September Is Pain Awareness Month

Things are definitely busier now that school has started back up. I am teaching 2 classes, an undergraduate abnormal psychology class and a 1st year graduate psychopathology class. So far it seems like I have good students, and this is material that I enjoy teaching and have knowledge about that goes beyond what's in textbooks, so both of these are fun classes. My one complaint so far is the classroom that I have to teach my undergrad class in – it is nowhere near "accessible" in that it is a lecture hall with an entrance at the top/back and big steps that go down to the front (where I have to teach) but no handrail. I absolutely cannot safely navigate that. There is a fire exit near the bottom/front, but that door is locked from the outside, so the current solution is to have my students prop the door open for me before class. It is an okay solution, but a better solution would probably be to switch classrooms, which I had not thought of before but will probably look into tomorrow.

I have so quickly become used to the fact that things are not well set up for people with mobility limitations that I sometimes forget there may be an easier way to deal with something (other than to get irritated but just deal with it and make it work). There are so many places that I can't go without assistance, many of them places that would be accessible to me if people were just a little bit more thoughtful (like a restaurant that has 3 steps to get in and no handrail could easily have a ramp and/or even more easily a handrail), or places that are probably legally required to have better accessibility. These are issues I didn't think about much before, but can get very angry about now, and not so much even for myself (because I keep improving, and also often have help) as for others who have greater mobility impairments than I do and less help. I am still sitting with this one, but I imagine that sometime in the future I may start taking action to right these wrongs.

On another advocacy note, I have been informed that September is National Pain Awareness Month in the US. So here are some facts that you may or may not be aware of:
 - About 1 in 5 people in North America experience serious chronic pain and about 1 in 4 suffer from at least moderate chronic pain--  more people than are diagnosed with diabetes, heart disease, and cancer combined.
 - Pain is the number 1 reason for visits to medical providers, and accounts for about three quarters of visits to the emergency room.
 - Chronic pain is associated with having poorer quality of life, increased rates of mental health concerns like depression, and doubles a person's risk for suicide.
 - Although many healthcare providers have a stereotype of the "chronic pain patient" as overly needy, seeking disability payments, and personality disordered, this does not describe most people with chronic pain. Because there are so many individuals living with chronic pain, there will of course be some people with difficult personalities who also have pain, and the fact that pain often cannot be adequately treated leaves many pain sufferers feeling helpless, and trying to find help. People living with pain (and conditions that cause pain, like HIV or cancer) are more likely to be disabled from work. However, the majority of people living with chronic pain continue going about their lives and work in spite of it.
 - A majority of doctors say they do not feel that they have received pain education adequate to deal with the range of patient presentations that they see.

Why does this matter to me? For lots of reasons, including what I see professionally both in clinical practice and research, the fact that I have friends and family members with chronic pain, and most prominently in my mind at the moment the fact that I have had pain since last fall. Ever since I began regaining sensation on my right side, the sensation has not been normal – at first a sort of pins and needles numbness, evolving into a feeling of constant burning that I experience now. I experienced a worsening of this pain until around February, and since then I have really had no change in sensation, either for better or worse. I still have hope that I may regain some useful sensation and/or have reduction in pain, but no one knows whether this will happen. I tend to minimize this, as it is usually most adaptive to do so– if there is nothing that can be done to change it (other than medications I take that make it tolerable to some degree), best learn to live with it. However, this also contributes to lack of awareness of the many different presentations of chronic pain. So I am trying to do my part by sharing my experience with you.

And now, because it is better to turn my attention to something else: today was a lovely late summer day, that included pancakes for breakfast, a little bit of work from home, a breezy bike ride along the creek, and currently a cat sleeping in my lap. In spite of challenges, life is good.