steamedsoymilk:

I recently saw a pain scale with the caption “if you can still talk, your not at a nine” and it really really bothered me. One of my doctors (who works extensively with teenagers with CRPS) said that one common theme he sees in his patients is a complete lack of reaction to pain. He told me that when he performs procedures and tests that are objectively extremely painful, often the teenagers will be smiling and cracking jokes, even though he knows that they are in excruciating pain. At nine I can carry on a conversation (not very well, because at this point things start to get really cloudy for me, but still a conversation). During my nerve conduction study (If you’ve ever had one you know how awful it is, and if you haven’t, it involves a six inch long eighteen gage needle stabbed deep into your muscles over and over while you clench and relax them as instructed.) i chatted with the nurse and played games on my phone. It wasn’t that I wasn’t in pain, it was just I was also outside of it. For teenagers with chronic pain a disassociation from themselves and their bodies is common, even expected. If I “grounded myself”, saw myself as In my body and of my body and nothing else I don’t know how I would survive. In order to live, to get out of bed or wash my hair or put on pants I have to separate ME from my body. It’s how I can pop my shoulder out of socket and put it back in during a conversation. It’s a matter of survival. And I’m tired of people saying that my pain isn’t real or valid because of it.