would have had more pain if I had been in a bad car accident.. the pain would come and go in waves, sometimes such that I could distract myself some with my phone.. though a conversation with my husband was too much… and then it was too much to even look at my phone let alone try to scroll through while thinking I was going to 🤢 vomit. The local ER sent me 40 miles by ambulance to a bigger hospital where I had both an ERCP and then lap chole to remove gallstones and my gallbladder and treatment for pancreatitis. I remember fairly early in that adventure and the nurse took my BP… she mildly scoffed at me when I said those numbers explained my headache. She replied that my BP was still nearly within “normal range” and thankfully my husband informed her that my BP normal was more like 98/50 not the 128/70 or whatever I was displaying at the time.
Same thing happened to my mum, GP kept brushing her off for months because she didn't really seem to be in much pain, eventually they found out her gallbladder was basically dead because of how long it had gone untreated and had to be removed. She had still been going to work the whole time
My wife had an ER visit for gallbladder pain and got scheduled to be removed. During that time, a stone got stuck in the duct and I know exactly when it happened. She wanted to try and stick it out until the schedule, but when her eyes started turning yellow a few days later, I convinced her to go.
I swear if you don’t react they say you’re faking. If you do react they say you’re faking. You can’t win as a patient and then Doctors wonder why patients don’t trust them.
Honestly this. Also, I often will end up making sure I have a high pain threshold (because I've got chronic pain), which means that me not having noticed pain is not the same as there not being pain. If it doesn't rise close enough to what my joints are always complaining of, I will likely miss it.
A doctor missed my ruptured appendix and didn’t take my pain seriously I was throwing up and doubled over in pain and he just told me it was period cramps and sent me home. I was in an ambulance and on my way to surgery the next day
@@fayerawcliffe7794 As someone who used to have throwing up/passing out period cramps, even if that's the issue it doesn't mean that it shouldn't be taken seriously. If it's "just period cramps" but it's completely debilitating, that's a problem too. Not to mention the amount of stories I've heard the inverse of what you said, people's cramps being so bad they had their appendix rupture and didn't realize it assuming it was just cramps. The idea that a certain type of pain is less valid because it's common and there's a very clear biological cause absolutely kills people, and I'm glad you're still here and safe today despite that.
@@kyradreamer4769 oh I 100% agree with you the doctor was sooo out of line for dismissing my pain like that even if it was period cramps. I just knew it wasn’t cause I wasn’t on my period lol
This reminded me of when I started having migraines. I was young, only 11, maybe, and they wanted me to keep a journal of the pain, when, if I noticed a trigger, etc. The highest number I wrote was 7 and it was "I'm out of commission" laying in a dark, quiet room. Doctor looked at the book and immediately said they didn't believe I'd had a 7 without even asking about what I described as 7. Without hesitation, I threw that book straight in the trash while making eye contact and never wrote another thing. Why fucking bother if they only response is "you're wrong"?
I had some of my worst migraines when I was young. Like throwing up from the pain bad. Saying you can't have that much pain because you're young is such BS
I was not being taken serious, was in agony, could not take a deep breath because it felt like my lungs were on fire, i got eye rolls and got booted despite having a very, very low oxygen content (was told to "just take some deep breaths" and ill be fine,) not getting the chest x ray i begged for, and being unable to walk very fast without pass I ng out, was wheeled out. I back in an hour later, demanded a chest x ray. This time i refused the wheel chair and tried to force myself to keep up, knowing i was going to pass out. I did pass out and got a gash on my forehead. The doctor i saw paened me off on another doctor, who reluctantly listened to.my chest, frowned, put in for a chest x ray and it turns out my lungs were all fluid. The next time i went in, i described the extreme pain i kept feeling for long periods a couple times a year and how i was completely unable to function. When it was clear that i was, again, not being listened to, that my protests that i don't want painkillers, i want ANSWERS or to figure out how to make the pain stop. Finally, the next time i was asked with an annoyed sigh what i would rate my pain at, i turned on a lighter and burned my arm, stone faced, and said, "worse than this, but not too much worse than this." They got incredibly upset and later sent a psych consult. A month later, i was diagnosed with a kidney infection and after an ultrasound, asked of i had recently passed a kidney stone because ome of my ureters was incredibly dilated. Pro tip: if medical staff, unprompted, keep reminding you that they are not giving you pain pills, and continue to remind you after you have stated that you don't want pain pills, that they will not give you pain pills, do not tell them, "i don't want your baby asprin! If i wanted to get high, i could go down the street and buy more potent drugs for 20 bucks, hassle free and i wouldn't have to wait 6 hours in the e.r. for it
I understand that there are people who take advantage of hard drugs, but the rest of us that don’t even want them in the first place can never get relief when we need it bc you get labeled drug/pill seeking. It’s incredibly frustrating and demeaning to beg for help to just feel normal and function at a basic level, like that’s asking for the world
I started telling them to document my request and their refusal of care in my record. I would also record with my phone. They started actually doing their job.
@@katelynnweigand5901 what's interesting is that the severe restrictions put in place to combat the opioid crisis (that lead to physician's reluctance to prescribe them) * have done absolutely nothing* in terms of said crisis. Creating MORE suffering is literally all it has accomplished.
I would literally be under a legal pain contract with 20mg of fentanyl literally stuck to my back, 30mg morphine pills in me too, and they still did this shit.
You nailed it. A few months ago I was in the ER for a major medical event. Nurses kept telling me I was so polite considering how much pain I was in. I'm like "yay I'm in a lot of pain but it's not your fault I'm in pain. You're job is to help and you're doing it."
Literally this. Whenever I end up in the hospital from my chronic illnesses, I'm usually in a severe amount of pain or I'm soooo sick. But I don't visibly show it. I smile at everyone, say please and thank you, am cooperative to care, try and clean up after myself. But I'm still struggling and I feel like some people think you're faking it if you are polite
I used to get really bad leg cramps when I was a kid. It was probably because I walked around pigeon toed cause I never experienced them again after I fixed my walk. Anyway, I sprained my ankle last year, and when the nurses asked me to rate my pain, I said it was around a 3 or 4, but I would suck in my breath anytime my ankle touched something. The nurse was convinced my pain was worse than I said, but to me, that pain was a three, compared to those leg cramps that had me immobilized, silently crying in my bed that sprained ankle was nothing.
You sound so sweet. I'm that kind of person too, who doesn't want to make my pain become someone else's bad day. There's a young man at church (I met him 4 years ago and have to keep myself from calling him a little boy) who has severe Crohn's disease and can be in a lot of pain at times, but even when you can tell he doesn't feel good, he's the sweetest little guy ever. 😭
My son has autism. When he was younger, he didn’t have an awareness of pain. I knew something was up with his foot, so I took him to the ER (complicated medical history means we skip right over Urgent Care, and it was the weekend with no access to our regular doctor). He was running and walking, no problem, when we got there. Luckily the staff was familiar with him, so they took my concern seriously. He hopped down off of the gurney when the tech came to get him for his X-ray. His foot was broken in two places. The same thing happened a couple months later to the other foot, broken in one place. Without their awareness and willingness to accept that he didn’t perceive pain “normally,” not only would he have been on two broken feet for who knows how long, we never would have been led to investigate further and find out he had a few conditions working together to make it so easy for him to fracture; that could have led to grave consequences.
My son is also autistic. When his appendix ruptured he told us and the docs that he was in 4/10 pain. He would complain of stomach pain, and then go play. No tenderness, no swelling, no fever...nothing to indicate he was having a medical emergency for 3 days, we thought it was gas. So did the urgent care guy, until they got the ultrasound out, only because it was the standard for abdominal pain in kids his age. I am glad the standards are what they are, my son not expressing pain well or feeling it the same could have been the thing that prevented him being saved by emergency medicine.
I broke all 3 bones in my left arm as a 6yr old. They were vertical pressure cracks. No one took me seriously because I cried only once right when it happened at the skate rink, but moved and did everything normally... until my mom looked out the kitchen window to me on the trampoline holding my arm to jump... 1 week after the incident I was now finally in a full arm cast for what felt like FOREVER. They never believed me when I said the baby was coming - BOTH times... and epidurals didn't take. They made me call 3 times and wait 45 mins to go to the bathroom and then YELLED at me for getting up on my own... like, I told you the epidural never took and you made me wait for almost an hour. I gotta pee.
I am 26, and when I was 20, I had pain in my hip when I would sleep. After a few months, I went to my doctor because the pain was now also when I would go from a sitting to standing position. The orthopedic doctor did not believe that anything was wrong because I wasn't in constant pain. He was very rude and dismissive. I asked for a referral to a doctor 2 hours from me. That surgeon was AMAZING. He listened and never made me feel crazy. I ended up having a 4 hour surgery, 2 weeks before my 21st birthday, because of how extensive the damage was in my hip. After the surgery, he told my parents that he didn't understand how I wasn't in constant excruciating pain.
Totally understand, and I’m so glad you got a doctor who listened. Unfortunately, a lot of doctors just assume that because it’s not something they’ve experienced, it’s not a big deal, but when you’re in excruciating pain, it’s a big deal, and they need to treat it as such.
Yep. Been told it can't possibly hurt as much as I say it does because I can still be "cheerful and polite". I'm cheerful and polite while pushing out a baby sans pain meds, while getting tattoos, and running on a twisted ankle in bootcamp.
Cheerful and polite is my whole personality, I can't suddenly shut it off. That's really stupid metric. Haven't they met enough people who are still kind while suffering?
As somebody who has never reacted a lot to pain, I had to learn that lesson pretty young, when I was 3 my brother and I were play fighting, and he yeeted me off my parents' bed, I cried and was comforted, went to bed, and we thought it was all good. The next morning when my mom woke up, she was pleasantly surprised by the house being so quiet, and when she went to the living room she found me reading and not making a sound. She knew that was not normal, she saw I was holding my arm close to my chest and she took me to the hospital, they gave me an x-ray and my arm was very broken. So if you don't/your kid doesn't react a lot to pain, don't be afraid to tell people you have a high pain tolerance, so many of my injuries and illnesses were left untreated for longer than they should've because I didn't show how hurt I was in a typical way.
The same happened to my brother. He fell on ice and his arm was broken. At school no one noticed it because he was not showing any discomfort. But my mom knew something was wrong when he didn’t want to eat ‘because he was not hungry’
My mother was told that my arm was definitely not broken because I wasn't carrying on IN FRONT OF ME. Then the doctor was super embarrassed when he saw that it was from the x ray she demanded. Lol. Same thing, I wasn't using the broken arm!
I’ve sometimes had to find interesting ways to deal with pain or panicking in medical places because apparently when instinct takes over I don’t really scream, I just swear like a sailor 😂
I never know how to answer those pain questions. Once I said my pain level was somewhere between Swearing and Crying. Then when Doc pressed on my belly while trying to diagnose, the pain jumped WAY past Swearing straight to Crying. Lol!
same with me. had costochondritis which is when the cartilage between your breast bone and rib cage inflames and it is extremely painful and every breath you take creates a horrible sharp pain. I was in the urgent care waiting room for over three hours crying. when they finally saw me they had told me the reason it took so long was because I wasn’t their top priority and there other people who are worse conditions than “just abdominal pain.” they didn’t take my pain seriously. but one female nurse FINALLY listened to me and thought I might have a appendicitis. I don’t think it was an x-ray but they did some type of scan and found it was costochondritis, a severe case too. They did apologize for not taking me seriously but it’s still very frustrating.
Same! I withdraw when I'm in pain. Sorry, I'm not a violent screamer. I've never screamed because of pain. I don't even cry if I can help it because it can trigger or make my migraines worse.
My cousin has an incredibly high pain tolerance that she believes was brought about by suffering high levels of pain as a child. I have been with her while she experienced delayed care in a hospital because she was reporting her pain as low enough that the docs didn’t believe something was seriously wrong until physical scans came back confirming a very serious condition. I stood there while they told her that they hadn’t considered what it turned out to be because they had never seen someone with the internal issues she had without the patient expressing extreme physical pain that made it almost impossible for them to even communicate. Meanwhile, my cousin had driven herself 40min to the hospital, walked in on her own and calmly explained everything very wrong she was feeling in her body, including the fact that she would place her pain at a ‘4’ but that she had a very high pain tolerance so they should probably consider that more of an ‘ 8 or 9’. Obviously, they didn’t believe her about the pain thing until they got her scans back.
@rheah7180 Pain can be so weird. I barely felt my motorcycle accident and ended up walking to the hospital after. It only really started stinging when they were aggressively cleaning out the road rash. I'm sure they wouldn't have believed me if I told them my pain was a 3, but it really was.
Pain is a perception your brain gives you to tell you something is wrong. There are so many ways it can be altered or misinterpreted. It’s really not a great measure of how severe an injury or condition is.
I've had experiences where the oain should have had me crying- as a kid doctors expected me to be screaming- because it was stuff THEY would be screaming over, I barely grimanced and never complained. But my fibromyalgia flare ups have me bawling- it took a decade to finally find a doctor who acknowledged it. honestly it's because I was so used to the fibro pain, starting at a young age, that getting stitches dug out of infected wounds and such were so trivial. And now that I've been getting treatment for ny fibro, minor stuff does make me say "ow".
I now refuse to only use numbers. It's always, "if stepping on a tac is a 1, being shot point blank with a paintball gun is a three, getting burnt on an engine block is a 5, lancing an abscess with no anesthetic is a 7, and kidney stones are a 9. My pain is # Edit: i also try to find out what kinds of paun the doctor has faced. "Ypu know the soreness the next day after someone kicks your ^⁵⁵? No? Have you ever been badly burnt? Had a bad shock? Been hit in the face with a baseball? Edit: I NOW try to find pain the doctor I'm seeing can relate to and use that to relate to those numbers. It seems to help in most cases. Edit 2: unless the doctor just SUCKS Edit 3 for the person who "daddy can do no wrong!" Whenever a doctor is mentioned, this is for you. Everyone else can ignore. For example, a bad dpctor who is not going tonbe reasonable can only be dealt with by saying, "i think-for whatever reason- you domt have the capacity to listen or be a neutral observer. Can i speak to.someone else." If you tolerate a shitty doctor, it could ruin your life. For example: after someone transferred my call, (cops? Insurance? Or maybe one of the witnesses or the guy who smashed into the back of my car called? Not sure. Moments are clear but most of it is fog) i know ome of the witnesses was worried. Inspoke to a 911 operator, the operator insisted an ambulance take me despite my protestation. The triage guy got me back that instant despite there not being a room for me and just being on the stretcher, and to my confusion, a couple nurses seemed incredibly concerned. Then came the doctor who didnt notice i had a traumatic brain injury. He refused to believe i was in a car accident, refused to look at footage of the car accident, was annoyed that i was shaking with a stiff back and neck, repeating things, slurring my words, confused, complaining of pain in my head, struggling with tasks like signing my name, struggling to recall my age and birthdate, stuttering, stammering, being confused about what was being said and forgetting the entire conversation halfway through a sentence, people seemed to me to be speaking gibberish, i was exhausted, struggling to stay awake, had erratic emotions, confusion about where i was, etc. The doctor acted like i was wasting his time and trying to find reasons why i was fine and am just uninjured liar. He got visibly aggressive when i asked for an M.R.I. he clearly thought i was lying about being jn a car accident. He refused to look at the photoS "You claim you were in a car accident. When? *something about weeks ago*"? *told him some variant of it just had happened* "Well, it a good thing you weren't going fast when you hit him" "I was stopped and he hit me at well over the speed limit 55, and he said he hit the gas instead of the break" Scoff and unprompted later: "Its good you didnt see it coming or you would have been injured." I rxplaimed that i did know he was coming i thpught i was about to be hit by Part that lives in my embarrassed Memory: "i thought it, um- i thought it was coming at me, a train. No, it was so loud. I saw the flagger drop his sigh and run and the engine was so loud. I knew a train was about to hit, no, sorry, not- um.... uh it was roaring. No, not tracks, a train. Not a train, sorry, no tracks um its for stores. Sorry, the track- sorry.. uh...... thought it was a TRUCK. Not a car truck. I mean a normal... One of those huge trucks with a train on the back. The freight train on the back. Sorry, freight truck. A truck with the- delivery-.... um a truck.. a truck was-... he drove a cop car. And then i was too embarrassed to say anything back. That doctor put "neck strain" no mention of losing consciousness, nonmention of a car accident, nothing went to my insurance. None of the standard paperwork was filled out until like 3 weeks later. And now i have potentially permanent damage to the speech center of my brain after my tbi was untreated
Yeah that’s the fucked brain wiring esp when you’re a kid 😂😂😂I could walk on a broken ankle for a week before having an adult notice I was being little too quite but you lightly touch my skin feels like you’re cutting me with glass 😂😂😂for me my stomach muscles can seize up and muscles around the rib cage worse pain ever, I’d rather take a punch and I have 😂😂😂.
@@HayleyPhoebeone of my daughters would cry more when she broke a nail than when she literally broke her elbow. The elbow break was bad enough that the er called in the orthopedic surgeon on a Sunday afternoon to set it. Her daughter also has paradoxical pain responses due to global apraxia. A small sliver in her foot and the neighbors might have thought she was being tortured, but when she somehow managed to break through a window resulting in several cuts and scratches? She was laughing. My daughter has been advised to seek medical attention for her child to rule out serious injuries anytime there is a possibility that such a thing could have happened. Stating that such children have been known to be diagnosed with poorly healed fractures because the child simply wasn’t aware of the injury.
when I dislocated my knee for the first time at 14 I got up off the ground, walked to the car and drove to the doctors office, only for my doctor to go "wtf is wrong with you get to a hospital??"😂😭 anyway they were all perplexed at how I was even walking on it without grimacing, but the pain was no where near my period pains so I just sucked it up. needless to say getting dxed with EDS and Endo definitely made sense.
I really like the pain scale that specifically describes how the pain affects your daily life. Like 4 is distracting but can do usual activities while 6 is hard to ignore and makes you avoid usual activities!
I was diagnosed with complex globally involved Ehlers Danlos syndrome when I was 8 and showed symptoms before that, the pain scale isn’t meant for people like me, if I read it and fit into it as best as I can, I’m at a 6 or 7 daily
I'm a nurse and we try to set goals with our chronic pain patients. Like you're in 9/10 pain, your baseline is a 6, what is a realistic pain level you want to be at? As a fellow EDS girly (with several autoimmune diseases too), obviously I wish my pain could be at a 0, or even a 3/4. But if I'm in acute pain, if we can get it down to my baseline pain I'm happy. Chronic illness sucks 🥹 we should create a new pain scale for chronic pain patients tho
Same i have eds, fibromyalgia, lupus, gastroparesis, and hypothyroidism(this is the only one that doesnt cause pain so i went ahead and listed all of them). My daily pain is 6-8 (6 most of the time up to 7 when its bad and on rare extra bad days all the way to 8 which is probably thanks to fibromyalgia telling me the pain im feeling is actually worse than it is) when i broke my finger that was a 4 so like the pain scale really wasnt meant for us
Another EDS zebra here. Same. I know I have a high pain tolerance because, for example, I request no anesthesia for dental fillings. Another example: x-rays show I have arthritis in my spine, but it was news to me. However, I think the main points the doctor is making in this video are true and important.
@@elisemorgan7591 ive had to go to ugentcares and ers for different severity of things a few times and I wish they would mention this. Because especially with my abdominal pain im never really going to see no pain but if it spikes to an 8 lets get in back down to at least 3 please
My kid was very sick between the ages of 18 months and 3 years. He learned how to just tolerate pain, because he was too young to express it when it was at a level below very high. When he was 13 he broke his wrist. (Distal radial ulna. A foosh) I knew the moment he stepped in our door that it was broken merely because he was holding his arm in a protective position. We went to the er immediately. 7 pm…. The triage nurse actually tried to tell us to go home. Because “kids with a broken arm come in crying” She made us wait until 4 am to to even get called in for an exam. 6 am X-rays. 7am cast and pain meds, then home. Yes. Some people have a high pain tolerance. And it’s often because they were frequently in a lot of pain before they developed the ability to express their pain with words. If someone says they are hurting? BELIEVE THEM.
My older sister (10 years older than me) was hit by a car when she was 13 and shattered her pelvis. Over the years, she's had 14 different surgeries to try and fix her hips. So, growing up, we spent a lot of time in the hospital. The downside was that whenever I would mention having pain or feeling ill, I would get accused of being jealous of my sister and lying to get attention. From the age of 4, I had to learn how to hide minor pain/illness from my family, or I would get punished/yelled at for lying. Now, as an adult, I genuinely don't react to pain at all.
Exactly i have a Connective tissue disorder and frequently get horrific pain but its all the time so i keep walking up the hill to bus stop even if i feel like im so much pain because i am everyday
@@brokenandcraked my story was similar with being born 11 weeks premature with lung problems and lower limb dysplasias. I was ten when I broke my leg sledding into a fence. The only person who immediately believed me was my mother-I didn't even have to tell her I'd heard and felt the crack.
It can be worse if you are AFAB. If your blood pressure isn't spiking, the ER doesn't seem to believe you are in pain and need pain management. It wasn't until the X-ray came back proving my shoulder was broken that I was allowed anything for pain. Husband had a kidney stone and got duladid (sp?) before the kidney stone was diagnosed.
That's because women lie about pain a lot. (And don't use acronyms. Just say women. "Women" is not a dirty word.) An estimated 20-50% of women straight up malinger acute or chronic pain and further that women tend to catastrophize pain aka exaggerate the pain they feel when reporting. Doctors actually account for these factors which harm women who actually are telling the truth about their symptoms because of others malingering or exaggerating. This is why it's extremely important to shame women who lie, malinger or exaggerate for social advantages because they are the reason the system is the way it is. Not the doctors who have to serve both populations and decipher who is which.
I grew up wirh abusive parents and "high pain tolerance" I'm absolutely sure beyond a shadow of a doubt that I broke at least 3 bones growing up and I never even got x rays, granted they only took me to the ER the time i was actively dying from dehydration from being punished without water but doctors and nurses saw me a day or two later and the response was usually, if it was broken your parents would have Taken you to the hospital or you wouldn't be able to stand (I know because I had to heal them on my own so they obviously healed funky and you can see where they broke, I think it may have been more than 3 but only those 3 healed funny so I'm only sure of those). It's about how much you react to pain and not how much you feel it. I've passed out from pain multiple times, sometimes while sitting next to medical professionals who didn't believe I could be experiencing that amount of pain,
happened to me too. Doctors should be our allies in these situations. that line always made me SO fricken mad-- "if it was bad enough your parents would've taken care of it" like. my parents starved me, beat me, deprived me of bathroom use, and used sleep deprivation as punishments. they're more likely to kill me than to ever give a flying f☆ck about my wellbeing. and the idiot counselor in highschool taught me well to NEVER EVER disclose abuse to a duty to report professionals. that stupid motherf☆cker called home. when I told him they were harming me, he was like, "Have you tried talking to them?" like you PoS you think I'm not begging for them to stop? I got so physically f☆cked up that week and the idiot counselor believed it when my dad said I "did it to myself".
I was born with Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis. As I get older, my tolerance goes up. Which is weird because my sensitivity in certain areas is also going up. If I'm in pain every day, I start to feel numb to it, but only a little, but the longer I have it, because it's degenerative, the worse it's gets, so I'm constantly just getting more and more tolerant. My previous bad days can't compare to my current bad days. My current “good” days used to be my previous fair days. And I get numb to the lowest amount off pain, but as my body gets worse, the pain gets worse, and the level had already maxed out. Today for example, was one of my worst days yet. I was in so much pain my body would twitch at random, completely out of my control, and I couldn't keep myself conscious. I never used to get so bad that my body would literally rather knock me out than deal with it. But that's my new worst, which means I can tolerate more pain than I had in the past. I tell doctors about this because I want them to realize that when I hurt, it isn't subbed my toe hurt, it's my body is literally knocking me out, possibly to stop me from going crazy? Maybe because being in that much pain used all my energy? I'll likely never know, I mean how would people even begin to measure THAT? But that much -hurt. It's so they know I'll laugh if they say “oh, so an extra strength Tylenol for that headache?” bitch please, I'm currently taking something that has the metaphorical ability to laugh at you for suggesting that. When they don't seem phased, I tell them my birthing story. I tell them: “I didn't think I was in enough pain to get my epidural, so I waited for it to be that extreme pain that everyone always talks about. I then remembered that some people don't feel as much pain as others. I started feeling a bit of pain, not unbearable, but definitely not fun, so I told the nurses I might need that epidural. They joked “you're not crying, you're not screaming, you're not ready”. I asked them to check anyway and within literal seconds people were running around to get ready to put in my epidural. I was nearly 10cm dilated and had they wasted any time at all, it would have been too late. In any normal circumstance, with any normal kid, I would have been able to give birth without it, I'm sure. But, it wasn't normal... He, isn't normal. As he came out, my doctor said “the technical term is corkscrewed...” he spun as he came out... With his shoulders -_-. Basically, while the doctor was stitching me up, I asked her how many stitches out was going to be... She wouldn't answer me. But my stepmom was there and said it was around 65. My doctor said “sure... We'll go with that...” it was clear there were more. That kid must have had sharp shoulders lol. So yes, I'm glad I had the epidural. I'm glad I couldn't feel the clearly a bajillion stitches. I'm glad I couldn't feel the doctors literally jumping up and down while pushing on my stomach. I'm glad those kinds painful, but only marginally worse than my normal cycle cramps were gone. I'm even a little glad that I had to ask the doctors if I was pushing because I legit couldn't tell, if only because looking back it was kinda funny. I'm glad that at that moment, I couldn't feel the pain my arthritis may or may not have decided to inflict upon my legs, if only for that relatively short time. I'm most glad that my now teenager ended up being safe, healthy and is the most wonderful experience of my life. But, I'm not glad it meant I would go out of remission, I would slowly, over the next 14 years become bedridden, wheelchair bound, have panic attacks and emotional breakdowns over feeling like I'm not a good enough mom because I can't play with my kid, I can't teach him sports, to ride a bike, how to swim, fish, fight if ever he has to (were a pacifist family, but sparring is really fun... If I hadn't be born with Arthritis, I would have signed up for martial arts and gymnastics and If likely be a dancer or a teacher... Sorry, massive tangent lol). The thing I hear most from others is about how “strong” I am. My points in all this? If someone who you think of as a “strong” human being tells you they have a high pain tolerance, it's because they want you to realize that that strength is working for and against them, either physically or mentally, and sometimes both. It's because they're trying to tell you to skip the basics, they have their patient diploma. You can save time and give things to them more straight. These are people who've been through shit, the people who've heard all the base line stuff before. The people who could work in triage without being trained. These are our kintsugi, our broken people who have been previously repaired with gold and made both stronger and more beautiful by people like you, whom take the kindness and care to wonder about things like this. Thank you ❤.
I very rarely run into other JRA kids-turned-adults. It's honestly really encouraging that I'm not the only one still struggling with chronic pain after all these years. I hope things get better some day, for both of us. (I thought about using a fist bump emoji but since I can't actually *make* a fist IRL, I'll just go with 👋 ❤).
@@Antimuffin lol, I couldn't agree more! And I'm laughing at the joke you made, not the reality behind it. Unfortunately for me, my “make a fist” is full on “walking”. Mine started in my knees and decided “ooooh, here looks nice!” about EVERY joint in my body that isn't in my back out neck. It then started to whisper sweet nothings in my immune system's ears and before I knew it, it started attacking my thyroid, platelets and muscles! (Hashimoto's, TTP [Thrombotic Thrombocytopenic, Purpura], and Fibromyalgia!) I was equally thrilled and saddened to read your comment. Although I'm really happy to find someone else who lived through similar experiences as I had, I'm really sad when others have to go through it; especially because you seem like sick a cool person. Although full on getting better isn't particularly likely, I do hope we both have as many good days as we possibly can. 💜💜
@@von0312 thank you for you incredibly kind comment. I'm glad if and when I am able to get people to think about things in the world they wouldn't have otherwise. 💜💜
Many immune system disorders are like that that cause arthritis such as PSA, AS and others. Or body over time just doesn’t compensate well leading to other issues. Be as well as you can.😊
When I was 13, a cyst twisted one of my fallopian tubes, cutting off the blood supply. I was in pretty severe pain for a week, and my mom thought I had pulled something near my hip. The pain gradually got worse. She gave me icy hot one night, which did literally nothing, and I woke up in so much pain that I threw up. While waiting for her to wake up, I threw up a second time. I woke her up then with “I need to go to the hospital.” On the ride there, the pain disappeared. There was just a weird heavy sensation, just something wrong in that area. It turns out that the tube had died around then. None of the ER doctors took it seriously when I got there. They thought it was my period (I hadn’t started it at all yet) or a UTI. The blood draw showed an outrageous white blood cell count, which made them order a CT. It took them hours to talk to us about the findings (my mom eventually had to bitch at them), and they saw that something was in there and opted for emergency exploratory surgery. So I now have a very clear idea of when something is extremely wrong and also harbor a mild resentment toward my mom for making similar mistakes to a lot of medical professionals in these cases.
I had the same thing happen, I was able to manage my pain for about a day by applying pressure before I was throwing up. Turns out my cyst was about the size of a baseball and almost twisted the tube to the point of tearing it. I had a hard time describing the pain and explaining where it was to the point that I was in the ER for about two hours waiting on imaging before any meds other than ibuprofen would be given. I got the first real pain meds when I was being rushed for an emergency surgery. I think they felt bad because they didn't even say anything when I explained that morphine and Norco have never been able to help manage my pain and I needed to jump to fentanyl. They just did it and into surgery I went.
The same thing happened to me, but due to my history, it took years of begging doctors to believe me. I had a twisted cyst, severe endometriosis, and eventually, I was diagnosed with pcos. I only have one ovary left now due to a hysterectomy, but it was the worst experience trying to get a doctor to believe I was suffering in pain. Even now, I have a large mass in my leg, and it took 3 years to get a doctor to believe it was not just a pulled muscle.
You are female and it was gynaecological pain therefore you aren't believed. Even if your mum advocated for you earlier she wouldn't have been believed either. Ask any woman who suffers from endometriosis and/or adenomyosis from starting their periods and was diagnosed 10+ years later.
The same goes for emotions, too. Some people assume their problems are far worse than other people's because they have a bigger reaction to something, but people can be equally frustrated or sad or happy and have completely different reactions to it. Someone who's "more patient" isn't just miraculously immune to frustration, they just don't have a strong reaction to it. Someone who doesn't smile much or doesn't react strongly to a gift isn't unhappy or ungrateful, they just don't react as strongly to those emotions. Especially people that are considered "tough" emotionally will be treated more harshly just because they tolerate it more. That doesn't make it any less hurtful or cruel, it only enables more of it before it gets to a breaking point.
As someone who has had a few kidney stones in my lifetime, I’ve experienced doctors not taking “pain” seriously. The first time I had a kidney stone, they said it was small enough to pass at home and sent me off with extra strength Tylenol. The next time I had a kidney stone, I expressed in strong language that it reminded me of back labor, the doctor gave me morphine. I like that doctor. Eventually, I decided to get lithotripsy and I’ve been stone-free for years.
So understand, I’m a chronic uti sufferer and I have had one kidney stone. The dismissive attitude is the worst, especially when you end up in the ER at 3 in the morning, just praying the doctor can fix you and relieve your pain, and they not only send you home to suffer, they make you feel bad about even coming there and taking up their time.
I was told to take fkn Tylenol post surgically after a double mastectomy. I'm pretty sure everyone knew that I was in pain. Throughout treatment, I made it a game with myself to not ask for pain management because nothing happened when I did. A high pain threshold is all about how much pain you've been forced to needlessly suffer through. But, yeah, I'm bitter.
I honestly should have used that when I went into labor. We waited as long as possible, but I was progressing so quickly, we went in. They really tried to send me home until I was farther along just because they wouldn’t believe us since I seemed so relaxed about it. I was in a lot of pain, but it was tolerable so I do what I always do, which is proceed as usual until I literally can’t. When they came to my room telling me I needed to go until I was closer to birth, I stood up to grab stuff and my water broke all over the floor lol had my daughter while in back labor about six hours later. They also didn’t get the anesthesiologist in until I was 9cm dilated because again, they didn’t think it was so bad until I was screaming bloody murder from the back labor. Lesson learned: always be your own best advocate and trust your own knowledge of your body.
This is very true. I went to an ent specialist and he said things like "I'm surprised you waited this long" and "most people are in here because of pain, in this situation, before hearing problems" "why didn't you come in before this". If you don't know you have a "high pain tolerance" then they don't know you're in a lot of pain because you couldn't possibly think to tell them 😅 so you don't even get the chance to mention it and do that whole song and dance. But in retrospect, some one who went to school to know these things should have noticed something was off, just saying 🤷♀️
I rode my bike to the hospital when I had ovarian torsion and didn’t feel like it was super terrible… just annoying. It was an instance of “this is really not that bad but maybe I should go to the hospital because it’s in my right lower abdomen.” They almost couldn’t save the ovary because it was nearly dead when they got to it. I wonder if I was in (or showed I was in) more pain if they would’ve taken it more seriously and gotten the imaging sooner 🤷🏻♀️ when I was in PA school, we were taught that ovarian torsion ALWAYS causes excruciating pain and I raised my hand and was like “I mean… always is a very strong word…”
I had to do some autonomic tests a while ago and that included the hand in iced water one, and it baffled me. I have reynauds for one so touching ice is pretty damn painful, but also something that has to be done sometimes and in this case definitely. I managed to keep my hand in for the time they wanted, and they talked like it mustn’t have been too painful, but the whole time I was reciting poetry and swearing under my breath trying not to panic from the pain 😐 guess I didn’t show it enough?
I've had some patients who were already refusing their pain meds and up and walking 3 days after having their sternum cracked open for heart surgery, and other who have gone through the same procedure be bed ridden for a week, with a PCA pump, all the meds from our plans and extra pain management from the physical therapists. Every person's pain tolerance is completely unique to them and no one can be treated exactly the same as the person laying in the bed nexr to them.
Having a high pain tolerance almost literally killed me. I ignored severe abdominal pain for hours and finally begged for a ride to the ER. I was too calm so person talked me out of it. More time goes by I insist on a ride. At the ER I was too calm so they didn't wanna see me. Did a CT scan per policy and rushed me to the OR in under 10min. They admitted I was too calm so they didn't believe I was in pain. My appendix was w capsulated, oozing fluid, wrapped around my intestine strangulating it, and adhered to my abdominal wall. Spent a week in the hospital
I know it's toxic, but I grew up in a family where it was considered "rude" to scream and carry on if you were in pain. I was expected to stay silent and cry to myself about it, so to this day, when I'm in a lot of pain, that's exactly what I do, much to my detriment, as my pain is never taken seriously. The one time I did actually show how much pain I was in by crying in front of a doctor, that doctor told me that crying and asking for relief was "drug seeking behavior". So never again.. Sad it has to be that way.
"Drug seeking behavior" is just shorthand for "we hate people." An addiction is going to come out in a lot of ways other than being in pain and wanting it to stop, and even if someone has an addiction that doesn't meant they deserve to suffer. It's entirely unsympathetic anf inhumane bs.
@@lulolie Exactly! Thank you so much for mentioning this! Addictions are disabilities as well, and the discrimination against them in the medical field is just awful.
I always seem more calm and competent when dealing with severe pain because those situations often require me to watch the doctor, my care team, and my symptoms very closely to avoid medication interactions or them missing comorbidities that pose risks. As a result they think I appear to be in less pain. It’s now really hard for me to relax enough to experience the pain instead of dissociating which I worry will lead to me also discounting my pain or missing symptoms. It’s very stressful and even if I disclose that I have medical PTSD, I get treated with suspicion as if me deliberately checking in on my pain and other sensations and becoming distressed after being calm and composed is actually me putting on an act, trying to get narcotics, playing up my issue to get seen faster, etc.
My sister gave me a pain scale for when I got to appointments or end up in the hospital, and it helps so much. It was nice to finally have a way of explaining that despite looking more-or-less okay, speaking normally, etc., I'm at an 8 and experiencing abc symptoms in xyz areas.
I have had one herniated disc in my spine bad enough that at one point, I was either walking with a cane or completely unable to walk at all. I've had one surgery so far, and the next disc up is also getting ready to fail, so I will likely need another at some point in the future. (trying to be very careful and alleviate that need as much as I can) When I tell people that I always hurt, they don't necessarily believe me. A good day is when I can ignore it and go about the day like nothing. The problem with a high pain tolerance however, is getting mysterious bruises, cuts, and other damage and I genuinely don't even note or realize it right away.
Oh my yes! I don't know how many time someone else will point out bruises, cuts and scrapes and I just shrug. I even developed a nasty skin infection and I didn't feel it. It is just not loud enough to be felt. Showing my age but did you ever get told to bite your thumb when you subbed your toe? It works, because it adds to the mental load of pain and down grades all your pain.
@@nikkiewhite476 I actually have heard that phrase, and while I don't bite, I do nail dig or I'll punch my hip/leg if I need to 'reset' if I get a particularly bad nerve spike.
I’ve struggled with this as well. Do I tell them how it really feels and make them de-prioritize me, or do I blow it out of proportion and act like it hurts worse than it does so they take me seriously. It can be really hard to accurately describe pain to a doctor.
I walked into an ER with a broken hand, probably my 5th broken hand in my life, and calmly told them that I had broken a bone in my hand and showed them exactly which bone. The doctor explained to me that he was almost certain that there was no chance that my hand was actually broken but if I would feel more comfortable then he could order an X-ray. I told him I would like the X-ray, and when he came in with the results he apologized and explained that with the lack of pain I was showing he assumed that there would be no way my hand was actually broken. And then there's the fact that I've just gone about my day as usual during 2 prolonged prodromal labors
When I broke my tailbone at 12, I didn't want go to hospital and though adults were just overreacting over little bumped tailbone, because I wasn't in that much pain. I also didn't want to believe the doctor when he said it's broken after looking at my X-ray.
Before surgery for an ACL and meniscus repair, the nurse asked me what my pain tolerance was like. Being a nurse myself i knew this question would help them anticipate how much pain meds I would need. I think just rating pain with a number is stupid and it would be better to use descriptions because the type of medication or therapy should change with the type of pain. If the ER doc had ordered fentanyl for my 9/10 knee pain when it was extremely swollen and I couldn't walk after the injury, I would think they were stupid because that would help pain only because I would be passed out 😅. In my experience, pain management is done best with multiple methods at once.
I am an OB Nurse and I had a 1 day post-op CSection Mom who simply couldn't use the number system to rate her pain. "I understand what you're asking, I just can't express it that way." No dice with the faces either. Me: "DO you mind some swear words?" Mom: "No. Go ahead." Me: "Are we talking, 'damn, this hurts; s*, this hurts!; or f***! this hurts!'" Mom: "S*, this hurts!" Me: "I'll be right back with 2 Percocet." Damn, I would have brought Ibuprofen, F***, I would have brought Dilaudid. Some people communicate differently. What the Hell, it worked!
One interesting thing I have found is the pain of tattoos! It’s hard to say whether you have a high or low pain tolerance but I have found that getting a tattoo from the same artist in the same spot is a pretty good way to compare pain tolerance levels! My artist kept warning me about my elbow and when she started there I was unfazed. Yes it was a different sensation from my forearm but not anywhere near the screaming and grimacing I’ve seen from others
I would repeat the mantra of "This is hurting, but it isn't hurting (damaging) me" in combination with mindful breathing techniques during the more sensitive areas of both of my full calf and foot tattoos (socks? ☺️). Playing Tetris on my old DS was also a big help! 😁 Little did I know how valuable these things would be later in life when chronic pain would become an unwelcome companion.
From years of ignoring intense chronic pain, you don't just tolerate it. You stop feeling it. It's so hard to try to communicate what I'm feeling to doctors when I'm in pain. So now I do meditation to be able to notice the pain again
so true! You nailed! I have had many horrific stories of doctors or nurses not taking my pain seriously or not believing me when I say I’m in pain. This is very sad and unfortunate. So it means a lot when a doctor is understanding,kind,trusts and believes the patient, and is willing to help.
I don't have a high tolerance for pain, but what I have learned since I was a kid was to mask the pain. That stoicism made getting help for my kidney infection difficult because I didn't react strongly enough when he thumped on them. If he had been able to see my face, he would have seen me flinch facially, which my mom did. As a kid, my doctors and PE teachers didn't understand how much pain I was in due to a misaligned knee cap for years. Eventually, my doctor ordered x-rays, which revealed the misalignment, and sent me to an orthopedic surgeon. He ordered an MRI, sent me to physical therapy, and then operated on it to fix the alignment. It was amazing how quickly my pain level dropped after I recovered from the surgery.
It's absolutely disgusting the way I've been treated since I was about 15 and started experiencing severe pain due to what I now know was endometriosis, but it took over 8 years to actually get a diagnosis. After about the 3rd time of collapsing and blacking out over and over, vomiting, writhing and screaming in pain like I was giving birth at age 17 and being rushed to hospital, the doctors started to treat me horrifically. Once they realised it wasn't any of the obvious and easy to manage things like appendicitis or a bowel blockage, they just started telling me it was just my period and I was just pathetic. Imagine grown adult doctors (mostly male, but terrifyingly there were female drs involved too) telling a terrified 17 year old girl that they're pathetic and need to stop being so dramatic 😢 After a few visits to A&E, they decided I was either a drug addict or had munchausens. That was the beginning of a decade long battle with the local NHS to simply be treated like a human and be treated with some compassion and empathy. The doctors and nurses I came across genuinely abused me by neglecting me, verbally abusing me and sometimes physically abusing me. One doctor threw a cannister of nitrous oxide across the room at me out of frustration. It's scary how many doctors and nurses don't want to treat patients who are going to take more than 10 minutes to diagnose and how many of them are genuinely obsessed with having power over vulnerable people. They are more concerned with being right than doing their jobs. Obviously there are some incredible doctors and nurses and they are like gold dust in my experience. But there are way more that are willing to abuse patients since they know it's their word against the patient, and they all close ranks. It's way more than anyone would care to believe. I've got CPTSD because of all of this malpractice and mistreatment and am on the waiting list for EMDR therapy now at age 31 because it still impacts my life massively. I'll be watching a film and when someone is shot in the arm and the doctor gives them morphine, that voice in my brain is like 'they don't need morphine, it's just a bullet wound' because of all the horrific care I've experienced and witnessed. In my experience, women only have their pain adequately taken care of if they're dying. It's such a huge issue in society and I wish more people understood the 'gender pain gap' 😢
Adult son just got out of the hospital because of his high pain tolerance. Drove himself to the ER on advice of doctor where appendicitis was suspected. Finally was admitted that night and had surgery early the next morning but it was too late. Even though his pain level was only around a 2 it had already ruptured. Luckily it all eventually healed and he was sent home. I have the opposite problem as near fatal conditions (pulmonary arterial hypertension, a ruptured gangrenous gallbladder and a collapsed lung) were diagnosed as just my fibromyalgia . High or low pain tolerance you just can’t win 🤷🏻♀️
My son doesn't know when he's hurt. If he feels a 2 on the pain scale, I'm super worried. He only knows he's broken a bone when his limbs don't move through their full range of motion.
I guess my "high pain tolerance" is born of several doctors and dentists being visibly surprised at how calm I looked when they diagnosed what I had. So cholecystitis, a jaw abcess or a broken ankle were not that painful for me. And I literally walked into urgent care or doctor office describing my symptoms calmly. But labor was exruciating that I could not do it and got epidural earlier than I should have
Years ago, I cut the side off my thumb at work. All the flesh from the tip of my thumb, down to the bottom of the nail, was hanging by a flap. I went to an urgent care clinic, knowing I'd need stitches. But I've never been the type to outwardly show pain. So I was very calm when I told the triage nurse that I needed stitches. She was very condescending and said that they would be the judge of if I needed stitches and told me to go sit in the waiting room. 40 minutes later, they called me in and had me wait in a room for another 20 minutes. Finally, a nurse came in and grabbed a Band-Aid from the cupboard and asked to see my cut. When I unwrapped my thumb and the skin peeled back, she lost it. Started freaking out about me being too calm to be this injured and rushed to get a doctor.
I have chronic pain and I found an old definition of pain that I loved, which was “Pain: whatever the experiencing person says it is, existing whenever the experiencing person says it does.” And I love that definition so much
Easy because I've been told by doctors and nurses repeatedly that "it should hurt more" once they realize what' I'm dealing with. I've been sent home from the hospital in labor and then yelled at for being too dilated when I come back. I don't know I feel pain differently than you but my medical providers have repeatedly said things things that make it clear.
Feeling less pain than usual isn't the same as a high pain tolerance though. You might just don't feel pain in certain situations in which others feel pain. I don't experience menstruations, pap smears, IUD insertion etc as painful at all. But not because I have a high pain tolerance, it's because it's literally not painful to me. Child birth was excruciatingly painful though.
@@Tariachan Practically and realistically speaking it results in the same outcome even if my word choice isn't the same words you would choose to use to describe it. But it's common for medical people and men to tell women about ourselves
this is so important, I don't react much to pain, I sit quietly through six hour tat sessions, am full of piercings, and have a history of self-harm. but I still feel the pain very strongly even if it doesn't elicit much of a verbal or physical response.
It's awful trying to get anything diagnosed with a high pain tolerance. Having daily headaches and migraines every 2-3 days for years straight made me numb to most pain, my kidney stones went undiagnosed for a week because I didn't present in the ER writhing and crying from pain. It doesn't help that I was young (12+ for the headaches, 18 for the kidney stones) and AFAB. I'm just glad I finally got to see a neurologist around 16 and am no longer in daily crippling pain. The pain tolerance has lingered but I've learned to advocate for myself more.
For me I think part of it is that those of us who experience pain on a larger term basis have learned how to mask our pain. My family used to get annoyed and even upset with me when I was experiencing some of my chronic pain, so I learned to hide my external reaction so the people around me felt more comfortable. I was expected to do the same things everyone else did during those days, so I had to force myself to do those things despite the fact that I shouldn’t have been doing it. People like us who go to the hospital or doctors with extreme pain might not react the typical way that nurses and doctors expect us to. They might think we’re drug seekers. They might think we’re lying or faking our pain. But the thing is, we all react to pain differently depending on our life circumstances, culture, exposure to pain, etc. I hope that differences in how pain can be expressed will be taught more in the future so that people like me when I was younger are taken more seriously. Hell, I had a kidney infection for a few days and had to walk to the urgent care nearby because I couldn’t get a ride. I was hiding the pain and it wasn’t as extreme as my worst pain, so I didn’t think it was as big of a deal as it was. My doctor was shocked that I was even walking around, but when you’re used to forcing yourself to walk and act normal despite your intestines like almost ripping apart pains like that don’t seem as extreme. It wasn’t that I was actually tolerating it better, I was just so used to extreme pains and had a tendency to hide pain and just force myself to do chores and work despite it.
In 2023 I was diagnosed with a 9cm dermoid cyst on my ovary, which I had been confusing with back pain (originally the doctor thought it was ovarian cancer, which scared me and my family, and spent 6-7 hours doing tests to find out what it was) Surgery was booked for a month in advance, but I ended up going back 3 separate times the next week with burning pain and a “leaking” sensation in my pelvic area . The first 2 times they insisted I was just overthinking and needed to wait Turns out the cyst had started twisting and was spilling all the nasty shit into my body, and I was told after the surgery had it been left any longer, it could’ve went septic and killed me
Had an NP at the ER insist that I was drug seeking/lying/hormonal/etc because if I’d REALLY broken my pelvis my pain “would be 10/10” and not my rated 9/10 and I would be screaming and crying. She told me that the loud POP I heard was “probably a stick or something”. I told her to get out and find the doctor. Doctor recognized me from 6 months prior when he’d seen me for a broken pelvis, femur, and 4 ribs from a different accident. My pelvis was indeed broken again. I went to the ER because I recognized the sound. It was a 9/10. Hurt more the first time. Like, sorry that you’re such a deeply hateful and jaded and pessimistic person that the patients you signed up to treat wanting treatment is such a burden on you. I work in EMS now. I still don’t think people who I’m 99% sure just want painkillers and a free ride don’t deserve my respect. I’m never 100% sure. I’m not God. Anyone who works in healthcare needs to be really, really sure of that.
I have cPTSD from years of childhood trauma. If I ever expressed being in pain or sick I was told 'I'll give you something worth crying about!' then very likely hit in the face/outright beaten and screamed at. When my pain level gets too high I start to disassociate into an almost completely numb state. I have had to just start explaining that 'if I were capable of actually expressing myself right now, I could be actively crying from the pain, and very possably rocking back and forth. But I can't. Because I have cPTSD.' My pain scale is also incredibly skewed like how you were mentioning in the video. Because I have experienced some incredibly horrifically painful things in my life that most people haven't what is 'the worst pain I have ever experienced' is a lot higher than what should be normal.
I recently had an umbilical hernia surgery. The surgeon had to make a T incision because it was tearing open more. When asked about my pain I said it was a dull 1-2 which only lasted 4 days. Doc was amazed saying I have a very high pain tolerance. Sometimes it's a good thing, other times it's not, depending on the situation
The only reason I think I have a high pain tolerance is because multiple medical professionals have told me I do. To your point, they didn’t think anything was wrong with me each time until I insisted.
After surgery for kidney stones, I found myself in a lot of pain after the anaesthetic wore off. The doctor prescribed an analgesic appropriate to what he believed to be the pain level despite me describing it as between an eight and nine out of ten. The worst pain for me that would bring me down to the floor was the pain from the kidney stones and that for me was the ten. The pain did not abate and I could find no position that would ease it, I spent several hours calling for something else to ease the pain, I cried and eventually after about six hours, I fell into a sleep, absolutely exhausted. My family even pleaded with two doctors to do something and said that I did not act this way unless the pain was very bad. After prescribing some more of what I was given earlier that day, I was discharged and sent home. When the pain flared up again, I went to a local wellness centre for a second opinion and that’s when they discovered I had a severe urinary tract infection. Stronger painkillers and a dose of antibiotics helped greatly. It turned out that nurses at the hospital had not been monitoring me properly and had disposed of a urine sample instead of testing it.
I feel as I have a good pain resilience rather than pain tolerance. But nothing has compared to an adult tonsillectomy. For me, this was an emergency situation. I had chronic strep for 10 years that caused an autoimmune disorder, strep that became antibiotic resistant and, by the end, tonsils that got so swollen they blocked my airways and I had to be taken to the ER twice in 3 weeks. It took 10 years for doctors to take it seriously. I was at risk for the strep to spread to my heart. I had the surgery and…. I’ll never forget that kind of misery. They told me the fifth day was the worst day of recovery. That seemed strange so, I brushed it off…… the worst day was the fifth day of recovery because that’s when you start VOMITING….. while you have a cauterized throat. It was horrible, but worth it in the end. It took me a full 6 weeks to heal and go back to classes and work.
i hate the pain scale because for awhile i was having severe pain for months on end non-stop due to a condition i was trying to get treated, and i never knew how to answer that question. because to me, "normal" was being in pain. i didn't know how to classify it in numbers anymore. felt like i was making it up, and it stressed me out that if i set the number too low that they wouldn't take me seriously or too high they'd think i was lying 😅
The most frustrating question with PCOS is “when is it bad enough”. When I got diagnosed in the ER I was accused of faking my pain because if I laid still I was pretty okay, but I couldn’t stand up
I'm pretty sure I have a high pain tolerance. Years ago, while I was working, I thought I stepped wrong as my foot was bothering me. The next morning, I couldn't stand on it. Turns out I ripped the tendon the crosses your foot. The doctor was like, "How did you finish your shift?" 🤷♀️
I have chronic migraines- i know when to take it easy, but i rarely react to my pain. My migraine pain often shifts around in my head so i dont pay attention to the type of pain either. Ive had a few issues i left unadressed for months because i didnt realize the pain indicated a new problem, im so used to ignoring my pain. Having a "pain tolerance" really is just a lack of reaction. I feel it, but I'm not prone to causing a fuss. Ive had an ER doc not believe i was having a severe issue because i was sitting quietly the whole time. Luckily, the nurse on that visit was super helpful.
I have a high pain tolerance. I also have reoccurring viral meningitis. I have had 4 flare ups since 2/14/2015. The most recent one I went to the ER with a 104 fever, terrible headache, throwing up and I hadn’t eaten in two days. Yes it took me that long to go because of how much I HATE going to the doctor. The doctor told me that he should admit me but they have a day waiting period to get checked into the hospital and he heard me before about how much I didn’t want to go. He asks me if he gives me pain meds, anti virals, and anti nausea if i can go home or if I should check in. I decided to go home. Having viral meningitis means getting a spinal tap which also can take weeks to recover from, and I figured with pain killers I would be ok. I was wrong. The pain meds that were supposed to last me 5 days last me 16 hours. I tried to tough it out for another day but my fever was back up and I just wasn’t ok. I went back to the doctor and he tells me that I can’t go running to the doctor every time I have a headache. That having a high fever, nausea, headache, inability to move my head, sensitivity to light and sound plus a documented history of viral meningitis at that hospital doesn’t actually mean I have it. Doctor gives me fancy Exderine and says I can go home. I was so messed up I couldn’t argue. I spent the next 4 days taking Benadryl because every time i woke up I wanted to die. Im normally a very pleasant person. I had negative patience for that time. My husband wanted to kill me. I didn’t drink water for 2 days and didn’t eat for 4 days. By the time I was semi functional it was thanks to opioids I had found from a prior injury. Even then, they only lasted 4 more days then I went back to work. All this to say the second doctor didn’t believe me (despite solid evidence) and my life was so much of a living hell the entire time I wanted to die so bad. My used to be nurse step mom heard and told me to report him to the doctor people. They are supposed to confirm I don’t have bacterial meningitis everytime I report signs because that is deadly and the doctor just told me I wasn’t that bad.
I have chronic migraine. I'm sensitive to noise. As much as I might feel like screaming in pain I would never do that because it would just make the migraine worse. That doesn't mean I'm not in severe pain, I've just trained myself to endure it silently.
not going to the doctor (in countries with free healthcare) for very paintul conditions would be one sign. just "toughing through it" and maybe even worsening the condition itself.
I have some sort of autoimmune disease (at least, that's the closest any doctor has bothered to get to trying to diagnose me for the better part of 5 years now since it suddenly started). At random times, though with a very small correlation to when I get sick, my entire body breaks out in hives. My skin will swell to the point I can't bend joints, often I can't walk right or even hold a pen in my hand. Sometimes it'll get so bad on my chest I can't breath because the skin is literally too swollen to move enough for me to take deep breaths. I have honestly lost track of how many doctors have told me to just take Zyrtec or Benadryl, who have refused to believe this is anything other than contact dermatitis despite no allergy tests coming back positive and there being seemingly no common cause (again, outside of a small correlation to when I get sick, but you can't be allergic to the common cold and I know it's not the cold meds, I've checked). It is a miracle I haven't overdosed on allergy meds that, of course, have done nothing to help, because it isn't an allergy. It absolutely sucks how much doctors just don't seem to care that I'm in pain or can't move or can't breath. I can't afford to continue going to the doctor just to be told to take over the counter meds, especially considering I want actual answers and an actual way to treat this, not just a quick fix so I'll shut up and go home...
That’s not the only thing that’s strange. For those of us with chronic pain, need a different pain scale. We are so accustomed to suffering and hiding it, people doubt us b
Yup! When my may thurner syndrome wasn't diagnosed and treated yet, I was in excruciating pain that was so different than anything else I'd felt before. It hurt worse to sit down or to stand, so I was bedridden for a while with my legs elevated. I got used to hiding the pain just so I could keep my sanity somewhat and not go crazy since it's not a condition that's well known or easy to diagnose and sometimes find the right physician who will dx and treat it who has experience. It was not a fun 7 months 😅
@@ItsJennNotJenny I have multiple autoimmune diseases. I was having shoulder pain I blamed on my lupus, seasonal changes etc. I finally got an MRI and needed a 2 level cervical fusion. It was a year after my pain started. It just didn’t occur to me that I had a new issue. Same thing in 2015. I felt weak etc and it hurt to wear a bra. Bilateral pneumonia before I was admitted. I lost 30 pounds. It’s really hard to know when to seek help. Especially with these doctors who invalidate our pain
@ukmary1968 Oh wow. I'm so sorry! I hope you're better now. I'm going through it again now with pain and swelling in my left leg and butt cheek that hurts to touch with US showing nothing 😪, mri showing only some bursitis which wouldn't explain the symptoms in the entire areas and symptoms, nothing musculoskeletal either ruled out by my ortho so I'm having to meet with a vascular surgeon tomorrow to beg for more help and see my pcp to have him help me if he can. I'm hoping to get an mra or mrv as I suspect I have pelvic congestion even though my ivus venogram showed that flow went back to normal after my stent placement. The symptoms fit but my ultrasounds didn't detect the mts, so I'm like, ok, clearly I need more than another US because my body isn't easy to detect things with those lol
@ukmary1968 Ty! My VS I saw again today is awesome! I was afraid he wasn't going to investigate further, but he wants to do a cat scan and then a possible tilt venogram after that but not until I do my biopsy to check for cancer on the 26th. My pcp will always advocate for me. He's been my rock through all of this and he won't give up on me, thankfully. I'll figure it out soon enough! I wish you well
I only know that I have a high pain tolerance because I've walked home after literally ripping my legs open after tripping on a gravel road in shorts and just not reacted to it, the only time that I remember a physical injury actually hurting that much was when I had to get stitches
Went to ER presenting with inability to put weight on my left leg. Shitty triage nurse put me down as r/o ankle sprain. Waited 8+ hours and was seen after every other single patient in the waiting room. x-rayed. Sent home with an air cast, ace bandage, crutches and instructions to see an ortho in two weeks. Hated the crutches and as long as I didn't try to do too much, I could put a lil weight on it after a week. Saw the ortho another week and a half later... only to find out I had a spiral fibula fx. ... I did it at ROLLER DERBY PRAX... (lots of us break ankles...) But I walked around like that for two weeks and the original break was visible on the ER film. Fck you, Holy Cross Hospital!
That's pretty standard treatment for leg/foot/ankle breaks that are closed ie no bone sticking through the skin. Crutches and a brace or air cast. In a couple of weeks when the swelling has come down the ortho can see if surgery is necessary. No need to visit the ER; walk-in clinics are faster.
@@corinnelehr you missed the part where I said the closed fx was visible on the xray and I was sent home and told it was NOT broken. My ortho was FURIOUS. Didn't need sx tho
I just believe that if I want to FINALLY be taken seriously, I will have to skip my pain meds for my period, go to the ER, and let myself fade in and out of consciousness and sh't myself and throw up while being EXTREMELY cold to the touch in hot weather, unable to move. It is NO joke just how bad I feel... but I have BEEN living with it because the one time it got really weird (a 22-day period) I finally went to a doctor and tried to tell them about ALL the things wrong with me that I have been living with for years, but nooo, they just... had me take a vitamin blood-test, got me on "the pill" for 2 months, and when I said I would like to see a gynecologist...nope, just blood test and the pill. And what is worse is that my pills sometimes, more often now, DON'T WORK ENOUGH OR AT ALL ANYMORE, and then I can't work, or WALK, or even do... ANYTHING...I become 90% disabled for the day if THAT happens, and I am just LUCKY, that I haven't had the day I go to work have that happen yet... But if I even by 20 MINUTES miss my next pain med dose, it is a FIGHT, to function even on a lucky day... now. So yeah...I "tolerate" my pain HIGHLY, and I don't cry, but It STILL, gets higher and then I can't even walk...I don't cry, i crawl and try to deal with it.
There's a quiet epidemic of people in the chronic illness community of people unaliving themselves bc we can't get appropriate help. Too many of us also have white coat syndrome aka medical PTSD bc of the pain we're in, get discarded as trash by nurses & doctors alike & know we won't be helped bc we're not being helped. Some even get blacklisted from hospitals for seeking help. The geniune individuals that need help end up experiencing multiple abuses from too many angles & its a literal hellscape. Passing on is the only way forward. No, I'm not feeling that way but I'm speaking up for the multiple number of people that never make it. If this helps at least one medical professional reading this come to get a little glimpse of what it's like & there's an open heart to consider giving better treatment then I feel I may have helped save a life. Maybe at least one person out there in the chronic illness community will have a better chance of having a life & maybe, if lucky, a quality life....
I won't talk about period pain because that's cheating at this point 😂 I had a bad friction burn in high school (saw my fascia), and I was so scared of getting an infection that I put alcohol on it. I'd gladly take that pain every hour than go through a single more minute of dysmenorrhea. Another fun story. Got stung by a wasp. The sting didn't hurt, but the abnormal swelling did. I couldn't walk anymore, but nobody believed me when I told them it hurt. I went to school, got sent to the ER 2 hours later. They took it seriously the moment my swelling got out of control. So if I say it hurts it doesn't matter, but it's suddenly worrisome the moment you see me with a wide tree log for a leg? Finally, story number 3. This one's very recent. I reached the severely underweight BMI category a few months ago, unintentionally. Couldn't eat, couldn't force myself to eat either. The feeling in my stomach was horrible. It's not the first time I have a weigh loss episode. But every single damn time, it was always "you're just depressed, go see a psychiatrist" or "maybe you're pregnant" or "you're stressed". Guess who has suspected gastritis and is being pretty successfully treated for peptic ulcers right now. What a surprise, I actually do have a stomach and I'm not making up symptoms to hide a childhood virgin pregnancy or anorexia nervosa!
Idk I’ve broken bones in my hand and just gotten up and went about my day like nothing happened, for three days. Some people shut down with a paper cut, even if they’re alone and still don’t seek out medical help. I don’t think it’s just a reactive thing like you seem to think it is. It honestly probably is something measurable, like speed or jumping height. We just haven’t actually looked for it yet, or haven’t looked in the right place.
It’s insane isn’t it? I’m sometimes taken out by certain minor pains or even sensory irritation, but have previously wandered around on an unsupported sprained ankle for a whole evening (not knowing it was sprained) and my sister once walked into the hospital pretty calmly on a fractured one. I’ve never broken a bone so don’t know what that’s like, but people always talk like it’s one of the most painful things so it’s kind of a terrifying concept
@@N3RDYG0GGLES yeah it’s hard to tell how much of it is just perception vs an innate difference in pain tolerance. On one hand there’s going to be some variability in how sensitive and efficient nerves are at transmitting signals across the body, there’s variability everywhere else so why wouldn’t there be here as well. On the other our perception and past experiences has a huge impact. If someone has lived their entire life without experiencing significant pain, then a paper cut might actually be as painful to them as a broken bone is to me. If that makes sense. Just simply because I have different reference points than someone else does. In addition to that though there can also be a significant reduction in pain simply by distracting the person long enough for the brain to start ignoring it. There’s also the whole component of your body’s reaction to the pain. The parasympathetic nervous system isn’t a joke. Even if painkillers are blocking the pain from reaching your brain you still have a full spinal cord where it could still be interacting with it. Just adding a whole other level of complexity to the situation.
I've broken my wrist and elbow at the same time and went swimming the same day. It literally felt like a bad sprain (pain scale like 6-7), there was minimal swelling and no bruising. I didn't know it was broken until xrays were done and even the Dr at the ER was shocked it was actually broken. Surgeon told me that going swimming was actually good in my case can't remember why now. Idk why people say broken bones are the worst injury to ever feel, to me it's just inconvenient pain for a bit. I didn't even know had even broken my foot/ankle several times until I had xrays for a different reason and was asked when the breaks happened. Had no idea. Couldn't tell them. I'm the only one in my family like this though for broken bones.
I'd say that getting a tattoo can generally be considered an equal sensory input for most people. Ask any tattoo artist and they'll tell you that there is such thing as a high pain tolerance and it's mostly among women.
There's a standard scale that expresses how much pain you personally feel that you can refer to, but it does rely on trust and honesty from both sides to be taken seriously
Thiiiiis! So much this! Thank you for saying what needed to be said. I was in immense pain sitting in a vascular surgeons office, but I had to hide it well to keep myself from breaking down. The doctor looked at me and said, "But you're not in pain." I said."Yes, I am." As a result, he thoguht I was a hypochondriac and waited until my next appointment driving 40 miles to his clinic just for him to have his staff call me 10 minutes before the appointment and CANCEL it! 😞 My pcp referred me to an IR, had an MRA, and found May thurner syndrome. Got a stent during my venogram with ivus, and I'm much better now, thankfully. It's infuriating when you have respect for the medical community, yet they sometimes treat you like crap in the process, causing people to distrust even the good ones. Some doctors ask more questions and/or just ask different types of questions that give them better insight. Keep being awesome Doc!
Thank you! I never could decide what my pain tolerance is. I only knew that I hate pain, and I will complain even if it doesn’t hurt that badly to stop me from functioning. That is just an attitude about pain, and not a way to tell the tolerance level.
My experience on how sometimes people freak out about whats happened to me and how I feel little or no pain and my face is still smiling tells me I definitely do have a high tolerance. Being told “how the hell are you ‘okay’? You are definitely not okay.” so I’ve come to gauge that the reaction of others especially healthcare tells me the scale I am supposed to be at. So definitely do have high pain tolerance.
I recently did a complete tear of my achilles tendon and refused pain meds in the ER. I didn't need any pain meds, 'cause I basically had no pain. I defined it as a 2 on the 10 scale. The Gout flairup was a 4 as I could walk somewhat on my heel without allowing my toe to touch the ground. But when I was hit by a car as a teen and the ends of the bone in the transverse fracture of the tib/fib were grinding on each other I was begging for pain meds, that was the 10 for me. The post-op exam wasn't much better, I say it was a 9. I don't have a high pain tolerance, I just know there are different levels of pain and what my particular scale might be.
Took over a year of pain to get diagnosed with trigeminal neuralgia because I wasn't displaying the pain enough. I was taught to "suck it up" When it came to pain. They only took me seriously when I said I was still in pain after I had three root canals trying to solve it.
I think the high pain tolerance resinates with me a lot as someone with a disability and a newly diagnosed chronic illness. My chronic illness is otherwise invisible unless you live or spend a lot of time with me and unless I’m in the midst of a flare my pain (although still there) usually isn’t enough for me to talk about it or act significantly different to where you’d notice. This has caused doctors to miss major things in my health history due to me not “looking hurt enough”. That mixed with the constant scrutiny of calling off consistently from work because my stomach hurts so bad I can’t think straight but “I didn’t look too hurt to work” because this has been life long and I’ve quite literally learned how to not look in pain while my stomach is twisting left and right.
I went to the ER because I thought I had a gas bubble stuck in my guts somewhere. I had been having "bad gas" for about a month when my husband made me go to the hospital. I thought it was gas. I would otherwise be fine until I ate something and then I would get really uncomfortable. Uncomfortable. Not in pain. The ultrasound tech said that he had never seen so many gallstones in his life and I was scheduled for immediate emergency gallbladder removal surgery. Some people have a high pain tolerance because of repeated pain. My labor pains were nothing because my period is worse. Far worse.
Yeah, I went around writing and drawing with a broke wrist for 5 days when I was inpatient for mental health. I knew that it hurt a lot, but I didn't realize it was broken, luckily the staff had me get it checked anyway. At the same time I had an ear infection in both my ears the other month, and it made me so uncomfortable and I definitely cried. Even when you do have a higher ability to deal with pain, different types of pain can be more or less uncomfortable for certain people.
I remember so vividly in one of my psych classes, we did a body scan exercise. And during it, I realized i had a headache and as soon as i realized, it refused to leave. Im in a constant buzz of pain that its white noise. I also have anxiety so i often go back and forth on my pain and ailments because so often its brushed off as anxiety. Of course i dont react strongly/loudly to pain. I have to function in a world that frames rest and pain as weakness and publishes you wholly for it. There's minimal support for people living in pain. When I talk to new docs now, I 1) look at veteran pain scales to rank my pain. This focuses on impact to life which is easier for me to conceltualize. 2) constantly am like "no u don't understand. I slept thru my ear drum bursting twice. I regularly cry from migraines." And ill just keep going if i have to. All the gorey details.
I have a fibroid that causes me so much pain. I have had bowel obstructions less painful and those were severe enough that I was hospitalized for five days. My doctors don’t care at all about the pain and really don’t care about the profuse bleeding either. I have had one ER doctor acknowledge that fibroids can cause pain. When my bowel perfed I was blown off repeatedly because I didn’t have hypertension or tachycardia. My doctors said I couldn’t be in pain when I was in the worst pain of my life. I was in so much pain I prayed to die faster. Doctors should listen to patients about their pain
It’s helpful for communicating to medical professionals, but mostly it’s helpful for taking care of myself. Chronic pain + a high pain tolerance has me avoiding taking pain medication or avoiding slowing down until I put my body through so much that it becomes an emergency. This often looks like paralysis, seizures, migraines, extreme weakness or fatigue, slurred speech, emotional disregulation , & brain fog/ dissociation. If I don’t make an effort to notice and attend to my pain early on, my body will make sure I pay attention.
I have the luxury of having sisters who all went through labor. The reaction to pain in different stages of labor is wild. I realized the nurses didn't take me seriously because I wasn't yelling enough but I was already at 10cm when I arrived at the hospital
Chronic conditions really screws up your perception of pain. Being ignored when you say you hurt doesn't help either.
Exactly i get nasty pain whenever I walk up hills or on Uneven terrain (Hypermobile Ehlers Danlos Syndrome has fucked up my legs) so my scale of pain is fucked
I have a whole list of reasons my reaction to pain is screwed, HEDS, Fibro, Occipital Neuralgia, Migraine… you get the picture; I also have a mast cell disorder and it’s left me with tons of medication allergies including almost all the heavy hitting pain meds. Unfortunately drs and nurses across the internet have been pushing this idea that if a person comes in and says they’re allergic to all but the strongest opiates then they clearly are just drug seeking, I’ve resorted to resetting my own dislocations/subluxations just to avoid being treated like an addict when they see that my only real pain med options are the big F, D, and K. One particular ER visit stopped me from seeking any help if there wasn’t a clear injury, my pain mgmt sent me to the ER after realizing that my pain level had gotten beyond what she could offer in office… instead of being treated for the insane level of pain I was in I was placed on a psych hold because apparently I was muttering “Please kill me so I don’t feel this” and the doctor took that to mean I was going to commit self-deletion. Show me one person who hasn’t had a “kill me now” or “put me out of my misery” moment and I’ll sell you some ocean front property in Kansas.
THIS. It’s so hard when you’re in pain everyday and you manage bc you have to and when you finally admit your pain is worthy of a hospital trip, they tell you that “you can’t be in that much pain, you look fine” and nurses are even worse with that. I’ve also had two different hospitals tell me “they don’t admit for just pain” and I’m like, I’m completely bedridden rn and nothing is working for my pain and u want me to go home???
👏 say 👏 it 👏 louder
@@KaiDoesThingsAndStuffI hope you find relief and your quality of life improves.
I'm autistic and in all seriousness I had to FIGHT for my back surgery and was trapped on my couch for 6 months. I don't express pain "properly" I'm always more pressed to explain my situation than to roll around or cry. It took months not only for proper pain medication but also just scans and surgery. It took forever. I literally couldn't sit up for longer than 2-3 minutes but because I was always calm, no one cared.
I fully understand. It's the same for me. After injuring my shoulder an accident it took me 6 months to find out, what was wrong, bc I wasn't checked properly. By now I have learned, that when it feels more like pressure, the injury is severe. Pain is what I feel, when someone scratches my skin softly. Pressure I feel when seriously hurt. Took me years to figure this out.
@@svenjar5994 Yeah interoception issues suck. I'm sorry you went through something similar! Hugs!
Same! I went 15 years begging for help for extreme pelvic pain and being told "period pain is normal" "suck it up, other women have it worse" etc. Turns out I have endometriosis, adenomyosis, PCOS, and interstitial cystitis. Two surgeries so far and looking at a 3rd in 5 years. But I was always calm and articulate during appointments so no one believed me
Autistic here as well!
Just over three years ago, I did something stupid and my reward was a compound fracture in my left arm. I screamed, ran inside and started to go into shock... And then I didn't. I was very articulate and didn't cry for 1½-2hrs. Sang, chatted and sat in agony until I was put on happy gas and bawled my eyes out from relief. During that time I also had to negotiate my arm (which looked like Harry's in chamber of secrets after Lockhart, but with bones) onto a plate for an x-ray and had to turn it 90°.
~4 years before that, I went around for three days with a fractured wrist that I broke on a school outing and my principal (RIP) thought I was being dramatic because there was nothing visibly wrong. My mother drove to where my father and I were fishing at a nearby pier (or, rather, he was) and my wrist was ballooned.
I also broke my thumb as a baby and no-one realised until after it had healed the wrong way and the doctors had to rebreak it.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk
@@absolootlynot Thank you. I'm also neurodivergent with ADHD and probably autistic as well.
It might not classify as a high pain tolerance per se, but more like you said interoception issues. Feeling pain differently and expressing it differently than most people is what causes the problem.
I came into the ER with horrible pain. But I'm not the type of person to cry and carry on. I told them my pain was a 9. After blood work and an ultrasound the doctor came back in with morphine in his hand. I had a gallstone blocking a duct and pancreatitis. I needed emergency surgery. The doctor said usually ppl with my lab results are balled up in the corner screaming in pain. I was like I told you my pain was a 9.
I had a similar experience
Told the nurse my pain was about an 8 … because I had given birth 4 times, once with very little pain meds on board. And I’m guessing I would have had more pain if I had been in a bad car accident..
the pain would come and go in waves, sometimes such that I could distract myself some with my phone.. though a conversation with my husband was too much… and then it was too much to even look at my phone let alone try to scroll through while thinking I was going to 🤢 vomit.
The local ER sent me 40 miles by ambulance to a bigger hospital where I had both an ERCP and then lap chole to remove gallstones and my gallbladder and treatment for pancreatitis.
I remember fairly early in that adventure and the nurse took my BP… she mildly scoffed at me when I said those numbers explained my headache. She replied that my BP was still nearly within “normal range” and thankfully my husband informed her that my BP normal was more like 98/50 not the 128/70 or whatever I was displaying at the time.
Same thing happened to my mum, GP kept brushing her off for months because she didn't really seem to be in much pain, eventually they found out her gallbladder was basically dead because of how long it had gone untreated and had to be removed. She had still been going to work the whole time
@@kasocool2812 gallbladder pain is seriously no joke. I couldn't breathe when mine got bad.
My wife had an ER visit for gallbladder pain and got scheduled to be removed. During that time, a stone got stuck in the duct and I know exactly when it happened. She wanted to try and stick it out until the schedule, but when her eyes started turning yellow a few days later, I convinced her to go.
I swear if you don’t react they say you’re faking. If you do react they say you’re faking. You can’t win as a patient and then Doctors wonder why patients don’t trust them.
The scary part about pain not being taken seriously isn’t even not getting pain medication. It’s missing an urgent diagnosis.
Honestly this. Also, I often will end up making sure I have a high pain threshold (because I've got chronic pain), which means that me not having noticed pain is not the same as there not being pain. If it doesn't rise close enough to what my joints are always complaining of, I will likely miss it.
Yes just being believed is a relief
A doctor missed my ruptured appendix and didn’t take my pain seriously I was throwing up and doubled over in pain and he just told me it was period cramps and sent me home. I was in an ambulance and on my way to surgery the next day
@@fayerawcliffe7794 As someone who used to have throwing up/passing out period cramps, even if that's the issue it doesn't mean that it shouldn't be taken seriously. If it's "just period cramps" but it's completely debilitating, that's a problem too. Not to mention the amount of stories I've heard the inverse of what you said, people's cramps being so bad they had their appendix rupture and didn't realize it assuming it was just cramps. The idea that a certain type of pain is less valid because it's common and there's a very clear biological cause absolutely kills people, and I'm glad you're still here and safe today despite that.
@@kyradreamer4769 oh I 100% agree with you the doctor was sooo out of line for dismissing my pain like that even if it was period cramps. I just knew it wasn’t cause I wasn’t on my period lol
This reminded me of when I started having migraines. I was young, only 11, maybe, and they wanted me to keep a journal of the pain, when, if I noticed a trigger, etc. The highest number I wrote was 7 and it was "I'm out of commission" laying in a dark, quiet room. Doctor looked at the book and immediately said they didn't believe I'd had a 7 without even asking about what I described as 7. Without hesitation, I threw that book straight in the trash while making eye contact and never wrote another thing. Why fucking bother if they only response is "you're wrong"?
I had some of my worst migraines when I was young. Like throwing up from the pain bad. Saying you can't have that much pain because you're young is such BS
"How do you feel? Nope, you're wrong!"
They ask us to do those journals as a way to distract us from noticing that they can't/won't help.
I was not being taken serious, was in agony, could not take a deep breath because it felt like my lungs were on fire, i got eye rolls and got booted despite having a very, very low oxygen content (was told to "just take some deep breaths" and ill be fine,) not getting the chest x ray i begged for, and being unable to walk very fast without pass I ng out, was wheeled out. I back in an hour later, demanded a chest x ray. This time i refused the wheel chair and tried to force myself to keep up, knowing i was going to pass out. I did pass out and got a gash on my forehead. The doctor i saw paened me off on another doctor, who reluctantly listened to.my chest, frowned, put in for a chest x ray and it turns out my lungs were all fluid.
The next time i went in, i described the extreme pain i kept feeling for long periods a couple times a year and how i was completely unable to function. When it was clear that i was, again, not being listened to, that my protests that i don't want painkillers, i want ANSWERS or to figure out how to make the pain stop. Finally, the next time i was asked with an annoyed sigh what i would rate my pain at, i turned on a lighter and burned my arm, stone faced, and said, "worse than this, but not too much worse than this."
They got incredibly upset and later sent a psych consult. A month later, i was diagnosed with a kidney infection and after an ultrasound, asked of i had recently passed a kidney stone because ome of my ureters was incredibly dilated.
Pro tip: if medical staff, unprompted, keep reminding you that they are not giving you pain pills, and continue to remind you after you have stated that you don't want pain pills, that they will not give you pain pills, do not tell them, "i don't want your baby asprin! If i wanted to get high, i could go down the street and buy more potent drugs for 20 bucks, hassle free and i wouldn't have to wait 6 hours in the e.r. for it
I swear to christ some Doctors just don’t want to do their job
I understand that there are people who take advantage of hard drugs, but the rest of us that don’t even want them in the first place can never get relief when we need it bc you get labeled drug/pill seeking. It’s incredibly frustrating and demeaning to beg for help to just feel normal and function at a basic level, like that’s asking for the world
I started telling them to document my request and their refusal of care in my record. I would also record with my phone. They started actually doing their job.
@@katelynnweigand5901 what's interesting is that the severe restrictions put in place to combat the opioid crisis (that lead to physician's reluctance to prescribe them) * have done absolutely nothing* in terms of said crisis. Creating MORE suffering is literally all it has accomplished.
I would literally be under a legal pain contract with 20mg of fentanyl literally stuck to my back, 30mg morphine pills in me too, and they still did this shit.
You nailed it. A few months ago I was in the ER for a major medical event. Nurses kept telling me I was so polite considering how much pain I was in. I'm like "yay I'm in a lot of pain but it's not your fault I'm in pain. You're job is to help and you're doing it."
Literally this. Whenever I end up in the hospital from my chronic illnesses, I'm usually in a severe amount of pain or I'm soooo sick. But I don't visibly show it. I smile at everyone, say please and thank you, am cooperative to care, try and clean up after myself. But I'm still struggling and I feel like some people think you're faking it if you are polite
I used to get really bad leg cramps when I was a kid. It was probably because I walked around pigeon toed cause I never experienced them again after I fixed my walk. Anyway, I sprained my ankle last year, and when the nurses asked me to rate my pain, I said it was around a 3 or 4, but I would suck in my breath anytime my ankle touched something. The nurse was convinced my pain was worse than I said, but to me, that pain was a three, compared to those leg cramps that had me immobilized, silently crying in my bed that sprained ankle was nothing.
I become a feral animal when I am in a lot of pain and I am so sorry for freaking anybody out
You sound so sweet. I'm that kind of person too, who doesn't want to make my pain become someone else's bad day.
There's a young man at church (I met him 4 years ago and have to keep myself from calling him a little boy) who has severe Crohn's disease and can be in a lot of pain at times, but even when you can tell he doesn't feel good, he's the sweetest little guy ever. 😭
@@elisemorgan7591but also a problem patient if you're rude or more generally vocal about your situation...
My son has autism. When he was younger, he didn’t have an awareness of pain. I knew something was up with his foot, so I took him to the ER (complicated medical history means we skip right over Urgent Care, and it was the weekend with no access to our regular doctor). He was running and walking, no problem, when we got there. Luckily the staff was familiar with him, so they took my concern seriously. He hopped down off of the gurney when the tech came to get him for his X-ray.
His foot was broken in two places. The same thing happened a couple months later to the other foot, broken in one place.
Without their awareness and willingness to accept that he didn’t perceive pain “normally,” not only would he have been on two broken feet for who knows how long, we never would have been led to investigate further and find out he had a few conditions working together to make it so easy for him to fracture; that could have led to grave consequences.
My son is also autistic. When his appendix ruptured he told us and the docs that he was in 4/10 pain. He would complain of stomach pain, and then go play. No tenderness, no swelling, no fever...nothing to indicate he was having a medical emergency for 3 days, we thought it was gas. So did the urgent care guy, until they got the ultrasound out, only because it was the standard for abdominal pain in kids his age.
I am glad the standards are what they are, my son not expressing pain well or feeling it the same could have been the thing that prevented him being saved by emergency medicine.
I broke all 3 bones in my left arm as a 6yr old. They were vertical pressure cracks. No one took me seriously because I cried only once right when it happened at the skate rink, but moved and did everything normally... until my mom looked out the kitchen window to me on the trampoline holding my arm to jump... 1 week after the incident I was now finally in a full arm cast for what felt like FOREVER.
They never believed me when I said the baby was coming - BOTH times... and epidurals didn't take. They made me call 3 times and wait 45 mins to go to the bathroom and then YELLED at me for getting up on my own... like, I told you the epidural never took and you made me wait for almost an hour. I gotta pee.
I am 26, and when I was 20, I had pain in my hip when I would sleep. After a few months, I went to my doctor because the pain was now also when I would go from a sitting to standing position. The orthopedic doctor did not believe that anything was wrong because I wasn't in constant pain. He was very rude and dismissive. I asked for a referral to a doctor 2 hours from me. That surgeon was AMAZING. He listened and never made me feel crazy. I ended up having a 4 hour surgery, 2 weeks before my 21st birthday, because of how extensive the damage was in my hip. After the surgery, he told my parents that he didn't understand how I wasn't in constant excruciating pain.
Totally understand, and I’m so glad you got a doctor who listened. Unfortunately, a lot of doctors just assume that because it’s not something they’ve experienced, it’s not a big deal, but when you’re in excruciating pain, it’s a big deal, and they need to treat it as such.
Yep. Been told it can't possibly hurt as much as I say it does because I can still be "cheerful and polite". I'm cheerful and polite while pushing out a baby sans pain meds, while getting tattoos, and running on a twisted ankle in bootcamp.
Cheerful and polite is my whole personality, I can't suddenly shut it off. That's really stupid metric. Haven't they met enough people who are still kind while suffering?
As somebody who has never reacted a lot to pain, I had to learn that lesson pretty young, when I was 3 my brother and I were play fighting, and he yeeted me off my parents' bed, I cried and was comforted, went to bed, and we thought it was all good.
The next morning when my mom woke up, she was pleasantly surprised by the house being so quiet, and when she went to the living room she found me reading and not making a sound.
She knew that was not normal, she saw I was holding my arm close to my chest and she took me to the hospital, they gave me an x-ray and my arm was very broken.
So if you don't/your kid doesn't react a lot to pain, don't be afraid to tell people you have a high pain tolerance, so many of my injuries and illnesses were left untreated for longer than they should've because I didn't show how hurt I was in a typical way.
The same happened to my brother. He fell on ice and his arm was broken. At school no one noticed it because he was not showing any discomfort. But my mom knew something was wrong when he didn’t want to eat ‘because he was not hungry’
@@Eet0saurus Parents trusting their gut when their kid acts in an unusual way is an impressive fail save.
My mother was told that my arm was definitely not broken because I wasn't carrying on IN FRONT OF ME. Then the doctor was super embarrassed when he saw that it was from the x ray she demanded. Lol. Same thing, I wasn't using the broken arm!
What aggrivates me is I dont scream or holler so they send me home saying rhey wstched me and I dont seem to be in pain but I get quiet.
I’ve sometimes had to find interesting ways to deal with pain or panicking in medical places because apparently when instinct takes over I don’t really scream, I just swear like a sailor 😂
I'll complain a lot if it's normal pain, but if it's actually serious pain I'm just breathing carefully
I never know how to answer those pain questions. Once I said my pain level was somewhere between Swearing and Crying. Then when Doc pressed on my belly while trying to diagnose, the pain jumped WAY past Swearing straight to Crying. Lol!
same with me. had costochondritis which is when the cartilage between your breast bone and rib cage inflames and it is extremely painful and every breath you take creates a horrible sharp pain. I was in the urgent care waiting room for over three hours crying. when they finally saw me they had told me the reason it took so long was because I wasn’t their top priority and there other people who are worse conditions than “just abdominal pain.” they didn’t take my pain seriously. but one female nurse FINALLY listened to me and thought I might have a appendicitis. I don’t think it was an x-ray but they did some type of scan and found it was costochondritis, a severe case too. They did apologize for not taking me seriously but it’s still very frustrating.
Same! I withdraw when I'm in pain. Sorry, I'm not a violent screamer. I've never screamed because of pain. I don't even cry if I can help it because it can trigger or make my migraines worse.
My cousin has an incredibly high pain tolerance that she believes was brought about by suffering high levels of pain as a child. I have been with her while she experienced delayed care in a hospital because she was reporting her pain as low enough that the docs didn’t believe something was seriously wrong until physical scans came back confirming a very serious condition. I stood there while they told her that they hadn’t considered what it turned out to be because they had never seen someone with the internal issues she had without the patient expressing extreme physical pain that made it almost impossible for them to even communicate. Meanwhile, my cousin had driven herself 40min to the hospital, walked in on her own and calmly explained everything very wrong she was feeling in her body, including the fact that she would place her pain at a ‘4’ but that she had a very high pain tolerance so they should probably consider that more of an ‘ 8 or 9’. Obviously, they didn’t believe her about the pain thing until they got her scans back.
Is your cousin a farmer?
@@TeeganLee nope, skinny white girl in the city lol
@rheah7180 Pain can be so weird. I barely felt my motorcycle accident and ended up walking to the hospital after. It only really started stinging when they were aggressively cleaning out the road rash. I'm sure they wouldn't have believed me if I told them my pain was a 3, but it really was.
@@zwink37 that is adrenaline my friend, it numbs all the pain so you can function while an emergency is ongoing.
Pain is a perception your brain gives you to tell you something is wrong. There are so many ways it can be altered or misinterpreted. It’s really not a great measure of how severe an injury or condition is.
I've had experiences where the oain should have had me crying- as a kid doctors expected me to be screaming- because it was stuff THEY would be screaming over, I barely grimanced and never complained. But my fibromyalgia flare ups have me bawling- it took a decade to finally find a doctor who acknowledged it. honestly it's because I was so used to the fibro pain, starting at a young age, that getting stitches dug out of infected wounds and such were so trivial. And now that I've been getting treatment for ny fibro, minor stuff does make me say "ow".
I now refuse to only use numbers.
It's always, "if stepping on a tac is a 1, being shot point blank with a paintball gun is a three, getting burnt on an engine block is a 5, lancing an abscess with no anesthetic is a 7, and kidney stones are a 9. My pain is #
Edit: i also try to find out what kinds of paun the doctor has faced. "Ypu know the soreness the next day after someone kicks your ^⁵⁵? No? Have you ever been badly burnt? Had a bad shock? Been hit in the face with a baseball?
Edit:
I NOW try to find pain the doctor I'm seeing can relate to and use that to relate to those numbers. It seems to help in most cases.
Edit 2: unless the doctor just SUCKS
Edit 3 for the person who "daddy can do no wrong!" Whenever a doctor is mentioned, this is for you. Everyone else can ignore.
For example, a bad dpctor who is not going tonbe reasonable can only be dealt with by saying, "i think-for whatever reason- you domt have the capacity to listen or be a neutral observer. Can i speak to.someone else."
If you tolerate a shitty doctor, it could ruin your life.
For example: after someone transferred my call, (cops? Insurance? Or maybe one of the witnesses or the guy who smashed into the back of my car called? Not sure. Moments are clear but most of it is fog) i know ome of the witnesses was worried. Inspoke to a 911 operator, the operator insisted an ambulance take me despite my protestation. The triage guy got me back that instant despite there not being a room for me and just being on the stretcher, and to my confusion, a couple nurses seemed incredibly concerned.
Then came the doctor who didnt notice i had a traumatic brain injury. He refused to believe i was in a car accident, refused to look at footage of the car accident, was annoyed that i was shaking with a stiff back and neck, repeating things, slurring my words, confused, complaining of pain in my head, struggling with tasks like signing my name, struggling to recall my age and birthdate, stuttering, stammering, being confused about what was being said and forgetting the entire conversation halfway through a sentence, people seemed to me to be speaking gibberish, i was exhausted, struggling to stay awake, had erratic emotions, confusion about where i was, etc.
The doctor acted like i was wasting his time and trying to find reasons why i was fine and am just uninjured liar. He got visibly aggressive when i asked for an M.R.I. he clearly thought i was lying about being jn a car accident. He refused to look at the photoS
"You claim you were in a car accident. When? *something about weeks ago*"?
*told him some variant of it just had happened*
"Well, it a good thing you weren't going fast when you hit him"
"I was stopped and he hit me at well over the speed limit 55, and he said he hit the gas instead of the break"
Scoff and unprompted later:
"Its good you didnt see it coming or you would have been injured."
I rxplaimed that i did know he was coming i thpught i was about to be hit by
Part that lives in my embarrassed Memory: "i thought it, um- i thought it was coming at me, a train. No, it was so loud. I saw the flagger drop his sigh and run and the engine was so loud. I knew a train was about to hit, no, sorry, not- um.... uh it was roaring. No, not tracks, a train. Not a train, sorry, no tracks um its for stores. Sorry, the track- sorry.. uh...... thought it was a TRUCK. Not a car truck. I mean a normal... One of those huge trucks with a train on the back. The freight train on the back. Sorry, freight truck. A truck with the- delivery-.... um a truck.. a truck was-... he drove a cop car.
And then i was too embarrassed to say anything back.
That doctor put "neck strain" no mention of losing consciousness, nonmention of a car accident, nothing went to my insurance. None of the standard paperwork was filled out until like 3 weeks later. And now i have potentially permanent damage to the speech center of my brain after my tbi was untreated
Exactly
Yeah that’s the fucked brain wiring esp when you’re a kid 😂😂😂I could walk on a broken ankle for a week before having an adult notice I was being little too quite but you lightly touch my skin feels like you’re cutting me with glass 😂😂😂for me my stomach muscles can seize up and muscles around the rib cage worse pain ever, I’d rather take a punch and I have 😂😂😂.
@@HayleyPhoebeone of my daughters would cry more when she broke a nail than when she literally broke her elbow. The elbow break was bad enough that the er called in the orthopedic surgeon on a Sunday afternoon to set it.
Her daughter also has paradoxical pain responses due to global apraxia.
A small sliver in her foot and the neighbors might have thought she was being tortured, but when she somehow managed to break through a window resulting in several cuts and scratches? She was laughing.
My daughter has been advised to seek medical attention for her child to rule out serious injuries anytime there is a possibility that such a thing could have happened. Stating that such children have been known to be diagnosed with poorly healed fractures because the child simply wasn’t aware of the injury.
when I dislocated my knee for the first time at 14 I got up off the ground, walked to the car and drove to the doctors office, only for my doctor to go "wtf is wrong with you get to a hospital??"😂😭
anyway they were all perplexed at how I was even walking on it without grimacing, but the pain was no where near my period pains so I just sucked it up.
needless to say getting dxed with EDS and Endo definitely made sense.
I really like the pain scale that specifically describes how the pain affects your daily life. Like 4 is distracting but can do usual activities while 6 is hard to ignore and makes you avoid usual activities!
I was diagnosed with complex globally involved Ehlers Danlos syndrome when I was 8 and showed symptoms before that, the pain scale isn’t meant for people like me, if I read it and fit into it as best as I can, I’m at a 6 or 7 daily
I'm a nurse and we try to set goals with our chronic pain patients. Like you're in 9/10 pain, your baseline is a 6, what is a realistic pain level you want to be at?
As a fellow EDS girly (with several autoimmune diseases too), obviously I wish my pain could be at a 0, or even a 3/4. But if I'm in acute pain, if we can get it down to my baseline pain I'm happy. Chronic illness sucks 🥹 we should create a new pain scale for chronic pain patients tho
Same i have eds, fibromyalgia, lupus, gastroparesis, and hypothyroidism(this is the only one that doesnt cause pain so i went ahead and listed all of them). My daily pain is 6-8 (6 most of the time up to 7 when its bad and on rare extra bad days all the way to 8 which is probably thanks to fibromyalgia telling me the pain im feeling is actually worse than it is) when i broke my finger that was a 4 so like the pain scale really wasnt meant for us
Another EDS zebra here. Same. I know I have a high pain tolerance because, for example, I request no anesthesia for dental fillings. Another example: x-rays show I have arthritis in my spine, but it was news to me.
However, I think the main points the doctor is making in this video are true and important.
@@elisemorgan7591 ive had to go to ugentcares and ers for different severity of things a few times and I wish they would mention this. Because especially with my abdominal pain im never really going to see no pain but if it spikes to an 8 lets get in back down to at least 3 please
Yep.
My kid was very sick between the ages of 18 months and 3 years. He learned how to just tolerate pain, because he was too young to express it when it was at a level below very high.
When he was 13 he broke his wrist. (Distal radial ulna. A foosh) I knew the moment he stepped in our door that it was broken merely because he was holding his arm in a protective position.
We went to the er immediately. 7 pm…. The triage nurse actually tried to tell us to go home. Because “kids with a broken arm come in crying”
She made us wait until 4 am to to even get called in for an exam. 6 am X-rays. 7am cast and pain meds, then home.
Yes. Some people have a high pain tolerance. And it’s often because they were frequently in a lot of pain before they developed the ability to express their pain with words.
If someone says they are hurting? BELIEVE THEM.
"oh that couldn't happen, it's pretty rare"
Yeah and how many patients come through here a day?
Genuinely, most people should not work in medicine.
My older sister (10 years older than me) was hit by a car when she was 13 and shattered her pelvis. Over the years, she's had 14 different surgeries to try and fix her hips.
So, growing up, we spent a lot of time in the hospital. The downside was that whenever I would mention having pain or feeling ill, I would get accused of being jealous of my sister and lying to get attention.
From the age of 4, I had to learn how to hide minor pain/illness from my family, or I would get punished/yelled at for lying.
Now, as an adult, I genuinely don't react to pain at all.
@@brokenandcrakedsorry for you mate
Exactly i have a Connective tissue disorder and frequently get horrific pain but its all the time so i keep walking up the hill to bus stop even if i feel like im so much pain because i am everyday
@@brokenandcraked my story was similar with being born 11 weeks premature with lung problems and lower limb dysplasias. I was ten when I broke my leg sledding into a fence. The only person who immediately believed me was my mother-I didn't even have to tell her I'd heard and felt the crack.
It can be worse if you are AFAB. If your blood pressure isn't spiking, the ER doesn't seem to believe you are in pain and need pain management. It wasn't until the X-ray came back proving my shoulder was broken that I was allowed anything for pain. Husband had a kidney stone and got duladid (sp?) before the kidney stone was diagnosed.
That's because women lie about pain a lot. (And don't use acronyms. Just say women. "Women" is not a dirty word.) An estimated 20-50% of women straight up malinger acute or chronic pain and further that women tend to catastrophize pain aka exaggerate the pain they feel when reporting. Doctors actually account for these factors which harm women who actually are telling the truth about their symptoms because of others malingering or exaggerating.
This is why it's extremely important to shame women who lie, malinger or exaggerate for social advantages because they are the reason the system is the way it is. Not the doctors who have to serve both populations and decipher who is which.
100%
Even with my blood pressure and heart rate being through the roof, they never give me anything.. it's ridiculous.
They don’t believe trans women either, tho.
"if ur afab" honestly rlly trans either way, not to mention fat or disabled or not white
I grew up wirh abusive parents and "high pain tolerance" I'm absolutely sure beyond a shadow of a doubt that I broke at least 3 bones growing up and I never even got x rays, granted they only took me to the ER the time i was actively dying from dehydration from being punished without water but doctors and nurses saw me a day or two later and the response was usually, if it was broken your parents would have Taken you to the hospital or you wouldn't be able to stand (I know because I had to heal them on my own so they obviously healed funky and you can see where they broke, I think it may have been more than 3 but only those 3 healed funny so I'm only sure of those). It's about how much you react to pain and not how much you feel it. I've passed out from pain multiple times, sometimes while sitting next to medical professionals who didn't believe I could be experiencing that amount of pain,
happened to me too. Doctors should be our allies in these situations. that line always made me SO fricken mad-- "if it was bad enough your parents would've taken care of it" like. my parents starved me, beat me, deprived me of bathroom use, and used sleep deprivation as punishments. they're more likely to kill me than to ever give a flying f☆ck about my wellbeing. and the idiot counselor in highschool taught me well to NEVER EVER disclose abuse to a duty to report professionals. that stupid motherf☆cker called home. when I told him they were harming me, he was like, "Have you tried talking to them?" like you PoS you think I'm not begging for them to stop? I got so physically f☆cked up that week and the idiot counselor believed it when my dad said I "did it to myself".
Oh my gosh. I'm so sorry you went through that for so many reasons. 😔
I had surgery the other week. Without any pain meds, it hurt less than my normal daily pain. Really put things into perspective
I was born with Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis. As I get older, my tolerance goes up. Which is weird because my sensitivity in certain areas is also going up.
If I'm in pain every day, I start to feel numb to it, but only a little, but the longer I have it, because it's degenerative, the worse it's gets, so I'm constantly just getting more and more tolerant. My previous bad days can't compare to my current bad days. My current “good” days used to be my previous fair days. And I get numb to the lowest amount off pain, but as my body gets worse, the pain gets worse, and the level had already maxed out. Today for example, was one of my worst days yet. I was in so much pain my body would twitch at random, completely out of my control, and I couldn't keep myself conscious. I never used to get so bad that my body would literally rather knock me out than deal with it. But that's my new worst, which means I can tolerate more pain than I had in the past.
I tell doctors about this because I want them to realize that when I hurt, it isn't subbed my toe hurt, it's my body is literally knocking me out, possibly to stop me from going crazy? Maybe because being in that much pain used all my energy? I'll likely never know, I mean how would people even begin to measure THAT? But that much -hurt.
It's so they know I'll laugh if they say “oh, so an extra strength Tylenol for that headache?” bitch please, I'm currently taking something that has the metaphorical ability to laugh at you for suggesting that. When they don't seem phased, I tell them my birthing story. I tell them:
“I didn't think I was in enough pain to get my epidural, so I waited for it to be that extreme pain that everyone always talks about. I then remembered that some people don't feel as much pain as others. I started feeling a bit of pain, not unbearable, but definitely not fun, so I told the nurses I might need that epidural. They joked “you're not crying, you're not screaming, you're not ready”. I asked them to check anyway and within literal seconds people were running around to get ready to put in my epidural. I was nearly 10cm dilated and had they wasted any time at all, it would have been too late. In any normal circumstance, with any normal kid, I would have been able to give birth without it, I'm sure. But, it wasn't normal... He, isn't normal. As he came out, my doctor said “the technical term is corkscrewed...” he spun as he came out... With his shoulders -_-. Basically, while the doctor was stitching me up, I asked her how many stitches out was going to be... She wouldn't answer me. But my stepmom was there and said it was around 65. My doctor said “sure... We'll go with that...” it was clear there were more. That kid must have had sharp shoulders lol.
So yes, I'm glad I had the epidural. I'm glad I couldn't feel the clearly a bajillion stitches. I'm glad I couldn't feel the doctors literally jumping up and down while pushing on my stomach. I'm glad those kinds painful, but only marginally worse than my normal cycle cramps were gone. I'm even a little glad that I had to ask the doctors if I was pushing because I legit couldn't tell, if only because looking back it was kinda funny. I'm glad that at that moment, I couldn't feel the pain my arthritis may or may not have decided to inflict upon my legs, if only for that relatively short time. I'm most glad that my now teenager ended up being safe, healthy and is the most wonderful experience of my life. But, I'm not glad it meant I would go out of remission, I would slowly, over the next 14 years become bedridden, wheelchair bound, have panic attacks and emotional breakdowns over feeling like I'm not a good enough mom because I can't play with my kid, I can't teach him sports, to ride a bike, how to swim, fish, fight if ever he has to (were a pacifist family, but sparring is really fun... If I hadn't be born with Arthritis, I would have signed up for martial arts and gymnastics and If likely be a dancer or a teacher... Sorry, massive tangent lol).
The thing I hear most from others is about how “strong” I am. My points in all this? If someone who you think of as a “strong” human being tells you they have a high pain tolerance, it's because they want you to realize that that strength is working for and against them, either physically or mentally, and sometimes both. It's because they're trying to tell you to skip the basics, they have their patient diploma. You can save time and give things to them more straight. These are people who've been through shit, the people who've heard all the base line stuff before. The people who could work in triage without being trained. These are our kintsugi, our broken people who have been previously repaired with gold and made both stronger and more beautiful by people like you, whom take the kindness and care to wonder about things like this.
Thank you ❤.
I very rarely run into other JRA kids-turned-adults. It's honestly really encouraging that I'm not the only one still struggling with chronic pain after all these years. I hope things get better some day, for both of us. (I thought about using a fist bump emoji but since I can't actually *make* a fist IRL, I'll just go with 👋 ❤).
This comment is incredibly insightful, thank you for sharing
@@Antimuffin lol, I couldn't agree more! And I'm laughing at the joke you made, not the reality behind it. Unfortunately for me, my “make a fist” is full on “walking”. Mine started in my knees and decided “ooooh, here looks nice!” about EVERY joint in my body that isn't in my back out neck. It then started to whisper sweet nothings in my immune system's ears and before I knew it, it started attacking my thyroid, platelets and muscles! (Hashimoto's, TTP [Thrombotic Thrombocytopenic, Purpura], and Fibromyalgia!)
I was equally thrilled and saddened to read your comment. Although I'm really happy to find someone else who lived through similar experiences as I had, I'm really sad when others have to go through it; especially because you seem like sick a cool person.
Although full on getting better isn't particularly likely, I do hope we both have as many good days as we possibly can. 💜💜
@@von0312 thank you for you incredibly kind comment. I'm glad if and when I am able to get people to think about things in the world they wouldn't have otherwise. 💜💜
Many immune system disorders are like that that cause arthritis such as PSA, AS and others. Or body over time just doesn’t compensate well leading to other issues. Be as well as you can.😊
When I was 13, a cyst twisted one of my fallopian tubes, cutting off the blood supply. I was in pretty severe pain for a week, and my mom thought I had pulled something near my hip.
The pain gradually got worse. She gave me icy hot one night, which did literally nothing, and I woke up in so much pain that I threw up.
While waiting for her to wake up, I threw up a second time. I woke her up then with “I need to go to the hospital.”
On the ride there, the pain disappeared. There was just a weird heavy sensation, just something wrong in that area. It turns out that the tube had died around then.
None of the ER doctors took it seriously when I got there. They thought it was my period (I hadn’t started it at all yet) or a UTI.
The blood draw showed an outrageous white blood cell count, which made them order a CT.
It took them hours to talk to us about the findings (my mom eventually had to bitch at them), and they saw that something was in there and opted for emergency exploratory surgery.
So I now have a very clear idea of when something is extremely wrong and also harbor a mild resentment toward my mom for making similar mistakes to a lot of medical professionals in these cases.
I had the same thing happen, I was able to manage my pain for about a day by applying pressure before I was throwing up. Turns out my cyst was about the size of a baseball and almost twisted the tube to the point of tearing it. I had a hard time describing the pain and explaining where it was to the point that I was in the ER for about two hours waiting on imaging before any meds other than ibuprofen would be given. I got the first real pain meds when I was being rushed for an emergency surgery. I think they felt bad because they didn't even say anything when I explained that morphine and Norco have never been able to help manage my pain and I needed to jump to fentanyl. They just did it and into surgery I went.
The same thing happened to me, but due to my history, it took years of begging doctors to believe me. I had a twisted cyst, severe endometriosis, and eventually, I was diagnosed with pcos. I only have one ovary left now due to a hysterectomy, but it was the worst experience trying to get a doctor to believe I was suffering in pain. Even now, I have a large mass in my leg, and it took 3 years to get a doctor to believe it was not just a pulled muscle.
Moms get told they are overreacting all the time by Drs. And when the mom is right, they get told it was their fault the Drs didn't believe them.
You are female and it was gynaecological pain therefore you aren't believed.
Even if your mum advocated for you earlier she wouldn't have been believed either.
Ask any woman who suffers from endometriosis and/or adenomyosis from starting their periods and was diagnosed 10+ years later.
The same goes for emotions, too. Some people assume their problems are far worse than other people's because they have a bigger reaction to something, but people can be equally frustrated or sad or happy and have completely different reactions to it. Someone who's "more patient" isn't just miraculously immune to frustration, they just don't have a strong reaction to it. Someone who doesn't smile much or doesn't react strongly to a gift isn't unhappy or ungrateful, they just don't react as strongly to those emotions. Especially people that are considered "tough" emotionally will be treated more harshly just because they tolerate it more. That doesn't make it any less hurtful or cruel, it only enables more of it before it gets to a breaking point.
As someone who has had a few kidney stones in my lifetime, I’ve experienced doctors not taking “pain” seriously. The first time I had a kidney stone, they said it was small enough to pass at home and sent me off with extra strength Tylenol. The next time I had a kidney stone, I expressed in strong language that it reminded me of back labor, the doctor gave me morphine. I like that doctor. Eventually, I decided to get lithotripsy and I’ve been stone-free for years.
So understand, I’m a chronic uti sufferer and I have had one kidney stone. The dismissive attitude is the worst, especially when you end up in the ER at 3 in the morning, just praying the doctor can fix you and relieve your pain, and they not only send you home to suffer, they make you feel bad about even coming there and taking up their time.
I don't have a high pain tolerance, I'm just good at ignoring what my body's telling me.
Yup! Sometimes it's the only way to not go crazy
I was told to take fkn Tylenol post surgically after a double mastectomy. I'm pretty sure everyone knew that I was in pain. Throughout treatment, I made it a game with myself to not ask for pain management because nothing happened when I did. A high pain threshold is all about how much pain you've been forced to needlessly suffer through. But, yeah, I'm bitter.
I honestly should have used that when I went into labor. We waited as long as possible, but I was progressing so quickly, we went in. They really tried to send me home until I was farther along just because they wouldn’t believe us since I seemed so relaxed about it. I was in a lot of pain, but it was tolerable so I do what I always do, which is proceed as usual until I literally can’t. When they came to my room telling me I needed to go until I was closer to birth, I stood up to grab stuff and my water broke all over the floor lol had my daughter while in back labor about six hours later. They also didn’t get the anesthesiologist in until I was 9cm dilated because again, they didn’t think it was so bad until I was screaming bloody murder from the back labor.
Lesson learned: always be your own best advocate and trust your own knowledge of your body.
Doctors may spend a few years in school but they'll never have more experience with the patient's body than they do.
These kinds of stories always seem weird to me because anesthesiologists prefer not to be rushed when doing the epidurals.
This is very true. I went to an ent specialist and he said things like "I'm surprised you waited this long" and "most people are in here because of pain, in this situation, before hearing problems" "why didn't you come in before this". If you don't know you have a "high pain tolerance" then they don't know you're in a lot of pain because you couldn't possibly think to tell them 😅 so you don't even get the chance to mention it and do that whole song and dance. But in retrospect, some one who went to school to know these things should have noticed something was off, just saying 🤷♀️
I rode my bike to the hospital when I had ovarian torsion and didn’t feel like it was super terrible… just annoying. It was an instance of “this is really not that bad but maybe I should go to the hospital because it’s in my right lower abdomen.” They almost couldn’t save the ovary because it was nearly dead when they got to it. I wonder if I was in (or showed I was in) more pain if they would’ve taken it more seriously and gotten the imaging sooner 🤷🏻♀️ when I was in PA school, we were taught that ovarian torsion ALWAYS causes excruciating pain and I raised my hand and was like “I mean… always is a very strong word…”
I had to do some autonomic tests a while ago and that included the hand in iced water one, and it baffled me. I have reynauds for one so touching ice is pretty damn painful, but also something that has to be done sometimes and in this case definitely. I managed to keep my hand in for the time they wanted, and they talked like it mustn’t have been too painful, but the whole time I was reciting poetry and swearing under my breath trying not to panic from the pain 😐 guess I didn’t show it enough?
I've had some patients who were already refusing their pain meds and up and walking 3 days after having their sternum cracked open for heart surgery, and other who have gone through the same procedure be bed ridden for a week, with a PCA pump, all the meds from our plans and extra pain management from the physical therapists. Every person's pain tolerance is completely unique to them and no one can be treated exactly the same as the person laying in the bed nexr to them.
Having a high pain tolerance almost literally killed me. I ignored severe abdominal pain for hours and finally begged for a ride to the ER. I was too calm so person talked me out of it. More time goes by I insist on a ride. At the ER I was too calm so they didn't wanna see me. Did a CT scan per policy and rushed me to the OR in under 10min. They admitted I was too calm so they didn't believe I was in pain. My appendix was w capsulated, oozing fluid, wrapped around my intestine strangulating it, and adhered to my abdominal wall. Spent a week in the hospital
I know it's toxic, but I grew up in a family where it was considered "rude" to scream and carry on if you were in pain. I was expected to stay silent and cry to myself about it, so to this day, when I'm in a lot of pain, that's exactly what I do, much to my detriment, as my pain is never taken seriously. The one time I did actually show how much pain I was in by crying in front of a doctor, that doctor told me that crying and asking for relief was "drug seeking behavior". So never again.. Sad it has to be that way.
"Drug seeking behavior" is just shorthand for "we hate people." An addiction is going to come out in a lot of ways other than being in pain and wanting it to stop, and even if someone has an addiction that doesn't meant they deserve to suffer. It's entirely unsympathetic anf inhumane bs.
@@lulolie Exactly! Thank you so much for mentioning this! Addictions are disabilities as well, and the discrimination against them in the medical field is just awful.
Yeah I think that's why I don't react in the "normal" way
I always seem more calm and competent when dealing with severe pain because those situations often require me to watch the doctor, my care team, and my symptoms very closely to avoid medication interactions or them missing comorbidities that pose risks. As a result they think I appear to be in less pain. It’s now really hard for me to relax enough to experience the pain instead of dissociating which I worry will lead to me also discounting my pain or missing symptoms. It’s very stressful and even if I disclose that I have medical PTSD, I get treated with suspicion as if me deliberately checking in on my pain and other sensations and becoming distressed after being calm and composed is actually me putting on an act, trying to get narcotics, playing up my issue to get seen faster, etc.
My sister gave me a pain scale for when I got to appointments or end up in the hospital, and it helps so much.
It was nice to finally have a way of explaining that despite looking more-or-less okay, speaking normally, etc., I'm at an 8 and experiencing abc symptoms in xyz areas.
I have had one herniated disc in my spine bad enough that at one point, I was either walking with a cane or completely unable to walk at all.
I've had one surgery so far, and the next disc up is also getting ready to fail, so I will likely need another at some point in the future. (trying to be very careful and alleviate that need as much as I can)
When I tell people that I always hurt, they don't necessarily believe me.
A good day is when I can ignore it and go about the day like nothing.
The problem with a high pain tolerance however, is getting mysterious bruises, cuts, and other damage and I genuinely don't even note or realize it right away.
Oh my yes! I don't know how many time someone else will point out bruises, cuts and scrapes and I just shrug. I even developed a nasty skin infection and I didn't feel it. It is just not loud enough to be felt.
Showing my age but did you ever get told to bite your thumb when you subbed your toe? It works, because it adds to the mental load of pain and down grades all your pain.
@@nikkiewhite476 I actually have heard that phrase, and while I don't bite, I do nail dig or I'll punch my hip/leg if I need to 'reset' if I get a particularly bad nerve spike.
I’ve struggled with this as well. Do I tell them how it really feels and make them de-prioritize me, or do I blow it out of proportion and act like it hurts worse than it does so they take me seriously. It can be really hard to accurately describe pain to a doctor.
I definitely know my pain tolerance went up over time given such circumstances as you described
I walked into an ER with a broken hand, probably my 5th broken hand in my life, and calmly told them that I had broken a bone in my hand and showed them exactly which bone. The doctor explained to me that he was almost certain that there was no chance that my hand was actually broken but if I would feel more comfortable then he could order an X-ray. I told him I would like the X-ray, and when he came in with the results he apologized and explained that with the lack of pain I was showing he assumed that there would be no way my hand was actually broken.
And then there's the fact that I've just gone about my day as usual during 2 prolonged prodromal labors
When I broke my tailbone at 12, I didn't want go to hospital and though adults were just overreacting over little bumped tailbone, because I wasn't in that much pain. I also didn't want to believe the doctor when he said it's broken after looking at my X-ray.
Before surgery for an ACL and meniscus repair, the nurse asked me what my pain tolerance was like. Being a nurse myself i knew this question would help them anticipate how much pain meds I would need. I think just rating pain with a number is stupid and it would be better to use descriptions because the type of medication or therapy should change with the type of pain. If the ER doc had ordered fentanyl for my 9/10 knee pain when it was extremely swollen and I couldn't walk after the injury, I would think they were stupid because that would help pain only because I would be passed out 😅. In my experience, pain management is done best with multiple methods at once.
I am an OB Nurse and I had a 1 day post-op CSection Mom who simply couldn't use the number system to rate her pain. "I understand what you're asking, I just can't express it that way." No dice with the faces either.
Me: "DO you mind some swear words?"
Mom: "No. Go ahead."
Me: "Are we talking, 'damn, this hurts; s*, this hurts!; or f***! this hurts!'"
Mom: "S*, this hurts!"
Me: "I'll be right back with 2 Percocet."
Damn, I would have brought Ibuprofen, F***, I would have brought Dilaudid. Some people communicate differently. What the Hell, it worked!
One interesting thing I have found is the pain of tattoos! It’s hard to say whether you have a high or low pain tolerance but I have found that getting a tattoo from the same artist in the same spot is a pretty good way to compare pain tolerance levels! My artist kept warning me about my elbow and when she started there I was unfazed. Yes it was a different sensation from my forearm but not anywhere near the screaming and grimacing I’ve seen from others
I breathe into them and sometimes fall asleep 😂 it hurts but it's not a bad pain because I know nothing is wrong 😅
I would repeat the mantra of "This is hurting, but it isn't hurting (damaging) me" in combination with mindful breathing techniques during the more sensitive areas of both of my full calf and foot tattoos (socks? ☺️). Playing Tetris on my old DS was also a big help! 😁
Little did I know how valuable these things would be later in life when chronic pain would become an unwelcome companion.
From years of ignoring intense chronic pain, you don't just tolerate it. You stop feeling it. It's so hard to try to communicate what I'm feeling to doctors when I'm in pain. So now I do meditation to be able to notice the pain again
But yeah, it all stemmed from doctors not believing I was in pain as a child in the first place.
so true! You nailed! I have had many horrific stories of doctors or nurses not taking my pain seriously or not believing me when I say I’m in pain. This is very sad and unfortunate. So it means a lot when a doctor is understanding,kind,trusts and believes the patient, and is willing to help.
I don't have a high tolerance for pain, but what I have learned since I was a kid was to mask the pain. That stoicism made getting help for my kidney infection difficult because I didn't react strongly enough when he thumped on them. If he had been able to see my face, he would have seen me flinch facially, which my mom did. As a kid, my doctors and PE teachers didn't understand how much pain I was in due to a misaligned knee cap for years. Eventually, my doctor ordered x-rays, which revealed the misalignment, and sent me to an orthopedic surgeon. He ordered an MRI, sent me to physical therapy, and then operated on it to fix the alignment. It was amazing how quickly my pain level dropped after I recovered from the surgery.
It's absolutely disgusting the way I've been treated since I was about 15 and started experiencing severe pain due to what I now know was endometriosis, but it took over 8 years to actually get a diagnosis. After about the 3rd time of collapsing and blacking out over and over, vomiting, writhing and screaming in pain like I was giving birth at age 17 and being rushed to hospital, the doctors started to treat me horrifically. Once they realised it wasn't any of the obvious and easy to manage things like appendicitis or a bowel blockage, they just started telling me it was just my period and I was just pathetic. Imagine grown adult doctors (mostly male, but terrifyingly there were female drs involved too) telling a terrified 17 year old girl that they're pathetic and need to stop being so dramatic 😢
After a few visits to A&E, they decided I was either a drug addict or had munchausens. That was the beginning of a decade long battle with the local NHS to simply be treated like a human and be treated with some compassion and empathy. The doctors and nurses I came across genuinely abused me by neglecting me, verbally abusing me and sometimes physically abusing me. One doctor threw a cannister of nitrous oxide across the room at me out of frustration. It's scary how many doctors and nurses don't want to treat patients who are going to take more than 10 minutes to diagnose and how many of them are genuinely obsessed with having power over vulnerable people. They are more concerned with being right than doing their jobs. Obviously there are some incredible doctors and nurses and they are like gold dust in my experience. But there are way more that are willing to abuse patients since they know it's their word against the patient, and they all close ranks. It's way more than anyone would care to believe.
I've got CPTSD because of all of this malpractice and mistreatment and am on the waiting list for EMDR therapy now at age 31 because it still impacts my life massively. I'll be watching a film and when someone is shot in the arm and the doctor gives them morphine, that voice in my brain is like 'they don't need morphine, it's just a bullet wound' because of all the horrific care I've experienced and witnessed. In my experience, women only have their pain adequately taken care of if they're dying. It's such a huge issue in society and I wish more people understood the 'gender pain gap' 😢
Adult son just got out of the hospital because of his high pain tolerance. Drove himself to the ER on advice of doctor where appendicitis was suspected. Finally was admitted that night and had surgery early the next morning but it was too late. Even though his pain level was only around a 2 it had already ruptured. Luckily it all eventually healed and he was sent home. I have the opposite problem as near fatal conditions (pulmonary arterial hypertension, a ruptured gangrenous gallbladder and a collapsed lung) were diagnosed as just my fibromyalgia . High or low pain tolerance you just can’t win 🤷🏻♀️
Oh my god, when you said it was too late 😰 I’m so glad to hear you’ve both survived these things
My son doesn't know when he's hurt. If he feels a 2 on the pain scale, I'm super worried. He only knows he's broken a bone when his limbs don't move through their full range of motion.
I always describe my pain as sounds and it drives medical professionals crazy but it makes so much sense to me
I guess my "high pain tolerance" is born of several doctors and dentists being visibly surprised at how calm I looked when they diagnosed what I had. So cholecystitis, a jaw abcess or a broken ankle were not that painful for me. And I literally walked into urgent care or doctor office describing my symptoms calmly.
But labor was exruciating that I could not do it and got epidural earlier than I should have
Years ago, I cut the side off my thumb at work. All the flesh from the tip of my thumb, down to the bottom of the nail, was hanging by a flap. I went to an urgent care clinic, knowing I'd need stitches.
But I've never been the type to outwardly show pain. So I was very calm when I told the triage nurse that I needed stitches. She was very condescending and said that they would be the judge of if I needed stitches and told me to go sit in the waiting room.
40 minutes later, they called me in and had me wait in a room for another 20 minutes. Finally, a nurse came in and grabbed a Band-Aid from the cupboard and asked to see my cut.
When I unwrapped my thumb and the skin peeled back, she lost it. Started freaking out about me being too calm to be this injured and rushed to get a doctor.
Pain is what the patient says it is
This.
Pain is 100% subjective.
If you can't believe what they tell you, don't bother asking.
Exactly! Thank y’all for mentioning this!
Unless the patient is a farmer, then the pain is likely much worse than they are willing to complain about
I had doctors, nurses, and dentist laugh at me when I seek help and ask questions I’d rather die. That’s how high my pain tolerance is.
Nerve damage from nerve sheath tumors and sensitive nerves. I'm just used to it but considered sensitive
I have chronic pain and I found an old definition of pain that I loved, which was “Pain: whatever the experiencing person says it is, existing whenever the experiencing person says it does.” And I love that definition so much
Easy because I've been told by doctors and nurses repeatedly that "it should hurt more" once they realize what' I'm dealing with. I've been sent home from the hospital in labor and then yelled at for being too dilated when I come back. I don't know I feel pain differently than you but my medical providers have repeatedly said things things that make it clear.
Feeling less pain than usual isn't the same as a high pain tolerance though. You might just don't feel pain in certain situations in which others feel pain. I don't experience menstruations, pap smears, IUD insertion etc as painful at all. But not because I have a high pain tolerance, it's because it's literally not painful to me. Child birth was excruciatingly painful though.
@@Tariachan Practically and realistically speaking it results in the same outcome even if my word choice isn't the same words you would choose to use to describe it. But it's common for medical people and men to tell women about ourselves
this is so important, I don't react much to pain, I sit quietly through six hour tat sessions, am full of piercings, and have a history of self-harm. but I still feel the pain very strongly even if it doesn't elicit much of a verbal or physical response.
It's awful trying to get anything diagnosed with a high pain tolerance. Having daily headaches and migraines every 2-3 days for years straight made me numb to most pain, my kidney stones went undiagnosed for a week because I didn't present in the ER writhing and crying from pain. It doesn't help that I was young (12+ for the headaches, 18 for the kidney stones) and AFAB. I'm just glad I finally got to see a neurologist around 16 and am no longer in daily crippling pain. The pain tolerance has lingered but I've learned to advocate for myself more.
For me I think part of it is that those of us who experience pain on a larger term basis have learned how to mask our pain. My family used to get annoyed and even upset with me when I was experiencing some of my chronic pain, so I learned to hide my external reaction so the people around me felt more comfortable. I was expected to do the same things everyone else did during those days, so I had to force myself to do those things despite the fact that I shouldn’t have been doing it. People like us who go to the hospital or doctors with extreme pain might not react the typical way that nurses and doctors expect us to. They might think we’re drug seekers. They might think we’re lying or faking our pain. But the thing is, we all react to pain differently depending on our life circumstances, culture, exposure to pain, etc. I hope that differences in how pain can be expressed will be taught more in the future so that people like me when I was younger are taken more seriously. Hell, I had a kidney infection for a few days and had to walk to the urgent care nearby because I couldn’t get a ride. I was hiding the pain and it wasn’t as extreme as my worst pain, so I didn’t think it was as big of a deal as it was. My doctor was shocked that I was even walking around, but when you’re used to forcing yourself to walk and act normal despite your intestines like almost ripping apart pains like that don’t seem as extreme. It wasn’t that I was actually tolerating it better, I was just so used to extreme pains and had a tendency to hide pain and just force myself to do chores and work despite it.
In 2023 I was diagnosed with a 9cm dermoid cyst on my ovary, which I had been confusing with back pain (originally the doctor thought it was ovarian cancer, which scared me and my family, and spent 6-7 hours doing tests to find out what it was)
Surgery was booked for a month in advance, but I ended up going back 3 separate times the next week with burning pain and a “leaking” sensation in my pelvic area . The first 2 times they insisted I was just overthinking and needed to wait
Turns out the cyst had started twisting and was spilling all the nasty shit into my body, and I was told after the surgery had it been left any longer, it could’ve went septic and killed me
Had an NP at the ER insist that I was drug seeking/lying/hormonal/etc because if I’d REALLY broken my pelvis my pain “would be 10/10” and not my rated 9/10 and I would be screaming and crying. She told me that the loud POP I heard was “probably a stick or something”. I told her to get out and find the doctor. Doctor recognized me from 6 months prior when he’d seen me for a broken pelvis, femur, and 4 ribs from a different accident. My pelvis was indeed broken again. I went to the ER because I recognized the sound. It was a 9/10. Hurt more the first time.
Like, sorry that you’re such a deeply hateful and jaded and pessimistic person that the patients you signed up to treat wanting treatment is such a burden on you. I work in EMS now. I still don’t think people who I’m 99% sure just want painkillers and a free ride don’t deserve my respect. I’m never 100% sure. I’m not God. Anyone who works in healthcare needs to be really, really sure of that.
I have cPTSD from years of childhood trauma. If I ever expressed being in pain or sick I was told 'I'll give you something worth crying about!' then very likely hit in the face/outright beaten and screamed at. When my pain level gets too high I start to disassociate into an almost completely numb state. I have had to just start explaining that 'if I were capable of actually expressing myself right now, I could be actively crying from the pain, and very possably rocking back and forth. But I can't. Because I have cPTSD.'
My pain scale is also incredibly skewed like how you were mentioning in the video. Because I have experienced some incredibly horrifically painful things in my life that most people haven't what is 'the worst pain I have ever experienced' is a lot higher than what should be normal.
I recently had an umbilical hernia surgery. The surgeon had to make a T incision because it was tearing open more. When asked about my pain I said it was a dull 1-2 which only lasted 4 days. Doc was amazed saying I have a very high pain tolerance. Sometimes it's a good thing, other times it's not, depending on the situation
The only reason I think I have a high pain tolerance is because multiple medical professionals have told me I do. To your point, they didn’t think anything was wrong with me each time until I insisted.
After surgery for kidney stones, I found myself in a lot of pain after the anaesthetic wore off. The doctor prescribed an analgesic appropriate to what he believed to be the pain level despite me describing it as between an eight and nine out of ten. The worst pain for me that would bring me down to the floor was the pain from the kidney stones and that for me was the ten.
The pain did not abate and I could find no position that would ease it, I spent several hours calling for something else to ease the pain, I cried and eventually after about six hours, I fell into a sleep, absolutely exhausted. My family even pleaded with two doctors to do something and said that I did not act this way unless the pain was very bad.
After prescribing some more of what I was given earlier that day, I was discharged and sent home.
When the pain flared up again, I went to a local wellness centre for a second opinion and that’s when they discovered I had a severe urinary tract infection. Stronger painkillers and a dose of antibiotics helped greatly.
It turned out that nurses at the hospital had not been monitoring me properly and had disposed of a urine sample instead of testing it.
I feel as I have a good pain resilience rather than pain tolerance. But nothing has compared to an adult tonsillectomy. For me, this was an emergency situation. I had chronic strep for 10 years that caused an autoimmune disorder, strep that became antibiotic resistant and, by the end, tonsils that got so swollen they blocked my airways and I had to be taken to the ER twice in 3 weeks. It took 10 years for doctors to take it seriously. I was at risk for the strep to spread to my heart. I had the surgery and…. I’ll never forget that kind of misery. They told me the fifth day was the worst day of recovery. That seemed strange so, I brushed it off…… the worst day was the fifth day of recovery because that’s when you start VOMITING….. while you have a cauterized throat. It was horrible, but worth it in the end. It took me a full 6 weeks to heal and go back to classes and work.
Pain tolerance isn't how much we feel the pain, it's how much we react. Pain tolerance IS what you described
i hate the pain scale because for awhile i was having severe pain for months on end non-stop due to a condition i was trying to get treated, and i never knew how to answer that question. because to me, "normal" was being in pain. i didn't know how to classify it in numbers anymore. felt like i was making it up, and it stressed me out that if i set the number too low that they wouldn't take me seriously or too high they'd think i was lying 😅
Same here...
So familiar :(
"If the pain is that bad you shouldn't be functioning"
What exactly was my other choice?
The most frustrating question with PCOS is “when is it bad enough”. When I got diagnosed in the ER I was accused of faking my pain because if I laid still I was pretty okay, but I couldn’t stand up
I'm pretty sure I have a high pain tolerance. Years ago, while I was working, I thought I stepped wrong as my foot was bothering me. The next morning, I couldn't stand on it. Turns out I ripped the tendon the crosses your foot. The doctor was like, "How did you finish your shift?" 🤷♀️
I have chronic migraines- i know when to take it easy, but i rarely react to my pain. My migraine pain often shifts around in my head so i dont pay attention to the type of pain either. Ive had a few issues i left unadressed for months because i didnt realize the pain indicated a new problem, im so used to ignoring my pain. Having a "pain tolerance" really is just a lack of reaction. I feel it, but I'm not prone to causing a fuss. Ive had an ER doc not believe i was having a severe issue because i was sitting quietly the whole time. Luckily, the nurse on that visit was super helpful.
I have a high pain tolerance.
I also have reoccurring viral meningitis. I have had 4 flare ups since 2/14/2015. The most recent one I went to the ER with a 104 fever, terrible headache, throwing up and I hadn’t eaten in two days. Yes it took me that long to go because of how much I HATE going to the doctor. The doctor told me that he should admit me but they have a day waiting period to get checked into the hospital and he heard me before about how much I didn’t want to go. He asks me if he gives me pain meds, anti virals, and anti nausea if i can go home or if I should check in.
I decided to go home. Having viral meningitis means getting a spinal tap which also can take weeks to recover from, and I figured with pain killers I would be ok.
I was wrong. The pain meds that were supposed to last me 5 days last me 16 hours. I tried to tough it out for another day but my fever was back up and I just wasn’t ok.
I went back to the doctor and he tells me that I can’t go running to the doctor every time I have a headache. That having a high fever, nausea, headache, inability to move my head, sensitivity to light and sound plus a documented history of viral meningitis at that hospital doesn’t actually mean I have it.
Doctor gives me fancy Exderine and says I can go home. I was so messed up I couldn’t argue. I spent the next 4 days taking Benadryl because every time i woke up I wanted to die.
Im normally a very pleasant person. I had negative patience for that time. My husband wanted to kill me. I didn’t drink water for 2 days and didn’t eat for 4 days. By the time I was semi functional it was thanks to opioids I had found from a prior injury. Even then, they only lasted 4 more days then I went back to work.
All this to say the second doctor didn’t believe me (despite solid evidence) and my life was so much of a living hell the entire time I wanted to die so bad.
My used to be nurse step mom heard and told me to report him to the doctor people. They are supposed to confirm I don’t have bacterial meningitis everytime I report signs because that is deadly and the doctor just told me I wasn’t that bad.
I have chronic migraine. I'm sensitive to noise. As much as I might feel like screaming in pain I would never do that because it would just make the migraine worse. That doesn't mean I'm not in severe pain, I've just trained myself to endure it silently.
not going to the doctor (in countries with free healthcare) for very paintul conditions would be one sign. just "toughing through it" and maybe even worsening the condition itself.
I have some sort of autoimmune disease (at least, that's the closest any doctor has bothered to get to trying to diagnose me for the better part of 5 years now since it suddenly started). At random times, though with a very small correlation to when I get sick, my entire body breaks out in hives. My skin will swell to the point I can't bend joints, often I can't walk right or even hold a pen in my hand. Sometimes it'll get so bad on my chest I can't breath because the skin is literally too swollen to move enough for me to take deep breaths.
I have honestly lost track of how many doctors have told me to just take Zyrtec or Benadryl, who have refused to believe this is anything other than contact dermatitis despite no allergy tests coming back positive and there being seemingly no common cause (again, outside of a small correlation to when I get sick, but you can't be allergic to the common cold and I know it's not the cold meds, I've checked). It is a miracle I haven't overdosed on allergy meds that, of course, have done nothing to help, because it isn't an allergy.
It absolutely sucks how much doctors just don't seem to care that I'm in pain or can't move or can't breath. I can't afford to continue going to the doctor just to be told to take over the counter meds, especially considering I want actual answers and an actual way to treat this, not just a quick fix so I'll shut up and go home...
That’s not the only thing that’s strange. For those of us with chronic pain, need a different pain scale. We are so accustomed to suffering and hiding it, people doubt us b
Yup! When my may thurner syndrome wasn't diagnosed and treated yet, I was in excruciating pain that was so different than anything else I'd felt before. It hurt worse to sit down or to stand, so I was bedridden for a while with my legs elevated. I got used to hiding the pain just so I could keep my sanity somewhat and not go crazy since it's not a condition that's well known or easy to diagnose and sometimes find the right physician who will dx and treat it who has experience. It was not a fun 7 months 😅
@@ItsJennNotJenny I have multiple autoimmune diseases. I was having shoulder pain I blamed on my lupus, seasonal changes etc. I finally got an MRI and needed a 2 level cervical fusion. It was a year after my pain started. It just didn’t occur to me that I had a new issue. Same thing in 2015. I felt weak etc and it hurt to wear a bra. Bilateral pneumonia before I was admitted. I lost 30 pounds. It’s really hard to know when to seek help. Especially with these doctors who invalidate our pain
@ukmary1968 Oh wow. I'm so sorry! I hope you're better now. I'm going through it again now with pain and swelling in my left leg and butt cheek that hurts to touch with US showing nothing 😪, mri showing only some bursitis which wouldn't explain the symptoms in the entire areas and symptoms, nothing musculoskeletal either ruled out by my ortho so I'm having to meet with a vascular surgeon tomorrow to beg for more help and see my pcp to have him help me if he can. I'm hoping to get an mra or mrv as I suspect I have pelvic congestion even though my ivus venogram showed that flow went back to normal after my stent placement. The symptoms fit but my ultrasounds didn't detect the mts, so I'm like, ok, clearly I need more than another US because my body isn't easy to detect things with those lol
@@ItsJennNotJenny oh wow. I really hope that they advocate for you and can get a diagnosis. Hugs
@ukmary1968 Ty! My VS I saw again today is awesome! I was afraid he wasn't going to investigate further, but he wants to do a cat scan and then a possible tilt venogram after that but not until I do my biopsy to check for cancer on the 26th. My pcp will always advocate for me. He's been my rock through all of this and he won't give up on me, thankfully. I'll figure it out soon enough! I wish you well
I only know that I have a high pain tolerance because I've walked home after literally ripping my legs open after tripping on a gravel road in shorts and just not reacted to it, the only time that I remember a physical injury actually hurting that much was when I had to get stitches
Went to ER presenting with inability to put weight on my left leg. Shitty triage nurse put me down as r/o ankle sprain. Waited 8+ hours and was seen after every other single patient in the waiting room. x-rayed. Sent home with an air cast, ace bandage, crutches and instructions to see an ortho in two weeks. Hated the crutches and as long as I didn't try to do too much, I could put a lil weight on it after a week. Saw the ortho another week and a half later... only to find out I had a spiral fibula fx.
... I did it at ROLLER DERBY PRAX... (lots of us break ankles...) But I walked around like that for two weeks and the original break was visible on the ER film. Fck you, Holy Cross Hospital!
That's pretty standard treatment for leg/foot/ankle breaks that are closed ie no bone sticking through the skin. Crutches and a brace or air cast. In a couple of weeks when the swelling has come down the ortho can see if surgery is necessary. No need to visit the ER; walk-in clinics are faster.
@@corinnelehr you missed the part where I said the closed fx was visible on the xray and I was sent home and told it was NOT broken. My ortho was FURIOUS. Didn't need sx tho
@@corinnelehr Also, what walk in clinic is open after 9pm?
I just believe that if I want to FINALLY be taken seriously, I will have to skip my pain meds for my period, go to the ER, and let myself fade in and out of consciousness and sh't myself and throw up while being EXTREMELY cold to the touch in hot weather, unable to move.
It is NO joke just how bad I feel...
but I have BEEN living with it because the one time it got really weird (a 22-day period)
I finally went to a doctor and tried to tell them about ALL the things wrong with me that I have been living with for years,
but nooo, they just... had me take a vitamin blood-test, got me on "the pill" for 2 months, and when I said I would like to see a gynecologist...nope, just blood test and the pill.
And what is worse is that my pills sometimes, more often now, DON'T WORK ENOUGH OR AT ALL ANYMORE, and then I can't work, or WALK, or even do... ANYTHING...I become 90% disabled for the day if THAT happens, and I am just LUCKY, that I haven't had the day I go to work have that happen yet...
But if I even by 20 MINUTES miss my next pain med dose, it is a FIGHT, to function even on a lucky day... now.
So yeah...I "tolerate" my pain HIGHLY, and I don't cry, but It STILL, gets higher and then I can't even walk...I don't cry, i crawl and try to deal with it.
Farmers. Enough said.
There's a quiet epidemic of people in the chronic illness community of people unaliving themselves bc we can't get appropriate help. Too many of us also have white coat syndrome aka medical PTSD bc of the pain we're in, get discarded as trash by nurses & doctors alike & know we won't be helped bc we're not being helped. Some even get blacklisted from hospitals for seeking help. The geniune individuals that need help end up experiencing multiple abuses from too many angles & its a literal hellscape. Passing on is the only way forward. No, I'm not feeling that way but I'm speaking up for the multiple number of people that never make it. If this helps at least one medical professional reading this come to get a little glimpse of what it's like & there's an open heart to consider giving better treatment then I feel I may have helped save a life. Maybe at least one person out there in the chronic illness community will have a better chance of having a life & maybe, if lucky, a quality life....
I won't talk about period pain because that's cheating at this point 😂 I had a bad friction burn in high school (saw my fascia), and I was so scared of getting an infection that I put alcohol on it. I'd gladly take that pain every hour than go through a single more minute of dysmenorrhea.
Another fun story. Got stung by a wasp. The sting didn't hurt, but the abnormal swelling did. I couldn't walk anymore, but nobody believed me when I told them it hurt. I went to school, got sent to the ER 2 hours later. They took it seriously the moment my swelling got out of control. So if I say it hurts it doesn't matter, but it's suddenly worrisome the moment you see me with a wide tree log for a leg?
Finally, story number 3. This one's very recent. I reached the severely underweight BMI category a few months ago, unintentionally. Couldn't eat, couldn't force myself to eat either. The feeling in my stomach was horrible. It's not the first time I have a weigh loss episode. But every single damn time, it was always "you're just depressed, go see a psychiatrist" or "maybe you're pregnant" or "you're stressed". Guess who has suspected gastritis and is being pretty successfully treated for peptic ulcers right now. What a surprise, I actually do have a stomach and I'm not making up symptoms to hide a childhood virgin pregnancy or anorexia nervosa!
You explained this so so so elegantly. Thank you
Because I've been told people with red hair have a higher tolerance for pain
My take on high pain tolerance is stacking pain. The more places you have pain for different reason the higher your stack gets.
High pain tolerance
Idk I’ve broken bones in my hand and just gotten up and went about my day like nothing happened, for three days.
Some people shut down with a paper cut, even if they’re alone and still don’t seek out medical help.
I don’t think it’s just a reactive thing like you seem to think it is.
It honestly probably is something measurable, like speed or jumping height. We just haven’t actually looked for it yet, or haven’t looked in the right place.
It’s insane isn’t it? I’m sometimes taken out by certain minor pains or even sensory irritation, but have previously wandered around on an unsupported sprained ankle for a whole evening (not knowing it was sprained) and my sister once walked into the hospital pretty calmly on a fractured one. I’ve never broken a bone so don’t know what that’s like, but people always talk like it’s one of the most painful things so it’s kind of a terrifying concept
@@N3RDYG0GGLES yeah it’s hard to tell how much of it is just perception vs an innate difference in pain tolerance.
On one hand there’s going to be some variability in how sensitive and efficient nerves are at transmitting signals across the body, there’s variability everywhere else so why wouldn’t there be here as well.
On the other our perception and past experiences has a huge impact. If someone has lived their entire life without experiencing significant pain, then a paper cut might actually be as painful to them as a broken bone is to me. If that makes sense. Just simply because I have different reference points than someone else does.
In addition to that though there can also be a significant reduction in pain simply by distracting the person long enough for the brain to start ignoring it.
There’s also the whole component of your body’s reaction to the pain. The parasympathetic nervous system isn’t a joke. Even if painkillers are blocking the pain from reaching your brain you still have a full spinal cord where it could still be interacting with it. Just adding a whole other level of complexity to the situation.
I've broken my wrist and elbow at the same time and went swimming the same day. It literally felt like a bad sprain (pain scale like 6-7), there was minimal swelling and no bruising. I didn't know it was broken until xrays were done and even the Dr at the ER was shocked it was actually broken. Surgeon told me that going swimming was actually good in my case can't remember why now.
Idk why people say broken bones are the worst injury to ever feel, to me it's just inconvenient pain for a bit. I didn't even know had even broken my foot/ankle several times until I had xrays for a different reason and was asked when the breaks happened. Had no idea. Couldn't tell them.
I'm the only one in my family like this though for broken bones.
Tell me you dont know physiology ....
@@jhoughjr1 go on? Surely your not gonna act all smug and all knowing while doing the same thing you’re accusing me of…
I'd say that getting a tattoo can generally be considered an equal sensory input for most people. Ask any tattoo artist and they'll tell you that there is such thing as a high pain tolerance and it's mostly among women.
There's a standard scale that expresses how much pain you personally feel that you can refer to, but it does rely on trust and honesty from both sides to be taken seriously
Thiiiiis! So much this! Thank you for saying what needed to be said. I was in immense pain sitting in a vascular surgeons office, but I had to hide it well to keep myself from breaking down. The doctor looked at me and said, "But you're not in pain." I said."Yes, I am." As a result, he thoguht I was a hypochondriac and waited until my next appointment driving 40 miles to his clinic just for him to have his staff call me 10 minutes before the appointment and CANCEL it! 😞 My pcp referred me to an IR, had an MRA, and found May thurner syndrome. Got a stent during my venogram with ivus, and I'm much better now, thankfully. It's infuriating when you have respect for the medical community, yet they sometimes treat you like crap in the process, causing people to distrust even the good ones. Some doctors ask more questions and/or just ask different types of questions that give them better insight. Keep being awesome Doc!
This is why I try to describe my pain in relation to an experience like a surgery or condition I’ve had before if at all possible
Thank you! I never could decide what my pain tolerance is.
I only knew that I hate pain, and I will complain even if it doesn’t hurt that badly to stop me from functioning. That is just an attitude about pain, and not a way to tell the tolerance level.
My experience on how sometimes people freak out about whats happened to me and how I feel little or no pain and my face is still smiling tells me I definitely do have a high tolerance. Being told “how the hell are you ‘okay’? You are definitely not okay.” so I’ve come to gauge that the reaction of others especially healthcare tells me the scale I am supposed to be at. So definitely do have high pain tolerance.
I recently did a complete tear of my achilles tendon and refused pain meds in the ER. I didn't need any pain meds, 'cause I basically had no pain. I defined it as a 2 on the 10 scale. The Gout flairup was a 4 as I could walk somewhat on my heel without allowing my toe to touch the ground. But when I was hit by a car as a teen and the ends of the bone in the transverse fracture of the tib/fib were grinding on each other I was begging for pain meds, that was the 10 for me. The post-op exam wasn't much better, I say it was a 9. I don't have a high pain tolerance, I just know there are different levels of pain and what my particular scale might be.
Took over a year of pain to get diagnosed with trigeminal neuralgia because I wasn't displaying the pain enough. I was taught to "suck it up" When it came to pain. They only took me seriously when I said I was still in pain after I had three root canals trying to solve it.
I think the high pain tolerance resinates with me a lot as someone with a disability and a newly diagnosed chronic illness. My chronic illness is otherwise invisible unless you live or spend a lot of time with me and unless I’m in the midst of a flare my pain (although still there) usually isn’t enough for me to talk about it or act significantly different to where you’d notice. This has caused doctors to miss major things in my health history due to me not “looking hurt enough”. That mixed with the constant scrutiny of calling off consistently from work because my stomach hurts so bad I can’t think straight but “I didn’t look too hurt to work” because this has been life long and I’ve quite literally learned how to not look in pain while my stomach is twisting left and right.
I went to the ER because I thought I had a gas bubble stuck in my guts somewhere. I had been having "bad gas" for about a month when my husband made me go to the hospital. I thought it was gas. I would otherwise be fine until I ate something and then I would get really uncomfortable. Uncomfortable. Not in pain. The ultrasound tech said that he had never seen so many gallstones in his life and I was scheduled for immediate emergency gallbladder removal surgery. Some people have a high pain tolerance because of repeated pain. My labor pains were nothing because my period is worse. Far worse.
Yeah, I went around writing and drawing with a broke wrist for 5 days when I was inpatient for mental health. I knew that it hurt a lot, but I didn't realize it was broken, luckily the staff had me get it checked anyway. At the same time I had an ear infection in both my ears the other month, and it made me so uncomfortable and I definitely cried. Even when you do have a higher ability to deal with pain, different types of pain can be more or less uncomfortable for certain people.
I remember so vividly in one of my psych classes, we did a body scan exercise. And during it, I realized i had a headache and as soon as i realized, it refused to leave. Im in a constant buzz of pain that its white noise. I also have anxiety so i often go back and forth on my pain and ailments because so often its brushed off as anxiety.
Of course i dont react strongly/loudly to pain. I have to function in a world that frames rest and pain as weakness and publishes you wholly for it. There's minimal support for people living in pain.
When I talk to new docs now, I 1) look at veteran pain scales to rank my pain. This focuses on impact to life which is easier for me to conceltualize. 2) constantly am like "no u don't understand. I slept thru my ear drum bursting twice. I regularly cry from migraines." And ill just keep going if i have to. All the gorey details.
I have a fibroid that causes me so much pain. I have had bowel obstructions less painful and those were severe enough that I was hospitalized for five days. My doctors don’t care at all about the pain and really don’t care about the profuse bleeding either. I have had one ER doctor acknowledge that fibroids can cause pain.
When my bowel perfed I was blown off repeatedly because I didn’t have hypertension or tachycardia. My doctors said I couldn’t be in pain when I was in the worst pain of my life. I was in so much pain I prayed to die faster. Doctors should listen to patients about their pain
It’s helpful for communicating to medical professionals, but mostly it’s helpful for taking care of myself. Chronic pain + a high pain tolerance has me avoiding taking pain medication or avoiding slowing down until I put my body through so much that it becomes an emergency. This often looks like paralysis, seizures, migraines, extreme weakness or fatigue, slurred speech, emotional disregulation , & brain fog/ dissociation. If I don’t make an effort to notice and attend to my pain early on, my body will make sure I pay attention.
I have the luxury of having sisters who all went through labor. The reaction to pain in different stages of labor is wild. I realized the nurses didn't take me seriously because I wasn't yelling enough but I was already at 10cm when I arrived at the hospital