The Smiffy’s Place Blog, in one BADD entry, talks about the question, When Will You Get Better?.

This is the sort of question I get a lot. Not for autism, really. But, in particular, for migraines.

I may have mentioned before on this blog: I’ve had an ongoing migraine now for several years. I didn’t realize that part of it was a migraine until I went to a migraine doctor, but it’s basically an ongoing migraine, sometimes severe, sometimes moderate. (I’d assumed the moderate pain couldn’t be a migraine.)

Right now, as it has been for pretty much since October, it’s in the severe range almost continually. As in, my baseline level of pain is between 5 and 7 on the 1-10 pain scale of someone who’s had severe pain for a lifetime. (Translation: Most people with no experience of severe chronic pain would probably rate it higher, although I already did have to adjust my entire pain scale after I got pain treatment, since pain treatment revealed to me that my previous “1” was really a “3” or “4” at least.) I’m vomiting a lot if I don’t keep taking tons of Dramamine, and sometimes even if I do. I’m having to cut off activities I could do when the pain was at a more moderate level, and the migraine interrupts anything I’m trying to do throughout the day. It causes huge levels of fatigue and clouded thinking, too.

I’m not saying all that to make anyone feel sorry for me, just to give an idea of how much pain I’m in on a regular basis. (And yes, I’ve tried tons of migraine treatments, I don’t really want to hear everyone’s migraine advice. The last migraine prophylactic med I was on actually worked, as in it took my pain down to moderate instead of severe, but it also did a lot of unpleasant and dangerous things to my body, so I had to stop it.)

Anyway, this is something that’s always here. It’s always affecting me. It’s never gone.

What I notice is that unless I broadcast some signal of pain, people seem to forget I’m in any pain at all. If I don’t talk about it, and I don’t grimace or vomit or lie down in a dark room with ice packs on my head, people assume it’s not there. And then they attribute all kinds of things that are pain-related, to other things entirely.

And then when I do show it, it’s “Oh, do you have a headache today?”

And I keep thinking, “Okay, how many times have I explained to you that I’ve always got a headache? If I don’t have a headache, that will be news.”

In So You Know a Dyke with CFS, Carolyn Gage writes:

DO ask me how I am when we get together for an activity. That lets me know that you are willing to be my ally in confronting the challenges I am meeting during the time we are together. I have come to learn that when you don’t ask, it means you don’t want to know. It means that your plan is to grant me the “privilege” of being considered your able-bodied peer for the duration of our activity. In other words, my illness will only be real for you if I bring it up. Experience has taught me that this attitude results in your equating my mentioning of symptoms with my causing those symptoms. And you will oppress me accordingly.

(Emphasis mine.) That seems, to me, to be exactly what is happening. People seem to expect this migraine business to be something that just goes away. Even if they’re told that it’s ongoing, I’m not sure they believe it. So, it’s only real when I mention it or give some indication that it’s going on.

In October, my roommate mentioned, also, that people who don’t have migraines seem to think that since they’re common, they must be mild. She said that a lot of people don’t even believe the degree of pain and other unpleasantness a migraine can cause, let alone that a migraine could last a long time. Others, including especially people who get migraines only temporarily, don’t believe a person could function with a migraine, so would disbelieve this from a totally different angle.

The truth is that if you have something every day, you learn to function better than if you’re hit with it intermittently. Not that I’m doing things as well as I do when the pain is milder, but I’m doing more than I would if this were temporary and could be expected to go away. One time I tried lying in a dark closet for the duration of a migraine and realized after three days that this wouldn’t work. At the moment, I have to lie down several times a day, and I’m probably going to have to go vomit again after I finish writing this, but I also get up and do stuff sometimes. With chronic migraines, the pain fluctuates, it doesn’t stay at total hell level all the time, just mostly-hell level. And with severe pain in general, if it lasts long enough, there are times when it seems to fade out a bit, even when it’s still there as much as before. Plus you develop all kinds of ways of detaching from your body (up to and including, in my case, full-immersion hallucinations and/or total disorientation and/or unconsciousness if the pain gets bad enough; I’ve experienced this with migraines, with the other kind of pain I get, and with post-surgical pain when the hospital screwed up and forgot painkillers).

Or in other words, as Diary of a Goldfish describes in their blog entry for BADD, the sick role doesn’t work for those of us who have one of these supposedly “temporary” things that refuses to go away. I may still be trying for a migraine cure, or at least a migraine “beat it back a fair bit until it’s manageable”, but I can’t put my entire life on hold until I do. Certainly there’s a lot of things I do less now than I would otherwise, but I still do more during a migraine right now than I probably would if I only got one of these a couple times a month.

My thought, with this and so many other things that people don’t notice, is often something like, “I bet if the people who have trouble believing this is ongoing, had to live in my body for one hour, they wouldn’t be able to function. At all.” They’re probably not used to the degree of pain that I’ve been used to as long as I can remember (from things other than migraine). They’re not at all adapted to my perceptual setup, and would probably just collapse in overload. They don’t know how to pace themselves for stamina problems like the kinds I have, and would rapidly end up what staff used to refer to as “fully catatonic”. I have a lifetime of figuring out how to function in this body. They don’t.

But regardless of this, many hold me to standards that would probably be impossible to hold themselves to. And when it comes to migraines, or other things like that, I am pretty sure that what I experience is not “real” to them until I mention it, and then it’s not “real” anymore until the next time I mention it.

I’ve even had medical professionals become skeptical when I talk about not reporting severe pain (that probably is central pain or something similar) for twenty years. Central pain (or other pain like it, since there are neuropathic pains besides that that act the same, I’m just assuming since no nerve damage has been found that it’s probably central pain) tends to be under-reported anyway, because it’s so alien to any form of pain that most people ever experience, and because it’s so often associated with communication trouble. It’s most often reported as debilitation rather than pain. If you’ve had it as long as you can remember, then what? How are you supposed to know? But, at any rate, apparently that pain wasn’t real until I reported it either, and continues to be unreal even if I do report it.

While I was writing this, my case manager walked in the door and said, “Uh… do you have a migraine today?” I told him about this blog entry and said “The day I don’t have a migraine, you’ll be among the first to know.”

I’ve also had staff assume, not just once but many times, that if something wasn’t happening on their shift, it just plain wasn’t happening to me, even if I mentioned it.

I do wonder if the notion of something not going away, makes people uncomfortable. If it’s more than just “forgetting,” but “not wanting to think about”. At any rate, regardless of what intentions are behind it, I do notice that if people are likely to “forget” that I’m experiencing something, they’re also likely to “forget” the different ways I might need to do things, the access problems, and so forth. And to become almost irritated, if I bring those things up, as if, yes, mentioning them is causing them.