Turning 40: Notes to My Younger Self. #14 Pain Hurts

#14. Pain Hurts

What is pain?

I love asking this question to novice nurses or students. I often get an interesting answer, sometimes a very scientific answer. But the answer is really quite simple, the answer is not scientific at all.

Pain is whatever the patient says it is.

Pain is subjective.

Only the person experiencing the pain can measure it, only the person with the pain can tell you what it is like. I can not describe what another person is feeling. I can guess and ask pointed questions, but only they can describe the feeling, the amount, the severity.

I know this to be true of the body. Life has taught me that it is also true of the heart, the soul.

Pain hurts. Sometimes life hurts. Sometimes experience hurts. Sometimes, people do not even realize how much they hurt. But we can not know how hurt someone is unless we ask.

We can not see physical pain. We can not see emotional pain, either.

We can not see that which causes physical pain. We can not see that which causes emotional pain, either.

No matter the type of pain, the cause of pain, or the severity of pain, it is always whatever the person says it is. Weather we think something should hurt or not, it hurts if the person says it does.

Some clinicians do not believe when a patient is in pain. They dismiss their complaints and do not provide treatment. They leave them to suffer, to writhe, to hurt.

I wonder how often we are dismissive of people who say they are in pain or hurt because we do not possibly understand how someone could hurt from the thing they hurt from. So, we leave them to suffer, to writhe, to hurt.

As you grow older and meet people of all walks, remember that their life experience is whatever they say it is. If you are to truly have compassion for those you meet, it must be for all things; even in things you do not see and do not understand.