Over time, I have come to realise that living with osteoarthritis is not simply a case of dealing with the physical symptoms but is also about managing the mental health aspect, which is the inevitable result of the relentless chronic pain characteristic of musculo-skeletal disorders. I also learned to recognise that poor mental health is, in itself, as detrimental to an individual’s quality of life as the physical symptoms of arthritic conditions. I reached this conclusion only relatively recently, following yet another rather brutal self-berrating episode, bemoaning the fact that I not only had a rubbish skeleton and a body which was a constant source of pain, frustration and embarrassment to me, but also that my head was a bit messed up too.
So, this week I am trying out a little experiment, using a word cloud. Word clouds are a quick and easy way of creating an image by inputting text relating to a particular topic; you simply add a bunch of text, and the programme then randomises the text to create the final image. Additionally, the programme will change the scale of words according to the frequency in which they appear – for example, a word which appears once will be small, words which appear more than once appear bigger. In this experiment, I asked myself the question “How do you feel today?”, and allowed myself 12 words each day to describe both my physical and psychological condition.
Here is the word cloud for day 1:
Since the word ‘pain’ appears in large text, this tells me that this appeared several times in my list of 12 words, and that I most likely experienced either a lot of pain or several different types of pain that day. Referring back to the original list of words, I listed ‘lower back pain’, ‘burning pain’ and ‘sharp pain’ as how / what I felt that day. ‘Pain’ is an interesting starting point in this experiment – ‘pain’ is a physical symptom / phenomenon, however, I believe that individuals who experience ‘pain’ on a frequent, regular or daily basis, are also likely to experience decreased psychological well-being.
So, each day this week, I will be creating a similar list of 12 words based on the question ‘How do I feel today?’ I am hoping that this will produce a detailed and useful snapshot of the physical and psychological impact of osteoarthritis on a particular individual. What I would expect to happen is that as the week progresses, other words (the usual suspects) will also appear in larger text; we can see this happening already in this image, where the 12 words from Day 2 are added to the image:
For the conclusion to this experiment, click here
Bare Bones 