What is pain?

I was at VGH emergency this morning with my dad because he told me he had ever-growing severe pains under his chest and was breaking into cold sweat. I panicked for a bit as I scramble to call a TOC and desperately tried to remember what I was suppose to get the person to teach this morning. But, of course, what worried me most was whether he would have a heart attack again. As we would discover later, it was really because he ate too much.

For a hospital of such size, it was surprisingly not busy at emergency. I suppose it's a good thing. This is the n-th time I've been to VGH emergency; I actually find the atmosphere calm there. We were admitted quickly and attended to promptly with questions, blood tests, urine tests, etc. Even the doctor came quickly. I was actually quite impressed with the speed of service especially since I remembered that we were never serviced this quickly before. Perhaps it's because my dad has a history of life-threatening illnesses?

It was interesting how my dad's pain went from 10 before we went to more like a 3 once we got there. He was left in a curtained unit (A8 to be exact) on a bed to wait for various test results. The longer we waited, the less the pain. Perhaps the medication was kicking in but the decrease in pain was really due to our surroundings.

We listened as the A9 patient moaned in agony but was forced to leave because the hospital couldn't do anything for her broken collar bone and just had to endure her pain for 4-6 weeks. We listened to the A7 patient who cried and screamed while people undressed her; she fainted and fell down the stairs. We heard the silent worries of the wife in A8 for her husband who had to be hospitalized for several wound infections. We tried to block the screams and yells from the A11 patient because the nurses seem to want to ignore him. And then we witnessed the new A9 patient experiencing a real heart attack as at least 6 doctors and nurses attended to her at once.

Dad then says, "hearing the pains of others forces me to redefine pain. I guess I'm really not in pain..."

When my dad was discharged with smiles, I looked back into the pains behind curtains but the real pain I felt was from the doctors and nurses. They become numb to their surroundings; they must. How else does one survive in such a working condition? The accumulated pain engraved in their memories are infinite.