it's not even quite pain pain

[eskimoeskimo]

Others have mentioned the same, and I've brought it up before too, but it is strange how much (my) chronic pain is not like pain pain. It's like if you took the "I want this to stop" part of acute pain and magnified it 5o times, but without the other components. It always shocks me, whenever I get an injury, to notice how completely different the pain of a stubbed toe or stomach ache is. My neck pain never makes me wince, it just feels like constant badness/danger/offness/tenseness. It's more like depression in my neck - and I don't mean that in the TMS sense that the reasons for it are psychological which is also true - but that the best way for me to describe the way it really feels is depression in my neck. Which is why the question "how bad does it hurt from 1-10?" is the wrong question, and only ever asked (though understandably so) by people who have never experienced it. Sometimes a 10 feels worse than a 1, and sometimes a 1 feels worse than a 10.

 

[Huckleberry]

Ditto for me. My lower back 'pain' is always there as a nagging discomfort and only really occasionally flares up to a level that is genuinely painful...tellingly there is never really and rhyme or reason for the flares but they do tend to occur around life events (last one was two days before going on holiday) rather than an obvious physical stressor.

I came to the conclusion (and I think this is true for many chronic pain sufferers) that it is actually the baggage of the secondary pain that is actually worse and probably drives the constant nature of the underlying pain...it is like the fact that the sensation is always there means I am constantly questioning its causality, how long it will last, how it will effect my future etc etc.

Whilst I don't concern myself with the causality of my pain/discomfort any longer the nature of it does make me question how it can be originating from a physical cause as it just doesn't make any sense...some times it is almost like it forgets to hurt when it should and then it can go to the polar opposite of flaring up for no reason and it like totally overplays its hand.

I understand what you mean about the depression in the neck way of describing it and I think that sort of nails the secondary pain aspect of it in that it becomes all encompassing and threatens to define you in every way...I find it is like unless you make efforts to counter it each and every aspect of your life starts to revolve around and once you add all the frustration, anger and confusion on top of everything else it just gets overwhelming.

 

[eskimoeskimo]

I came to the conclusion (and I think this is true for many chronic pain sufferers) that it is actually the baggage of the secondary pain that is actually worse and probably drives the constant nature of the underlying pain...it is like the fact that the sensation is always there means I am constantly questioning its causality, how long it will last, how it will effect my future etc etc.

Double-Ditto. I don't care that much about the pain level, I care about: 'causality, how long it will last, how it will affect my future etc etc'

It's like my brain has become an instrument that only plays one note: neck pain. Even more than I want the pain to go away, I want my brain to be me again. I've only got so much CPU.