I’ve been in pain for about a month. Because I don’t have insurance, I had to save up to go to a doctor and get it checked out, then save up for the tests they wanted to run, and now I have to wait another week before they’ll see me to tell WTF is up with the tests. Ow. I don’t want to go into too much detail as I’m not looking for the Teeming Masses to diagnose me, but it’s a steady 3-5 on a scale of 1-10 where 10 is the worst.
The pain is in a specific area, and that area is easily accessible to external as well as internal prodding, and when seeing the doctors and getting the tests, it has been well prodded, and at no point was there ever more pain or even tenderness. That’s the weird part. I’ve never had a pain from anything- sprains, surgery wounds, infection or bruises- that didn’t feel far worse when poked at.
The only thing I can think of that’s similar is when I had a tooth pain that made my ear hurt. The ear was absolutely fine, but the pain transferred. Could this be transferred pain from a location that doesn’t have enough nerves of its own? But I think in that case the actual-owie part would need to be close to the perceived-owie part, which would mean that it would have gotten prodded, too, and the perceived pain would have been worse in that case also?
What hurts but doesn’t hurt worse when poked?
This happened to me too. I broke my elbow big time. After the cast was off I went through physical therapy. I noticed that when I typed on a keyboard my wrist was killing me. I tried icing my wrist but it did not help. I complained to my PT. He said I just throught is was my wrist… it was really my elbow. He “proved” this by roughly squeezing my wrist which did not hurt. I did not actually believe this until my wrist hurt again and ice on my elbow helped it.
I don’t think this means my elbow is lacking in nerves. My best guess is that my brain is getting an unfamiliar signal and is not intrepreting it correctly.
A referred pain?