On my scale I start moaning at about level four. This is totally involuntary but I can supress it. They say a woman in childbirth experiences level 6 and I can't really relate to this personally but do have some sort of feel for it since I've seen it and heard descriptions. This is probably the level of some of my old injuries. I woke up from a hernia repair screaming from level five hand pain. It was horrible being caught between being awake and asleep with high level pain. It took four shots of morphine to shut me up.

The highest pain I ever felt was when I knelt down and pinched a nerve in my knee. I just call this a ten because it's the worst I've known. Everything went white and I would have lost consciousness, I'm sure, had I not been able to take the weight off of it and straighten the leg. I had level 8 pain when I slipped on ice and cracked the back of my head. I might have passed out that time but needed to get off the road to avoid being hit. I've only lost consciousness a few times and they were probably caused by the RSD. They were as pain was increasing at about level 8.

I've always been good at ignoring pain and even better at just turning it off. I guess I do a poor job of suffering it so I learned to turn it off. As a child I was doing pushups an hour after an appendectomy and taking long walks around the hospital that evening.

The RSD pain is just completely different for me. There's nothing I can do to affect it and even distracting myself from it isn't always effective. It's usuall low level and frequently goes away entirely for a few minutes or a few hours. It always seems like it's never coming back when it goes away and never leaving when it comes.

It's hard to believe that pain is the cause of the trouble with this disease since symptoms often seem to be independent of the pain. Even when they arise in unison the intensity of each seems independent of anything which can be positively identified. Sure, once in a while I'll find a trigger and have some control but it changes. Sodium Nitrite, for instance, used to cause great distress but after avoiding it for many months it no longer seems to have any causative relationship with symptoms.

Still I keep making little changes and trying to find things to help. The biggies are just to avoid stress and overdoing anything. Good sleep and good diet seem to be essential. It can be difficult sometimes to not get down and feel sorry for myself though, and this can't be good either.