Something that I have noticed time and time again, is that people associate initial injury with outcome and prognosis. Of course this is completely normal and usually makes sense. It’s often that a minor injury will have a short healing time and won’t cause lasting problems and a severe injury would have a longer healing time and is more likely to cause longer lasting problems. I think that’s where a major issue lies with people understanding how RSD affects those who suffer. It defies logic that a minor injury or sometimes no injury at all, could cause something so horrific – and it is often a minor injury that causes RSD/CRPS.
People are often astounded that I’m disabled from a minor fall. It’s so much easier to anticipate a big accident, involving paramedics, a hospital stay and months upon months of rehabilitation would be the cause of me now being disabled. It’s often been said to me by even medical professionals “pain is subjective, directly to the injury, therefore since it started with a minor injury, it can’t be that bad!”
RSD/CRPS doesn’t play by the normal rules, like other medical conditions. The pain is far from subjective to the original injury. The original injury heals, but the body doesn’t accept this, the nerves misfire and stop working. It’s no longer the original injury, it’s something so much different and incredibly more complex.
Are we in a no win situation? Many people can’t understand something so minor causing something so traumatic, having such a huge impact on a persons life. It simply goes against logic. The sad thing is, those people can step away, it only affects their lives for a limited time – the time that we’re with them mostly. It doesn’t matter that they don’t understand our pain and that they can’t get their heads around the fact something minor had such a devastating effect, because they can walk away from it. As sufferers of RSD/CRPS, we don’t have the luxury, we have to live with it and somehow accept that for some reason, our bodies malfunctioned and didn’t heal normally, but created other problems instead.