By Jasmine Hearn and Stella Bullo in The Conversation.

What [do] I mean by sitting in a pit of fire? You’ve got every nerve ending that’s just going hellfire, and you just don’t know what to do with yourself.

Forty-two year old Emma has experienced chronic pain from a spinal cord injury for the last year. For Emma and many others, living with severe pain is now part and parcel of everyday life. It is estimated that 35-51% of people in the UK live with chronic pain. But communicating that experience can be a challenging endeavour.

We interviewed people with spinal cord injuries and women with endometriosis – a condition where tissue resembling the lining of the womb grows elsewhere in the body causing severe pain – in an effort to find out about their experiences and to learn more about how they talk about pain.

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Link to Pain story