Yeah, everyone experiences acute pain.
It's part of our everyday… … life, and it's how we learn to … … do sensible things and avoid the things that are silly really so it's a really useful thing and … … acute pain is that signal that tells us that there's about to be damage to our body we're too close to the flame or we've actually burnt ourselves so it's really um, a signal that is an early warning system to avoid harm to yourself basically, it can last just a moment like that flame or it could last for hours or days if you've got an injury, you've eaten the wrong kind of food or you've sprained your ankle those sorts of things are examples of acute pain.
Chronic pain is different to acute pain it’s … … pain that's ongoing and … … it could be due to an ongoing condition, something that's present and not going away at all But sometimes it's not really clear why it continues after you expect … … the pain to go away, after something that you think should've healed up, you think you should be better by now, and it hasn't gone away.
And that chronic pain can be really really confusing, and frustrating, and … and you can even feel a bit lonely and isolated ‘cause people just can't see it and they can't understand what your experience is.
So the thing with complex regional pain syndrome and the way that I developed it, it was a gradual process that happened over a period of a day so it started off by being able to walk on the foot just feeling pain and in the space of three hours it got the point where I was hobbling, needing help getting to the medical centre and coming back on crutches And from then, it was from that point that the pain was at it's climax, and sat there for the period of ten months.
So it was really hard to explain to people when they saw you walking one minute and on crutches the next and it was, it was really difficult and really bizarre and so it was impossible to explain to people that saw it and hence I got a lot of criticism for it from people and staff and doctors alike.
When I got kicked by this kid of course the pain started to happen there and I was able to walk off and hobble up to medical centre to get some attention there.
So coming back after that and half way through the day once I was on the crutches after the injury had happened the whole year group decided I was just faking it and so they all turned against me apart from about six of my friends and were teasing me and going up to the principal and saying he's actually faking all this, um so that was all really quite confronting knowing that my whole peer group didn't understand and just thought I was a faker.
Um … you feel alone, and you feel like you're the only person going through what you're going through and no-one will ever understand what it feels like or what it's… like just everything.
Like….
no-one will ever understand, no-one will ever know what it's like or what it feels like, and it makes you feel, makes you feel like really alone.
It makes me feel um sad when people, you know, think that your healthy and they can't see you on the inside.
And it gets a bit tiring when you have everyone, you know, saying oh your healthy and everything cause you know that….
um….
you're not.
And no matter how many times you can try to tell people they….
some people just don't get it.
Some people won't believe, some people won't understand.
So when the doctor explained chronic pain to me it was a big relief because of how weird it was and how bizarre our family thought it was.
And so to find out that it was, that chronic pain was this real thing was great for me and also my family because it gave us more hope and empowered me to get moving with the next lot of treatments, so it was fantastic just to know we could move forward some way.
