Marianne MacDonald has felt her body go into spasms and collapsed on the job, been wheeled out of work on an ambulance stretcher, and lost several positions – one just a couple of days after starting it because, she says, someone in human resources noticed she had ticked the “yes” box beside the question: “Do you have chronic pain?”
Now working in Regina as a manager of a group home for people with intellectual disabilities, Ms. MacDonald has days when she feels as if her back is on fire and her neck and shoulders are twisted up in knots. But she says she mostly keeps quiet about how she’s feeling.
“Sometimes I will tell my employer that I’m in a huge amount of pain and that it might affect my work that day,” says Ms. MacDonald, whose health problems began seven years ago after a car accident. “There are some days when I’ve gone into work and they’ve sent me home because I was in so much agony,”
Ms. MacDonald is one of thousands of Canadians struggling to cope with chronic pain on the job. The debilitating effects can have major repercussions for them as they try to just keep working, never mind advance their careers, while battling persistent pain caused by injury or disease.
“There’s no question about it. Chronic pain presents tremendous challenges for people who are trying to build and maintain a career,” says Barry Ulmer, executive director of the Edmonton-based Chronic Pain Association of Canada, an Edmonton-based non-profit organization working to advance understanding and treatment of chronic pain.
Nearly one in five Canadians – 18 per cent – suffers from chronic pain, according to a 2008 Nanos Research survey of 4,000 Canadians, which defined it as moderate to severe pain lasting more than three months.
It can, in fact, go on for years. And it takes its toll. The Nanos survey found employees with chronic pain missed an average of 28.5 work days a year. The national annual average for work absences, according to 2008 Statistics Canada figures, is seven days.
Nearly half of sufferers in the survey – 47 per cent – said their job responsibilities had been reduced, and a third said they had lost a job. As well, nearly half said they seen their annual income drop as a result of their pain, according to Nanos, which did the survey for painexplained.ca, a chronic pain awareness campaign led by the Chronic Pain Association, Canadian Pain Society, Canadian Pain Coalition and the Association québécoise de la douleur chronique (Quebec Association for Chronic Pain).
It’s not a bad idea for the employee with chronic pain to share some information with co-workers and let them know he or she is interested in working hard and being part of the team, but is limited by a medical condition.
Perhaps the biggest challenge for workers with chronic pain, Mr. Ulmer says, is hanging on to their jobs. They are often let go because they call in sick more frequently. Even when they do hang on, sufferers often find their careers stalled as managers stop sending important projects their way and they gain a reputation for being unreliable, the experts say.
“The problem is that, even when they’re at work, they’re often not fully productive because their pain makes it hard for them to focus on their work, or they have physical limitations that prevent them from performing certain tasks that would normally be part of their job description,” he says. “So they become perceived as slackers and complainers.”
Dr. Mary Lynch, director of the pain management unit at the Queen Elizabeth II Health Sciences Centre in Halifax, says it’s not unusual for workers with chronic pain to be ostracized by other employees.
“This may be due in part to the fact that pain is invisible and many people can’t imagine what it’s like being in pain all the time,” says Dr. Lynch, who is also president of the Canadian Pain Society.
