You Can’t Be In Pain! #2

Today I want to continue my blog posts about pain by sharing another example of coping with pain…

I recently heard of someone who had had a minor accident, but it had left them in too much pain to allow them to drive to work. Therefore, rather than take the day off work sick, they intended to work from home. However they were informed that as they couldn’t work from home as they would be “doped up on pain killers“.

You might think this is fair enough, however let me ask you this, if the person requesting to work from home had simply requested to do so for some reason other than their pain, would their manager ever have known they would be working from home while “doped up on pain killers”?

What about those who work, who are in pain, and are “doped up on pain killers’, are their managers quick to stop them working just because they’re on pain killers?

You may think anyone who is on pain killers shouldn’t be working as they can’t possibly be operating at their true level, and therefore their work must be suffering. But can we really be that sweeping with this response? I’d suggest not, as everyone is different. Speaking for myself, I know I am on prescription pain killers and therefore would probably be deemed to be “doped up on pain killers” while I’m at work, but I’d suggest that majority of the time, most people around me at work are completely unaware that I’m struggling or that I’m even in any kind of physical pain.

So basically I’m saying that just because one person can’t work while in pain or “doped up on pain killers”, it doesn’t mean everyone is this same.

We all have different pain tolerance levels.

We all cope with pain differently.

Our bodies all cope differently with pain medication.

Just another little reminder for you today not to judge someone’s ability to cope while in pain or on pain killers, because of their own experiences, as we are all different, and we call cope differently with pain medication.