A High Tolerance for Pain

My physical therapist told me yesterday that I have a high pain tolerance. Monday marked 4 weeks since my hip surgery and I'm off pain medications almost entirely. It's only when I'm up enough to make my side really hurt and swell that I take one.

But I have been on opioids for months, maybe a year at this point. Maybe longer. That makes me an addict in the eyes of many, probably including the surgeon general. Really I'm a person who had a doctor who gave the wrong diagnosis and then gave up. I'm a person who had/has complex issues happening all at once which took a while to sort out. I'm a person that as in a lot of pain. I'm a person. Period.

I get so frustrated listening to current obsession with opioid addicts. There are people addicted to cigarettes and there are people who have one every few months. There are people addicted to alcohol and people who drink on occasion without issue. There are gambling addicts and those that go to a casino a couple times a year for fun. All those things and other typical addictions should be regulated, but those that take part shouldn't be stigmatized.

I live with a condition called Interstitial Cystitis. When first diagnosed, my doctor explained it to me as thousands of paper cuts on the inside of my bladder and certain foods are like putting lemon juice over then, except they are inside your body and it lasts a lot longer than a sting from a lemon slice. I'm blessed to have a less severe case, but there are still times I am curled in the fetal position, sobbing in pain. The pain someone living with IC has is said to be worse than those with stage 4 cancers. This isn't about who is worse though. It's about how someone suffering with that level of pain is supposed to get through their days because whatever else IC is doing, including to their mental health, it isn't killing them.

Sometimes it just feels like it's killing me.

My still unexplained upper right quadrant abdominal pain and swelling can't be treated by trigger point injections, as it was before, because of the blood thinners I'm taking. We are going to try myofascial pain release massage next.

But the point of this post is that I've been in pain of one degree or another for most of the last 5 years. I've had periods like now where it has stopped me from being able to work. I've had a period where the effects on my mental health were more than I could manage and plenty of times when it was nearly there.

I'm lucky that I have had physicians who recognize that I am truly in pain and are willing to treat that symptom while they try to uncover the cause. But I've also had doctors who didn't believe me. Who saw that I was joking with Adam about my pain through my tears to try to show him i was going to be okay and my mental health was in tact, but took my jokes as a sign I wasn't really in pain. I know others who are unable to get any treatment because their doctors don't understand or believe they are in pain.

I'm in pain. I've become pretty good about putting it to the back of my mind and doing what I needed to do, but that doesn't mean I'm not in pain. And there are times that pain breaks through and cannot be ignored.
That doesn't make me an addict, as some friends and family have suggested or implied. It means I'm in a lot of pain, because apparently I have a high pain tolerance.

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