My personal experience with pain comes from a time in my life where my daughter was diagnosed with Arnold Chiari Malformation at the age of two years old. She was at a stage where she was speaking/saying lots of words but it was merely a copy-cat situation and then obviously words said by herself. She started having the crying-spells but not at regular intervals or so that I could said she had a pattern of crying. Her crying became so severe that it turned into screaming and the only thing she started saying was “my toppie” which would mean her head. It became very clear that she had some or other severe headache. As it turns out, it was signs and symptoms of her diagnosis that was made. At first she could not show or verbalize her pain. The more her word-span grew, the more we could start to understand her needs. I just always used the saying”When you are in doubt whip it out”, but as i went through my list of the possible reason for crying or uneasiness I eventually stopped with a thermometer. Fever was always alarming for me as a new mom.
I think the big reason why it is so easy to misdiagnose or treat pain in children is because they struggle to verbalize it to us and we don’t know what to specifically look out for, and now I cant begin to think what it is like for children who are non-verbal.
I firmly believe that I will know a great lot when I am done with this module. There are so many non-verbal and even paralyzed children out there that can’t even show where the pain is. In the time when I grew up – in the 80’s and 90’s parents were so easy to brush of a complaint of pain, especially before school….. My grandmother use to give us little pink sweets and hoped that it had a placebo effect….
