so goth, so very very goth

[baratron]

Argh. The gallstones are attacking some more. Far too much pain to sleep, or indeed, do much of anything :/

artremis, if you read this before you leave London, there's no way I can meet you tomorrow :/ Doubt I'll even be well enough to leave the house when meeping & gerwinium get here, so if you guys read this & there's a movie you want to see that's on DVD, rent it & bring it round.

When you go to the hospital as an emergency and they ask you how bad the pain is on a scale of 1 to 10, it's so useless, because "10" keeps shifting. My pain is bad enough right now that I am considering taking an overdose - not because I want to kill myself, just to make the pain stop. Of course, I'm not going to do that, because it's bad enough having a fucked gall bladder, I don't need a fucked liver as well. But seriously - I've taken the maximum safe dose of every single painkiller I have, and I'm still in frigging agony.

The heat that's radiating out of my gall bladder shows me it must be pretty damn inflamed. Can I do anything about the inflammation? No! because I have a BLOODY NSAID ALLERGY! Ibuprofen or Voltarol or something would probably be enough to sort it out, except that probably would kill me. It's just not fair - why is every single bloody anti-inflammatory on the market related to damn salicylic acid? Why can't someone invent one that isn't?

Woe is me! *sobs dramatically, and staples her hand to her forehead*

Comments

[jinian.livejournal.com]

I don't think it counts as goth when your pain is physical. Sorry. You could start an entire new subculture of people with medically accepted reasons to whine, though.

[ludy]

that's a shame.
you do looking after yourself stuff (and getting other people to look after you!) and i hope you feel better soon.

[judiff]

i still don't get why you can't have steroids to be anti-inflamitory. There is prolly like a reason but it would be cool to like understand it.

[barakta]

Steroids would probably do nasty things to immune systems and indeed cholesterol. They work on allergic response because they dampen down the body's response to inflammation but in a different way to NSAIDs.

I have reason to believe prednisolone which my girlf kim took for her asthma two summers running was a largely contributory factor for her developing gallstones. Basically kim piled on the weight despite being careful and it did nasty things to her fluid balance - her hands still swell badly 2.5 years after the last treatment. On the other hand the asthma which had got dangerous stopped within 4 hours of each set of treatment, we'd tried EVERYthing else.

1-10

[ailbhe]

They kept asking me to measure my pain on that scale in hospital, too. It wasn't useful. I mean, I had "10" marked as when the needle in my spine was in the wrong place and the universe was pain, and compared to that, being in enough pain that I passed out or threw up seemed pretty mild. The scale isn't explicit enough.

Turns out "cannot move for pain" is about an 8 on some kind of "official" scale they have. "Has learned to move through pain that was previously debilitating" isn't on the scale, though. Nor is "has been in pain so long has forgotten what 0 feels like."

None of this helps. But I share a certain amount of frustration with their need to measure or quantify pain.

Re: 1-10

[barakta]

My girlf had great difficulty describing pain on a 1-4 chart that her last hospital had. The barchart was complete bollocks as the 4th bar was twice the height of the 3rd bar, but the 1st and 2nd weren't relatively proportioned.

I think she'd been given morphine postop and she was on O2 for a few hours afterwards which combined with sore throat made it hard to hear her talk. This meant she was communicating via sign, which the nurses couldn't understand, so I was 'translating'.

The nurses asked her how much pain she was in and she was describing her pain coherently to me in sign, pointing at different body parts and describing the pain.
The nurses interrupted me and said "On a 1-4 scale".
My girlf was signing 1-4 SCALE BOLLOCKS! PAIN DESCRIBE BETTER!.
The nurse was repeating "One to four, which is it?".
Eventually I said NURSE NOT UNDERSTAND. STOP BEING AUTISTIC AT THEM. DESCRIBE PAIN TO ME. I MAKE IT 1-4 FOR [stupid was implicit] NURSE. We said 2 because she wasn't in agony, but she was in more than discomfort.

The nurse then gave her some liquid painkiller which my girlf drank signing PAINKILLER ME JUST DRANK WHAT?. I asked the nurse and found out it was paracetamol. I got the finger, which fortunately the nurses didn't see and I didn't translate.

Half an hour later they asked the 1-4 crap again and jumped straight from paracetamol to morphine which amused us. A DHC or two would probably have sufficed without the accompanying nausea.

I guess this insistence on pain being numerated is easier for nurses who don't understand what you are saying fully. It also means they don't listen to you when you say something outside of their box. They like their nice little neat boxes of compliant and passive patients. My girlf is the daughter of medics, and wants to know exactly what they are doing, when they are doing it and why. She might not be able to speak, but she could hear and feel everything perfectly.

I certainly think they were confused by my girlfriend's lucidity even when she was semi-conscious. She came out of theatre asking me in slightly confused ASL (she only had one movable hand) how they had done her procedure and what everything was as she couldn't open her eyes to see.

I translated for her and it took them a while to realise she was asking and not me, I had to explain "She's signing at me, she wants to know what you are doing to her. She won't stop being agitated until you talk to her slowly and audibly about what you are doing at every stage". This was proved when they started fiddling with her arms and she was thrashing around until I said "Pulseox!" and she obligingly provided them with a finger...

I wonder if anyone finds pain easily quantifiable, or would prefer to give a brief description of the pain in actual words. Which of course would require the medics to a) listen, b) have good enough english to understand and c) be able to relate description to causes and likely severity.

Re: 1-10

[barakta]

Oh and I should note that the ASL was relevant cos we know BSL. She was using ASL fingerspelling because it's one handed and BSL is 2 handed. The fact she could remember any ASL immediately after surgery was impressive and indicated to me that she was probably ok just very pissed off with not being told anything useful.