Brainology

Ouch! The science of pain
John Walsh
One night in May, my wife sat up in bed and said, 'I've got this awful pain just here.' She prodded her abdomen and made a face. 'It feels like something's really wrong.' Woozily noting that it was 2am, I asked what kind of pain it was. 'Like something's biting into me and won't stop,' she said.

'Hold on,' I said blearily, 'help is at hand.' I brought her a couple of ibuprofen with some water, which she downed, clutching my hand and waiting for the ache to subside.
An hour later, she was sitting up in bed again, in real distress. 'It's worse now,' she said, 'really nasty. Can you phone thedoctor?' Miraculously, the family doctor answered the phone at 3am, listened to her recital of symptoms and concluded, 'It might be your appendix. Have you had yours taken out?' No, she hadn't. 'It could be appendicitis,' he surmised, 'but if it was dangerous you'd be in much worse pain than you're in. Go to the hospital in the morning, but for now, take some paracetamol and try to sleep.'

Barely half an hour later, the balloon went up. She was awakened for the third time, but now with a pain so savage and uncontainable it made her howl like a tortured witch face down on a bonfire. The time for murmured assurances and spousal procrastination was over. I rang a local minicab, struggled into my clothes, bundled her into a dressing gown, and we sped to St Mary's Paddington at just before 4am.
The flurry of action made the pain subside, if only through distraction, and we sat for hours while doctors brought forms to be filled, took her blood pressure and ran tests. A registrar poked a needle into my wife's wrist and said, 'Does that hurt? Does that? How about that?' before concluding: 'Impressive. You have a very high pain threshold.'
The pain was from pancreatitis, brought on by rogue gallstones that had escaped from her gall bladder and made their way, like fleeing convicts, to a refuge in her pancreas, causing agony. She was given a course of antibiotics and, a month later, had an operation to remove her gall bladder.
'It's keyhole surgery,' said the surgeon breezily, 'so you'll be back to normal very soon. Some people feel well enough to take the bus home after the operation.' His optimism was misplaced. My lovely wife, she of the admirably high pain threshold, had to stay overnight, and came home the following day filled with painkillers; when they wore off, she writhed with suffering. After three days she rang the specialist, only to be told: 'It's not the operation that's causing discomfort — it's the air that was pumped inside you to separate the organs before surgery.' Like all too many surgeons, they had lost interest in the fallout once the operation had proved a success.
During that period of convalescence, as I watched her grimace and clench her teeth and let slip little cries of anguish until a long regimen of combined ibuprofen and codeine finally conquered the pain, several questions came into my head. Chief among them was: Can anyone in the medical profession talk about pain with any authority? From the family doctor to the surgeon, their remarks and suggestions seemed tentative, generalised, unknowing — and potentially dangerous: Was it right for the doctor to tell my wife that her level of pain didn't sound like appendicitis when the doctor didn't know whether she had a high or low pain threshold? Should he have advised her to stay in bed and risk her appendix exploding into peritonitis? How could surgeons predict that patients would feel only 'discomfort' after such an operation when she felt agony — an agony that was aggravated by fear that the operation had been a failure?

I also wondered if there were any agreed words that would help a doctor understand the pain felt by a patient.