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6/52 - Ouch
Feb. 10th, 2020 02:25 amToday I'm using the second letter from my 12 letter word prompt of "housewarming". I've gone for 'ouch'.
I always think of ET when I look at the word "ouch" for any length of time.
When I picked ouch tonight I was thinking of pain.
As I stagger back to normal functioning after a particularly brutal period of depression I have been reflecting a great deal on "pain". What does psychological 'pain' mean? Why is language so rich in describing physical pain but allows us only hopelessly derivative words for describing psychological hurt?
When I suffered chronic pain from a shoulder injury (ultimately resolved in 2015 with an operation and an even more painful couple of months of recovery) I knew what it was. I knew that it was changing my movements, I knew I was asking for something which existed when I went to the doctor, consultant, physio, and finally surgeon. I knew it was justified - even though the MRI and x-ray were largely inconclusive. I knew there was something objectively wrong.
And it was fixed.
When I go to the doctor when I am suffering with mental illness (a term I am still uncomfortable with, and trying out like one might a new pair of shoes on a soft carpet, ensuring you can still return them with soles unscuffed) the pain I feel is less easy to communicate and, perhaps, less easily observable.
I remember saying to the GP, in my week of crisis, "I feel humiliated". It was an attempt to express how it felt to have an invisible illness inside me preventing me from functioning. They were also the only words I could find. There is no "where does it hurt" or "can you bend your arm this way?" assessment. The less sensitive GP will hand you a multiple choice tick box sheet to assess the "severity" of your depression - an attempt to rationalise the irrational and manage it into a measurable format. But there is no place to point, or origin of that bone deep "ouch".
There's been no clear cut path, either. My shoulder had a journey. It took a few years to take every step. But each new thing had a clear rationale and a clear measure of its success or failure. After my operation I was enrolled in an online monitoring outcomes measure where every few months I ticked a 1-5 box to indicate function and pain and so on. You could count the success.
My GP wants me to start monitoring my moods, energy, sleep (hello 3am!), anxiety and use them as some sort of barometer to head off future storms. She was very compassionate and precise and personal when she proposed this (I gave her the side eye of "you know too much about this for a GP" but I knew she wouldn't be coming-out). A scale of "ouch". Like those 1-10 pain scales which are meant to help a doctor better understand your pain away from the imprecision of language.
But mental pain is imprecise. And my experience of it is vague and hard to pin down. It hurts. I know that. But it seems to drift away from me when I attempt to lift it up for inspection. And which part of my mood do I record during the normal periods? The brief stubbed-toe-swearing pain of a horrible couple of hours at work, the comfort-of-a-warm-bath-release of an hour laughing with friends? Which of my moods counts? And if not all of them are authentic from a diagnostic/predictive point of view, then can my pain be real either?
Ouch.
I always think of ET when I look at the word "ouch" for any length of time.
When I picked ouch tonight I was thinking of pain.
As I stagger back to normal functioning after a particularly brutal period of depression I have been reflecting a great deal on "pain". What does psychological 'pain' mean? Why is language so rich in describing physical pain but allows us only hopelessly derivative words for describing psychological hurt?
When I suffered chronic pain from a shoulder injury (ultimately resolved in 2015 with an operation and an even more painful couple of months of recovery) I knew what it was. I knew that it was changing my movements, I knew I was asking for something which existed when I went to the doctor, consultant, physio, and finally surgeon. I knew it was justified - even though the MRI and x-ray were largely inconclusive. I knew there was something objectively wrong.
And it was fixed.
When I go to the doctor when I am suffering with mental illness (a term I am still uncomfortable with, and trying out like one might a new pair of shoes on a soft carpet, ensuring you can still return them with soles unscuffed) the pain I feel is less easy to communicate and, perhaps, less easily observable.
I remember saying to the GP, in my week of crisis, "I feel humiliated". It was an attempt to express how it felt to have an invisible illness inside me preventing me from functioning. They were also the only words I could find. There is no "where does it hurt" or "can you bend your arm this way?" assessment. The less sensitive GP will hand you a multiple choice tick box sheet to assess the "severity" of your depression - an attempt to rationalise the irrational and manage it into a measurable format. But there is no place to point, or origin of that bone deep "ouch".
There's been no clear cut path, either. My shoulder had a journey. It took a few years to take every step. But each new thing had a clear rationale and a clear measure of its success or failure. After my operation I was enrolled in an online monitoring outcomes measure where every few months I ticked a 1-5 box to indicate function and pain and so on. You could count the success.
My GP wants me to start monitoring my moods, energy, sleep (hello 3am!), anxiety and use them as some sort of barometer to head off future storms. She was very compassionate and precise and personal when she proposed this (I gave her the side eye of "you know too much about this for a GP" but I knew she wouldn't be coming-out). A scale of "ouch". Like those 1-10 pain scales which are meant to help a doctor better understand your pain away from the imprecision of language.
But mental pain is imprecise. And my experience of it is vague and hard to pin down. It hurts. I know that. But it seems to drift away from me when I attempt to lift it up for inspection. And which part of my mood do I record during the normal periods? The brief stubbed-toe-swearing pain of a horrible couple of hours at work, the comfort-of-a-warm-bath-release of an hour laughing with friends? Which of my moods counts? And if not all of them are authentic from a diagnostic/predictive point of view, then can my pain be real either?
Ouch.