Do you have a chronic-pain condition but get accused of faking it?

I do, I had surgery for it. It resulted in about a year of freedom from pain and the loss of hearing in one ear. I have learned to live with and only the people closest to me realize when I am in it. I think my tolerance to pain has just gone up so much. Unless people can see an illness or an injury, they don't believe that you have pain. They see it as an excuse.

I have had chronic pain for more years then I wish to count. I started have arthritis pain in my knees when I was fourteen. When I was nineteen I had A hundred pound sake of fertilizer dropped on me from the top of a flat bed truck and a full pallet. At that time the doctors said the pain in my shoulders was from a strained muscle and to go home, take asprin and use ice. The pain never went away. When I was thirty the doctors again told me that the pain that had been bothering me for ten years was mild arthritis in the shoulders. They put me on prescription Motrin and told me to go home and put ice on it. When I was forty I finally lost use of my left arm because the pain was so bad. I also found a doctor who would listen to me. She sent me to have a catscan which showed that I had a torn rotator cuff and damage to my shoulder socket. The did surgery to repair the torn muscle and to scrap the deformity in the shoulder to make it so the shoulder joint would work properly. I still have limited use of my left arm (and I am left handed). If the doctors had done a proper exam over the previous twenty years I would not have had this problem. They also found that I had degenerative joint disease and this added to why I was in so much pain. In 1999 I had a very severe infection that caused all the joints on the left side of my body I could not walk or do anything except lay in bed. After about three months of tests they never determined what the infection was but they at that time diagnosed me with Sacroilitis and Ankylosing Spondinitis. Both of which are spine disease. I was diagnosed with Rheumatoid Arthritis about three months later. I never recovered from that infection and have had the sever pain ever since. My spine is completely fused so I have no movement in my back and hardly any movement in my neck, On top of that my ribs are fused together so I have a very hard time breathing and have developed severe asthma as a result and am pron to lung infections. I was also diagnosed with Neuropathy in 2001. I think that being in pain all the time has caused me to have a high tolerance to pain because the doctors can do things to me, that would leave most people screaming, I hardly feel them. That shows how much pain I am normally. It is really true that most people do not understand how much pain I am in and that I am faking and need to get off my lazy butt and get a job. They can not understand why I can not go to church and set in those hard pews for two hours a week. I can not be on my feet for more then ten minutes without having severe pain in my back, legs and hips. They just can not comprehend it. I was actually evicted from the last place we live because the owner of the property did not want a lazy bum living there. Most of my friends do not understand and do not have anything to do with me any more. Even my parents and siblings tell me that it can not be that bad and I need to get a job. I force myself to go for walks or to go to a store and walk around to keep my muscles from turning into much and to get some exercise. But I have to take a couple of hours afterwards just to recuperate. I have even had doctors tell me that I am just faking it. Needless to say they are no longer my doctors.

I know about the problems with the back pain and how hard it is for people to understand what that is like. It is extremely irritating when people think or suggest that you are faking. I have degenerative disc disease which is a form of arthritis which is where the discs in you back erode or narrow and allows your spine to rub and grate together. There is no treatment or cure other than pain medication. Needless to say, this can be very painful at times. It doesn't help matters that it seems to be spreading into my neck and ribs which sometimes makes breathing painful. Before I got my disability approved I had to move onto my mom's property into an old trailer that was there. Since I couldn't drive we had to depend on her for transportation and to get to the grocery store. She got the idea that maybe my problems weren't really that bad, so I would up doing the shopping on a couple of trips to the store. After nearly collapsing from the pain that pushing that cart and walking around the store caused, she finally got the message. It wasn't only her though, there have been doctors and Social Security people, other relatives, and several others that have doubted that the pain was real. The problem is that back pain is very hard to prove, and even though I finally won my claim, it wasn't based on my disability as much as it was on my age. I first became disabled at 47, I was approved after I had turned 50, and they said that at that age I was considered unsuitable for retraining in a new career field. According to the original specialist that I went to, I am 100% disabled...the reality is that I can only stand for about 10 minutes at any one time, and I can get around my apartment fairly well, but that is about it. To walk from the apartment to the parking lot, (about 75' with a six inch curb to step down) is enough to put me into some serious discomfort, and by the time I go do whatever it is I have to do I am wore out and in serious pain. I am basically housebound. I don't know why some people think that we are faking sometimes...and while I would wish my problems on nobody, there are times when I wish they could get a little taste of what they think I am faking. There are some days where the meds work fairly well, and there are others where I can barely sit, or even hold my head up. Anyway, this has been my experience.

I have several 'ailments', so naturally some narrow minded people think I am exaggerating or faking one of them. I've never had a friend accuse me of something so heinous, but I had a new doctor and they told me that one of my problems, fibromyalgia, didn't even exist. That was the last time I saw him!

If you can easily imagine strangling someone who says "it can't be THAT bad" then yes, you've been accused of faking and exaggerating the pain. I have Connective Tissue Disease. There isn't a part of my muscles, ligaments and tendons that doesn't hurt. I have neuropathy -- nerve damage. Since it's pinched nerves you have you need to see a neurologist and get medicine for nerve pain. I know I can't live without my Neurontin and I hoard it in case another hurricane blows thru because I don't want to live with the agony of the nerve pain and having no Neurontin left as I did for 3 weeks in 2004. Please see a neurologist and ger your nerve pain treated!

I was unable to work a 40 hour week due to chronic pain issues. I was fired. The only people that believed I had any pain were a few that had chronic pain issues themselves. So many people don't believe in something unless they can see it, have experienced it themselves or it is a known disease, i.e. rheumatoid arthritis, fibromyalgia, diabetes, etc. It made my life on the job miserable and resulted in many people ignoring me or talking about me behind my back. I had hoped educating people about chronic pain would allow them to accept it, but most were unable or unwilling to listen.