I’m Not Lazy…I’m in Pain
I follow Shannon Ashley on Medium and this post really hit home:
https://medium.com/honestly-yours/its-so-hard-to-talk-about-pain-d721abfd8e05
I’ve been dealing with pain for most of my adult life. It started when I was a young RN. In the 1960s-1970s there were few ways that patients were transferred from bed to stretcher or bed to wheelchair without the use of a nurse’s strong back and since I was a “big girl” I was usually given the big patients.
By the time I was in my late twenties I had back pain that limited what I could do. I went to an orthopedic surgeon I knew from the hospital. This was before MRIs; he did a cursory look at me –saw I was overweight — did some review of how my joints were and gave me the name of some fibro disease he told me was called “the malingerer’s disease.” He probably thought I didn’t know what the word meant. And that was it.
Back to work on a very busy Med-Surg unit with limited staffing with nothing but aspirin for the pain.
Of course, the pain continued, and I returned to that physician and he decided he needed to “go in” and see what was going on. So, at age of 29 I had back surgery — two large lipomas were removed. They had been pressing on both sides of my spinal nerves.
