Pain Awareness Month 2024

It is September which means it is pain awareness month 2024, and as I live with chronic pain it is only fitting for me to talk about. I am not alone in living with pain, and raising awareness of how exhausting and overwhelming that can be is so important to me, so let’s get into it.

What is chronic pain like?

The theme for this year’s pain awareness month 2024, is #lifewithpain and as I share my life with pain here on the blog it makes sense for this month to be important to me. I have several chronic illnesses including Ehlers Danlos Syndrome and Fibromyalgia both of which cause widespread chronic pain.

Everyone knows how pain feels, but for most people it is something that is helped with painkillers, or an operation or time to heal. Chronic pain is different, chronic means every day for the rest of your life, something most people cannot even imagine.

I am lucky; to be honest my pain is mostly well managed with the high level of pain medication I am prescribed. However, as with most of us, managed pain does not mean life with no pain it just means that I can live with this level of pain.

On my medication I still get electric shock kind of pain down my arms and legs all the time, I also have aching along my shoulders and in my upper arms. Along with this, my neck is very painful, and my spine gives me a lot of pain most days.

Living with this level of pain every day is exhausting, which doesn’t help when I have chronic fatigue, and I must cope with the side-effects of my medications. As an extra part of the fun, I also often get intercostal muscle pain which are the muscles between my ribs. This can sometimes make it hard to breathe and I must choose my clothing carefully so as not to make it worse.

If my Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, also known as chronic fatigue, is flaring I often feel pain all over my skin. This often feels like someone is poking a bruise if they touch me and can be very painful in certain clothing.

However, even looking at all of this written down, I prefer it all to life without my medication which means I can cope with my levels of all of these types of pain. I am sure, if someone who doesn’t deal with pain had the chronic pain that I have for a day they would certainly not try to just carry on!

This is what society expects though, we are looked at like we are scroungers or as if we should just get back to work as if this is something we can cope with. But chronic pain affects everything from sleep, to how long you can stand.

My pain and fatigue levels work together to make it difficult for me to even write this blog post, in fact I have been writing just this section of the post for over two hours. My brain is foggy today, making it hard to concentrate and to think of the words I need. Imagine trying to get work done for a business when just a few paragraphs take so long to do!

Pain awareness month is important because it gives us a voice and a platform to explain these things, but I have been writing about my experiences for years here on the blog, hoping people will start to understand and to have more sympathy.

I am sure, if someone who doesn’t deal with pain had the chronic pain that I have for a day they would certainly not try to just carry on! Share on X

Why pain awareness matters

To be honest, the thing that is most annoying about dealing with the healthcare system, and this might surprise you, but they rarely treat illnesses. Most of us are given medications and treatments, but most are to mask the symptoms not to treat the illnesses.

I never really thought about that, even when I was a nurse, I gave out medications every shift at work, yet never thought about this fact. In fact, I asked about improved treatments for my illnesses on my last medication review and was met with stunned silence.

Around 34% of the population, or 15.5 million people in England live with chronic pain, that is probably more than you expected! So, it seems insane to me that people are merely masking the pain instead of treating the reason for it.

I am not alone in realising this, a quick search online will lead you to many medical papers that discuss this. It seems to be done mainly in the West, and I am not sure why that is, all I know is that by just treating my pain, and not my illnesses we are just ignoring the cause.

Imagine if we treated my illnesses and not just the symptoms they caused, the amount of medication and the money it costs the NHS would be greatly reduced. Not only that, but I could get my life back, I could have a job and pay taxes, I could be a functioning human again!

Just the idea of that gives me chills! But because we are merely covering a gunshot with a plaster instead of treating the gunshot wound; I stop being a functioning member of society.

Our government acts as if the amount of people living with chronic pain are merely faking to get the small amount of benefits offered. But trust me, I would rather have a job and be able to do things with the money than be stuck at home in pain.

This pain awareness month 2024, I hope you will think about these things and realise not everyone on benefits should be treated like social pariahs because it is out of our control. Until the healthcare system in the West changes how it treats chronic pain, our lives will continue to be isolated, and our illnesses not treated. Let me know what you think about this and if you think this will change in our lifetime.

Thank you xx

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