‘How would you rate your pain on a scale of 1 to 10?’ It’s a hard question to answer. If you’re really hurting that moment, it’s tempting to say ten, but then there’s the creeping fear that it could still get worse and then where does that leave you? But if you hedge your bets and say six or seven, maybe the doctor won’t take you seriously enough and you really need help to make it stop.
That was my conundrum in the years before I was diagnosed with Ankylosing Spondylitis (AS), a form of arthritis in the spine which can cause parts of it to fuse. I learned a rich vocabulary to describe my pain. Beyond its intensity, it also matters if it’s sharp and concentrated in a particular area that I can treat with care, or dull and diffuse, seemingly everywhere at once.
At its worst, chronic pain that didn’t yield for days or weeks left me exhausted and muddled. Things would start to slip – my bank PIN or things I meant to do – as each wave of pain surpassed the next, bursting the banks of the limits of what I thought I could handle. At those times, I felt a disconnection from the world around me. I was moving through the world with everyone
