Running counter-clockwise around the basketball court in elementary phys ed, each time my foot hits the ground, a sharp pain in the arch of my foot and heel shoots up my leg. I’d tried to explain that running hurt, but was told there was no way I was getting out of it. So I ran, fire in every other foot strike of my likely-lopsided stride.
“Why are you grabbing at your leg? I thought you said your foot hurt,” yelled our gym teacher.
“It does, but I can’t reach my foot while I run!” I yelled back, not realizing the thing I thought logical would be interpreted as seven-year-old sass.
“There’s nothing wrong with you. Keep running!”
“Keep running.”
I kept running. Was it an early exercise in resilience, learning that I could run in spite of the pain? Knowing that if I just followed the slap-slap of my feet that it would eventually be over? That I would get through it stronger at the end?
“There’s nothing wrong with you.”
Or was the larger lesson that I couldn’t be trusted? That my body wasn’t to be believed? At that point, I’d been diagnosed with juvenile arthritis and plantar fasciitis, swallowed giant pink anti-inflammatories twice a day for months, but still hurt. Maybe the thing that was wrong with me was all in my head. Maybe I wasn’t in pain. Maybe I was just weak. Maybe I just didn’t like running.
Maybe the message that I couldn’t trust my experience started even earlier than I realized.
#PatientsAreNotFaking has recently been trending on Twitter. While it reminded me of the difficulties I had getting a trigeminal neuralgia diagnosis, and – more recently – with struggles with my insurer getting CRPS acknowledged, the truth is, these messages can start young, and can be reinforced by those outside the medical community, too.
Suck it up. There’s nothing wrong. You’re whining for no reason. After decades of receiving these messages, perhaps it’s no wonder that I question my experience of pain all the time. When the pain is low, I can start to wonder if I’m just making a big deal out of something that may not even exist. If the pain is psychological weakness rather than physiological misfires.
When the pain is high… well, when it’s high, it doesn’t matter, because everything else disappears. The pain is the only thing that is real. But as it subsides, the little girl in me starts to wonder again… could it really be all in my head?
The adult in me is starting to wonder instead, though – what might things have felt like if a few of those laps around the gym were replaced with age-appropriate pain education instead?