Living Strong TIPS FOR DEALING WITH PEOPLE IN PAIN 1. People with chronic pain may seem unreliable to you. When we are feeling better, we may promise things (and mean it); when in serious pain, it can be hard to follow through. 2. An action or situation may result in pain several hours later, or even the next day, for us. Delayed pain is confusing to people who have never experienced it.... 3. Pain can inhibit listening and other communication skills. It’s like having someone shouting at you, or trying to talk with a fire alarm going off in the room. The effect of pain on the mind can seem like attention deficit disorder. So you may have to repeat a request, or write things down for a person with chronic pain. Please don’t take it personally, or think that they are stupid. 4. The senses can overload while in pain. For example, noises that wouldn’t normally bother you, seem too much. Please try to understand this and respect it. We may not even understand it, at times, leaving us feeling very overwhelmed. 5. Patience may seem short. We may not be able to wait in a long line, for example. 6. Please try not to always ask “how are you” unless you are genuinely prepared to listen it as we just want to feel understood. 7. Pain can sometimes trigger psychological disabilities. When in pain, a small task, like hanging out the laundry, can seem like a huge wall, too high to climb over. An hour later the same job may be quite OK. It is OK to be depressed occasionally when you hurt and your abilities have diminshed. 8. Pain can come on fairly quickly and unexpectedly. Pain sometimes abates after a short rest. Chronic pain can be very unpredictable. 9. Knowing where a refuge is, such as a couch, a bed, or comfortable chair, is as important as knowing where a bathroom is. A visit is much more enjoyable if the chronic pain person knows there is a refuge, if needed. A person with chronic pain may not want to go anywhere that has no refuge (e.g. no place to sit or lie down). 10. Small acts of kindness can seem like huge acts of mercy to a person in pain. Your offer of a pillow or a cup of tea can be a really big thing to a person who is feeling temporarily helpless in the face of pain. 11. Not all pain is easy to locate or describe. Sometimes there is a body-wide feeling of discomfort and not in one particular spot you can point to. Our vocabulary for pain is very limited, compared to the body’s ability to feel varieties of discomfort. 12. We may not have a good “reason” for the pain. Medical science is still limited in its understanding of pain. Many people have pain that is not yet classified by doctors as an officially recognized “disease”. That does not reduce the pain, – it only reduces our ability to give it a label, and to have people believe us. Author Unknown
Posted on: Sun, 06 Oct 2013 08:28:50 +0000
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