Pain logs and diaries might not seem like something you want to track, but the data you can collect does a lot for your senior. That one little log can be the key to keeping her way more comfortable than she is right now.
Don’t Make it Complicated
The one thing you don’t want to do with a pain log is to make it complicated or difficult to use. The simpler the log is, the more likely you’re going to be to keep it updated. The pain log can be electronic or it can be kept in a small notebook, but it needs to be something you can access quickly and that you find easy to update as needed.
Capture Some Details
You also want to make sure that you’re capturing details in each entry. The kinds of details you want to capture include information about what kind of pain your senior is experiencing and where she’s feeling that pain in her body. If the pain starts and then continues for a period of time, both starting and end times are important to note. You may have some possible solutions for specific pain your senior experiences, so it’s worth noting in the log whether those work or not.
Find a Way to Gauge the Pain
Pain is so subjective for everyone who experiences it. There’s no way for you to know exactly how much pain someone else is in unless you can find a way to quantify it. That’s why are used by doctors and other health professionals. It honestly doesn’t matter which pain scale you and your senior use to try to pin down the amount of pain she’s experiencing. What matters is that you have a way to compare the pain from one experience to another. Using the same pain scale throughout the log can help you to do that.
Share the Log with Whoever Needs the Information
The pain log does you and your senior quite a bit of good, but other people can use that data, too. Your senior’s end-of-life care providers can find that information incredibly helpful, too. They can use the pain log to help determine if there are other ways that they can help your senior to feel more comfortable and to see if the solutions they have access to might be the right ones.
When your senior is no longer interested in curative treatments, she might worry that pain and other problems are simply issues she has to live through. But at the end of her life, your senior has more options available to her than you or she might realize.
If you or an aging parent is considering end-of-life care in Bensalem, PA, please contact the caring staff at Serenity Hospice today. Call (215) 867-5405.