Communicating pain and discomfort - sensory abnormality

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I'm curious to know if anyone can relate to this:

It is not uncommon for people on the spectrum to be hyposensitive (also known as sensory under-responsitivity), which makes it difficult to determine for instance how much pain or discomfort one is experiencing, which then makes it difficult to correctly express this to a physician. I've experienced this a number of times in my life, but let me give some examples:

24 years ago I started experiencing a pain in my left leg, and after a couple of days my calf started to swell.
I went to my family doctor who told me to come back if if got worse. It did, so a week later I returned, he told me it was probably nothing. It got worse, and two weeks later, as I was hopping through my workplace (I couldn't use my left leg anymore), I crashed. I was rushed to hospital where it was discovered I had a deep vein thrombosis (DVT) along the entire length of my leg. I also had a fever. I had to spend two weeks in hospital.
The specialist asked me why on earth I didn't seek help earlier. My family doctor remarked that I never told him I was in THAT much pain and felt THAT awful. But how much pain is THAT much pain?! I was asked if there was pain, I replied with yes.

2 years later the whole thing repeated itself, this time with my right leg (different family doctor).

In 1994 I went to my family doctor (yet another one) because of painful hips. Been there a number of times, nothing was ever discovered.
A year ago the pain got so bad I could barely walk for 10 minutes. Then suddenly my right hip locked up. An MRI scan showed that the labrum (ring of cartilage that follows the outside rim of your hip joint socket) was torn to shreds in both hips. Also showed I had cam/pincer (hip impingement syndrome). I was operated on both hips, I can now walk again. My family doctor said I failed to make clear in how much pain and discomfort I was.

I also walked around with a cracked bone in my left underarm for a couple of days when I was around 10 years old, until my mother noticed.

In all these cases I was asked why I didn't seek help sooner. Let it be clear that I WAS in pain and I DID feel awful.... perhaps it just wasn't clear to me how MUCH pain and HOW awful.

I'm still wondering if I'm less sensitive to pain than other people (hyposensitive), not good at relaying how I feel and how I'm doing, or just a tough guy who can endure more than most people. I don't think many people could just go on the way I did.

Also, I'm wondering if there could be a link with alexithymia (inability to identify and describe emotions experienced by one's self), which applies to me.

Thoughts/experiences?

I am less sensitive to pain than other people, so I don't notice injuries that easily, and also I don't get the desire to really tell anyone about any pain I do have. I'll vent about it online sometimes if I notice it, but I don't often willingly go to my parents/doctor or anything for help with it. That might partly be because of having things dismissed before, though ever since I was a toddler I've been more of a "grin and bear it" type of person. If something doesn't prevent me from functioning I will usually just stay that way until it does.

Similarities here with both of the above posts. I pretty much had to be coerced by someone else to go to the doctor for gout because I was limping so badly - but still going out for my daily walk in the countryside (gotta get away from them damned humans). I definitely seem less sensitive to pain generally, and any pain that lasts more than a few hours, I acclimatise to and it becomes my new "normal" - my brain just says; "yeah, I heard all about that the first time, you jangly nerves can just shut up now". Also, like HeroOfHyrule, I need to be almost at the point of operating on myself with a kitchen knife before I even think of going to the doctor (I have not even registered with a local doctor since I moved house a couple of years ago). Either I keel over or it will get better by itself - very typical fatalism for me generally, including where mental illness is concerned too (anxiety, depression) .

Thanks for the replies!

I don't often willingly go to my parents/doctor or anything for help with it. That might partly be because of having things dismissed before, though ever since I was a toddler I've been more of a "grin and bear it" type of person. If something doesn't prevent me from functioning I will usually just stay that way until it does.

Interesting...

I'm usually hypersensitive -- especially beyond 5 basic senses and not very alexithymic.

Yet I happened to have an unusual amount of tolerance to pain and discomfort.

Sometimes sensory seeking -- I'd be the type who would pour unholy amounts of alcohol directly to a superficial wound just to feel the sting.

Or kept poking my own bruises. Or move whatever's sprained, cramped or possibly broken.

Or if I have a headache bad enough, I'm not gonna lie on some pillow -- rather, I'd bang it on the wall.


Partially because I can't exactly afford accomodations and nothing is reliable.
Partially because I don't like worrying people and I'd rather look up to it myself.

Partially because I can't simply communicate 100% at the time -- if someone tells me what I feel about it, I'd ramble and just get frustrated anyway.

And partially because I do have a habit of ignoring my feelings in general.


So.. In my case...
It's not really the senses and it's processing related to pain, but my reaction to the senses and how I'd judge it.

I'm just highly tolerant -- and sometimes, it's encumbering whenever it's past my thresholds without a rest which happens more often.

And not very communicative -- at least not vocally.
But more like discomfort is more or less too normal, too used to it and personally dismissed it as such. Until finding out, it isn't and does affect in subtle ways.




But yes. A lot of atypical reaction happens around the autistic spectrum.

Alexithymia does play a lot of role around pain and communicating about pain -- alexithymia is but a dimension along with sensitivity, threshold, tolerance and response.

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I’m hypersensitive to any sort of abnormality in my body, and therefore get brushed off because nothing ever looks “that” bad (whatever “that” is). My body is also very reluctant to give any measurable signs of anything that’s wrong. In college I went to the health center because I was certain I had strep throat since I’ve had it a fair bit and it was exactly the same symptoms as every other time, and was promptly dismissed because my temperature wasn’t even over one hundred, they only took about a second to even glance in my throat. Five days later I was back in because my temperature shot up (still 99 to 103) overnight, and guess what, I was confirmed to have strep And when my doctor and I were pretty darn sure I had some sort of lymphoma and had enough swelling on one side of my neck to be noticeable even if you weren’t looking for it, ultrasound, CT scan, and core biopsy all were inconclusive, it wasn’t until they did the larger biopsy that they found yeah, I had stage 2 Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

So basically, I do detect that something is significantly wrong, but I’m usually promptly dismissed anyway

Upon reflection I feel my previous post was somewhat charged/blunt regarding neurotypicals, driven partly by past experiences but also by fatigue and bad mood.
Apologies to anyone who does not relate or was offended.

I also have both alexithymia and hyposensitivity to (some types of) pain.

For instance, I used to suffer from chronic ankle instability some years ago because of recurrent ankle sprains.

Whenever I suffered a sprain, I would just ignore it because the pain was manageable (and sometimes it even felt good - like a tickle or exercise soreness - rather than painful).

Since then I have grown my health-conscious, though, so I am now more aware if something ought to hurt even if it actually doesn't hurt.

I used to sprain my ankles a lot when I was young, but it never really hurt or bothered me. Also I was able to do weird things with my shoulder joints, so maybe I was just really flexible.