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.
anyone else ever think about how butch deloria’s mom was an alcoholic who at the very least canonically neglected him and in all likelihood abused him and how his teacher openly called him stupid in front of All Of His Peers and how no one in the entire vault seemed to give a shit about him so he found the only way he could earn respect was by forming a gang and making people scared of him and even then the fucking overseer took advantage of him and made him do dirty work that he didn’t want getting pinned on vault security because if he didn’t he would break up the gang, the one thing he feels safe in, and he’s an asshole to anyone who looks at him the wrong way and yet the second you leave the vault, the second he’s out of this situation in which he’s contorted into a facsimile of something hard and cruel, he immediately becomes noticeably more amicable and kind and he buys you a drink and he treats you as a friend and looks out for you and yeah he’s still kind of douchey and he’s still deadset on “starting a gang” even though it’s not a realistic goal in the wasteland and he’s clearly an inexperienced kid who didn’t know what he was getting into when he left the vault and he’s still kind of agoraphobic BUT YOU CAN STILL SEE THE BEGINNINGS OF RECOVERY…. the undoing of all those years of being treated like a nuisance by everyone around him even from the time he was a little kid… well i am just thinking about it now
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