health
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CHRONIC PAIN
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Written by GABRIELLE DROLET Illustrations by HOLLY STAPLETON
When my wrists started to twinge in February 2021, I assumed it was temporary. Instead, I joined the 20 percent of Canadians who experience chronic pain, at a time when relief had become even harder to find
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little over a year ago, a dull pain started forming in my wrists whenever I worked. It came on when I typed and sometimes lingered long afterwards, throbbing up my forearms. I pushed through it, assuming it would go away with time. Instead, dull pain turned into sharp, shooting bolts that made me wince. My fingers started to tingle, and then went numb entirely. On a bad day, I couldn’t type through the searing pain that started at my neck and moved down through my arms and into my hands. On a worse day, I couldn’t feel my hands at all. By March 2021, my life had been altered completely. It was no longer just typing that caused me pain; it was buttoning shirts, turning on the faucet, thumbing through a book. As a freelance writer and illustrator, I felt my livelihood become more unstable during an already challenging time. What’s more, I had witnessed my then girlfriend, a pianist, experience similar symptoms in the years prior. Not long after we met, she started feeling pain in her wrists when she pressed her fingers down onto the keys, her sonatas cut short when it got to be too much. Suddenly—seemingly all at once—she could barely play at all. She was diagnosed with tendinitis; after months of treatment, she started to recover, but she never fully regained her original skill on the piano. I didn’t fully understand what she had lived through until it happened to me: how all-consuming it is to constantly hurt, and the immense sense of loss you feel when your body keeps you from the things you love.
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CHATELAINE • MAY/JUNE 2022
I didn’t know it at the time, but those first twinges in my wrists would become my introduction to the world of chronic pain.
CHRONIC PAIN,
which is generally defined as pain lasting for three months or longer, can be categorized as either primary or secondary. Primary pain, explains Dr. Andrea Furlan, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Toronto, is a disease of the pain system and not a signal that there is an injury to be fixed. Secondary pain is caused by an identifiable and treatable problem—say, arthritis or injuries from a car accident. Regardless of whether it’s primary or secondary, chronic pain is persistent and you experience it every day—though some days are worse than others. “Many [people with chronic pain] are still living a normal life as much as they can, but they pay the price,” says Furlan. “If they can maintain a full-time job, when they get home, they are extremely fatigued. They can’t help other people; they can’t socialize.” It’s estimated that nearly eight million Canadians live with chronic pain—that’s roughly 20 percent of
