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Chronic PainArrow
Age 61-80
Interview CP48  

Interview CP48

Age at Interview: 61
Sex: Male
Age at Diagnosis: 50
Background: Writer/driver; married; 2 children.
Brief outline:Pain following myelogram (test) for disc damage in 1978. Diagnosed Arachnoiditis 1992. Pain management: In-patient NHS pain management programme. Current medication: None.


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Sometimes he suspects that people think he is a phoney when he gets into his car in a disabled parking space.

 



I think it's hard for anybody. The basic problem is that I look perfectly normal, you know, to all intents and purposes I can do most things. I can drive a car, I can do the shopping, I can meet trains. I mean I can, I look perfectly normal. I walk, I could walk upstairs. Okay I pull on the handrails to get upstairs but to... I'm a complete physical specimen. 

If I'd lost a leg, one often feels that pain, people with chronic pain often use a walking stick because they want people to understand that there's something wrong and that it can't be seen. Pain can't be seen. It's sometimes it's very difficult. It's particularly difficult because when I'd been walking for a bit, because the endorphins are flowing, I can walk more or less normally.

And so for example I get out of my car in the disabled spot, I have a disabled badge, when I get out of a car, to get me out of the car is intensely painful and you, you sort of creaking upright and getting back into gear, you know, but after I walk round Tesco I'm back, you know I can look like a normal human being and so you get a sense sometimes as it were “Nought wrong with him”, you know. “Nothing wrong with that fellow. He's a phoney.” And I'm pretty impervious to it but you don't like to be thought a phoney. 

And I think even with close personal relationships, when they see you being completely normal because you're in full distraction mode. You are absolutely not thinking about the pain. It's hard for them to believe that there's actually anything the matter with you.
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