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There's an element of truth in this.
I slipped on the ice in February 2021. I got up, hopped in my car and drove to work.
When I got there, I took my coat off and noticed my arm hurt a bit. I figured it was just a bad bruise, but folks said I should get an X-ray to be sure. I work in a hospital, so it was no big deal to get a picture done.
Turns out I fractured my arm. My wife and my doctor both asked how I managed to drive to work with a broken arm. I told them it just didn't hurt that much.
The reason it didn't seem that bad is because I also have gout. Gout reset my pain scale. What used to be a 8 is about a 3 now.
I understand this.
As a kid I had severe mouth and throat ulcers (autoimmune); it happened regularly. Turns out the drive to eat out weighs the pain response.
You can literally learn to bear pain.
I now have palindromic arthritis; this is also an autoimmune disorder. I feel pain in random parts of my body, usually around joints, but other times in the soft tissue. I am in fairly constant pain, but it is like a background level now.
This can be dangerous, it almost killed me earlier in the year, I got a "very nasty pneumonia" (doctors words) and waited too long to go to the hospital. The pain wasn't that bad...
Also adrenaline. I tore every single ligament in my knee and went on the whole day while limping thinking I was okay.
But you can’t think your way out sickness, all you can do is cope with pain the best you can.
Yeah, no question. Pain is still pain. There's just an aspect of discovering how much more you can endure than you thought you could until what was once unbearable is just your normal.
Hope you're on permanent medication. Gout can and will cause permanent joint damage. I had a friend that started getting it pretty bad and he didn't do anything about it for several years except change what he ate. He went through like five jobs because of it, he was basically unable to leave bed for weeks at a time. Now he has lost permanent mobility in one of his feet or toes or something so he has a limp and his knee is pretty janky too.
I'm on allo now, but it took too long and the damage is done. Not so bad that I can't still move. Just enough to remind me that I screwed up.