Yes! There’s this whole idea prevalent in our culture, “well, you don’t LOOK sick”. I’m not in a wheelchair and my hands aren’t clawed and I’m young so I must be perfectly fine. If you can’t see it, it must not be real. Tell that to my spinal xrays.
Honestly at this point I feel like I’ve developed a mild form of impostor syndrome just because of how often I’m doubted or outright called a liar, even by family members. It’s ridiculous how blind people can be when it comes to chronic pain.
Lately whenever I play wow I get a huge pain in my gluteus maximus muscles. I’ve been using booze and narcotics so i can raid. Other than that it only starts hurting when I watch the news.
Or the people that don’t understand something like the difference between the pain of a broken bone or the burning feeling of nerve pain. I got nerve pain. I think at this rate I’d much rather take the broken bone. Least we can fix broken bones.
All they can do with me really is throw medicine at me until they have to replace my bladder with a little baggy.
Just blows to be a young 20 something and suddenly be in huge amounts of pain and told this is often a problem for way older people. At least with the old people they got to live their lives. I’m 27 now. I haven’t done crap with my life because I can’t.
Walking hurts. Moving to get up and go to the bathroom hurts. GOING to the bathroom hurts. Getting up to go back to my chair hurts. Going to bed hurts. Getting up out of bed hurts. I can just go on
I have joint issues in my hips and lower back from a car accident in my teens, which having kids made 1000 times worse, plus I’m Epileptic.
I love when people find out I’m only 31 and say I’m too young, because I was born with the Epilepsy and had my first grand mal seizure at age 1. I’ve had seizures at work but my coworkers are all amazing and know what to do if I have one.
It’s just the way it is.
If people can’t see that you’re sick or in pain, they don’t think you are.
I literally have a lot of invisible problems, I’m sick, (don’t know what of yet) but people say that I don’t look sick since they don’t see it
I’m 39 and got cancer earlier this year. My insurance covered the bills. The $5000 I’m responsible for I have on a payment plan.
Exactly. There was a period of time when they were trying to figure out how to treat me best, and we went through a series of steroid medications. It was the first thing that was really helpful for the pain.
They warned me in the beginning that weight gain would be an issue and I’d just have to cope with that for a while. The pain got a LOT less, but I put on 20 pounds over that year. I was ecstatic. I got a little chubby, but the husband didn’t care at all, so I didn’t care at all. I could move and I could do things again, and I could pick up my little kid and I could clean my house and pick things up off the floor. It was amazing.
All my family did was hand-wring over the gained weight. Not one of them understood how bad the pain was and that 20 extra pounds was nothing compared to being able to live like a normal person again.
It bred a lot of resentment; I’ll tell you that. The pain is more important than anything cosmetic when you’re living through it. People do NOT get that.
My mom keeps trying to be all “I had both knees replaced, it’s not a big deal” Yeah she says that NOW. During her recovery she once asked me to get her a gun when I asked if she needed anything.
Pain comes in all sorts of stupid ways and yet some people just refuse to learn that.
It’s like how some people with tattoos HATE getting shots. Sure with tattoos there is pain. But a shot penetrates WAY deeper into the skin so it hurts more.
Or oh god my doctor. I know he means well but I wish he didn’t constantly remind me he’s had patients with my problem before and they figured out how to handle it. Really just makes me feel stupid that I can’t handle the pain that well.
/druidnightelfhug
VERY Big hugs*
Yeah, it’s tough. It’s so hard even getting through the gatekeepers to even begin transition, and transition is itself even harder than dealing with gatekeepers. It’s tough. Trans man, woman, black, white, rich, or poor, seldom have I ever heard anyone say “Transition was easy!”
Look, I’ll give you a little (by that I mean LONG) writeup here, maybe if anything to make you giggle a bit, or at least to show you a little something when it comes to dealing with certain rigors associated with being transgender, namely transphobes.
Now as many are aware some folks out there fake being trans. Every once in a while to “prove it” as best I can, I’ll do something like this:
https://imgur.com/a/VbdA1xd
Oh yea, load up a spike with that estrogen 
Here’s the funny part. A long while back, years ago, I used to post on another toon… a rogue named Tufi. You can be forgiven for forgetting her because, boy, did I give you hell for being a trans man and it was pretty much the standard copypaste essentialist crap I’d give ya. Would tease you so hard. This was before the “transgender debate” was the in thing, before Jenner and all that Jazz. I remember you pretty well, the predator tattoo.
Just funny how almost like clockwork the people who be hating on transgender folks often have LGBT/Gender issues they are dealing with themselves, and here I’ll put my neck out there and admit to you I was one and for that I publicly apologize to you. Straight up>> Since then, I got SRS, laser/electro, all legal stuff changed, I’m siting here with my nails painted red while babysitting… the works lol. So sometimes when you come across haters know that so often they are either dealing with transgender issues themselves, or they are attracted to transgender people and that makes them uncomfortable so they lash out. That’s not me playing keyboard psych, but it’s the stuff my doctors told me because I used to be a flaming transphobe. That’s not necessarily all to you, Rosen, but to anyone else out there silently reading on. I could write a book about what I have learned about transphobes, I swear haha.
As far as transition struggles. It’s a pain. I pass, had support from my wife and fam, got money and all that and it’s STILL hard. Sometimes to get what I wanted, I had to “manhandle” people, people like my therapist and doctors. Please do not be afraid to put your foot down and demand stuff. That does not mean you have to curse and rage, but let gatekeepers and other such people know that you are serious and you’re not gonna passively sit there while they give you the cold shoulder or the runaround treatment.
Sometimes when you come out of the closet, it’s the hardest time. Think of it like this: You are stuck up in that dark closet, you were cramped up in there many years. Now that you are out the bright light hurts your eyes, standing up hurts your joints and your back, but as time passes on your eyes adjust, your muscles begin to strengthen, you get your bearings, and you enjoy the freedom of being out that closet.
But, again, it ain’t easy. Being trans is hard. Super hard and truthfully transition ain’t for everyone. Know yourself as best you can and be real with that dude looking back at you in the mirror and realistically assess the benefits vs losses you will experience with transition.
Once you are certain, I’d love for you to AGGRESSIVELY go after getting your hormones. Like I said, call planned parenthood and/or call trans legal centers to see if you can get some help. Many transgender people are poor and there are organizations and programs out there who will work with you. If you call one place and fail, then call another. If you fail calling that one, call another. Don’t. Give. Up.
Lastly, and sorry this got so long, but even if you cannot get your hormones there are still some things you can do to possible help alleviate the pain brought on by dysphoria. Work on your voice (this is SUPER powerful for helping alleviate dysphoria). One thing about voice. Some trans men get lazy with it thinking hormones will do all the work, but there is more to voice than pitch/resonance. It’s volume, they way you enunciate words, etc. But more on helping alleviate dysphoria before hormones: If possible get a hair cut. Look at good binders. Work on your mannerisms. These things can help you so much, and they can help give you a running start so when you do get your hormones -and if you keep confident you will get them- you’ll go into medical transition with a few more feathers in your cap.
When I was 6(late 80s) I was diagnosed with Legg-perthese disease, essentially necrosis of the hip joint. It had a severe impact on my life when I was younger, a lot of therapy and doctor visits. Originally they had planned to double cast my legs for a year to make sure things healed properly. However it was decided unneeded as healing seemed to progress well enough.
Fast forward to my late teenage years, my body broke. I ended up missing over a quarter of my senior year from pain and my body just not working. The years of my body developing and compensating for a severe limp as I was healing caused a lot of my structure to be misaligned. My knees have lost their cartilage, it has been bone on bone for years. I’ve had arthritic pain all over my body for years, winters make it worse. Knees and hips need replaced but I’m too young for the procedures.
Being in a constant state of pain, I gained a lot of weight as physical activity was difficult and at times impossible. At my heaviest I was 300+ lbs. Most still don’t quite understand my situation, even when explaining so I don’t have much of a support group. I still managed through a lot of pain and effort to drop down to 195-200, it has been a slow process the last couple years. Losing the weight helps a lot but there are still days, even if I want too, I just can’t do anything.
I’ve held on to these pains since from 6 years old and into my 30s. It is why I spend as much as time as I do playing games like WoW, it is a fairly good outlet for keeping me moderately sane.
I have a lot of other fun issues but this is the one that leaves me with the most consistent pain.
I’ve got chronic pain, and the only solution is more cowbell!
Why joke about pain
It’s called gallows humor. It helps some people.
i hear ya, some people are just too close minded about what real pain is, they dont believe you unless you are holding a bloody stump where your arm used to be or something.
you aren’t alone. i wish i could say or do something more tangible than just words on a video game message board, but there are many people who suffer as you do.
I’ll just say this: healthcare should not be dependent on where someone works. Everyone is born with a body that requires healthcare, some need more than others, and sometimes even from birth. Not everyone has the physical ability for certain jobs, and (sounds rough, but it’s true) not everyone has the mental acuity for the better white collar jobs. For-profit healthcare should not be a thing imho, and I think single-payer is the way to go. The way things are in the US is a source of great shame and embarrassment really, we can (and should) do so much better than this. Medical bankruptcy simply shouldn’t exist anywhere in the world. ALL people should have access to quality care no matter their lot in life. “How we treat the least among us” had meaning, once upon a time.
There was a funny picture someone had posted on these forums a loooong time back and I saved it. It’s about if people treated physical pain like they do mental pain:
https://imgur.com/a/u3K6IqQ
Pain and tremors, both of which get worse on bad days. And it really blows because I’m a long-time raid healer, which I think may be the worst possible role to be, dealing with what I deal with. And it’s tough, but even though many of my guildies know, they don’t really know and it’s caused some friction. So I largely just linger on the sidelines now, doing dailies.
If not for the fact that I’m lucky enough to have good insurance at work, I wouldnt be able to afford my seizure meds. Back in the days before this job it was rough. It was either pay rent or buy my medication ![:confused:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/confused.png?v=6" ":confused:")