What was the worst pain you can remember? Was it the time
you scratched the cornea of your eye? Was it a kidney stone?
Childbirth? Rare is the person who has not experienced some
beyond-belief episode of pain and misery. Mercifully, relief
finally came. Your eye healed, the stone was passed, the baby
born. In each of those cases pain flared up in response to a
known cause. With treatment, or with the body's healing powers
alone, you got better and the pain went away. Doctors call that
kind of pain
acute pain. It is a normal sensation triggered in
the nervous system to alert you to possible injury and the need
to take care of yourself.
Chronic pain is different. Chronic pain persists.
Fiendishly, uselessly, pain signals keep firing in the nervous
system for weeks, months, even years. There may have been an
initial mishap -- a sprained back, a serious infection -- from which
you've long since recovered. There may be an ongoing cause of
pain -- arthritis, cancer, ear infection. But some people suffer
chronic pain in the absence of any past injury or evidence of
body damage. Whatever the matter may be, chronic pain is real,
unremitting, and demoralizing -- the kind of pain New England poet
Emily Dickinson had in mind when she wrote:
- Pain -- has an Element of Blank --
- It cannot recollect
- When it begun -- or if there were
- A time when it was not
