Hansard

I, too, welcome the many volunteers to the Parliament. I will not add to the flattery, because they have had 10 years of that and have found that it does not butter many parsnips. I think that they will have whole-heartedly welcomed the cabinet secretary’s speech.

I am a co-convener of the cross-party group on chronic pain and a member of the Public Petitions Committee, which heard the Susan Archibald petition. Margo MacDonald asked, “What is chronic pain?” She knew the answer, but she legitimately asked how people who do not suffer from chronic pain can define its severity.

Some might have thought that you were the definition of chronic pain, Presiding Officer, when you said that we had a 14-minute speech from the cabinet secretary ahead of us. Some of us in the cross-party group have found new ways to define pain that I am sure that some members present today will recognise.

Chronic pain is sterilely described as

“continuous, long-term pain lasting more than 12 weeks, or pain persisting after the time that healing would have been expected to occur after trauma or injury.”

I cannot pretend to know what chronic pain that lasts longer than 12 weeks is. I am a chronic migraine sufferer, and have been all my life. My migraines last for 72 hours. I can only describe what that is like for me.

Imagine a plain red brick, which is central to the entire construction of a four-storey building. It suddenly shatters. You can see that if you pulled it back into alignment, all would be well, but you cannot.

Imagine now that brick inside a human being. Imagine the grating noise of that brick and your every function starting to become debilitated and unable to operate normally. Your neck cannot support your head. There is pain and a feeling of nausea that exudes not from your stomach but from every pore in your body.

Other people laugh at a joke. You laugh, too—you still can—but at the end of it, that pain, nausea and discomfort are still there. You go on holiday, as other people do. They enjoy the view; you sit there absorbing the view while absorbing the continuous pressure and pain. Other people eat a meal and enjoy it; you eat a meal because you have to—no enjoyment comes from it at all. The pain is continuous.

Last week I had for the first time in years what I call a chronic migraine. It lasted three days, during parliamentary business. In the time that I was not in the chamber, I was flat on my back, unable to sleep or get any relief.

I participated in a debate, but I wrote the speech out because I was not sure that I could recall any of it or have the ability to construct sentences were the speech not in front of me. Afterwards, I was told by some people who wrote to me that it was one of my better speeches—I am not sure what the moral of that story is. Migraine also affects your vision, which becomes blurred, and you cannot concentrate. Even Paul Wheelhouse looked young and Tory again from where I was standing. Migraine is completely debilitating.

If, when suffering a chronic migraine, I had an electric drill, I could put it to my head and drill into the source of the pain to relieve the pressure. So, I understood Susan Archibald when she told the Public Petitions Committee that she has considered suicide because of the pain that she has endured. It becomes a mental health condition and leads to people having alcohol problems—they try to dull the pain that they endure—or to problems with drugs. People with chronic pain take medication at the prescribed dose but it makes no difference, so they take more than the prescribed dose and it still makes no difference. It is a fundamentally debilitating condition, but they look perfectly normal to everybody else around them and no one has any sense of what they are suffering or enduring.

For the past 10 years, despite people knowing that we have been talking about chronic pain in Parliament, there has been no significant or material progress towards any kind of long-term relief or hope for sufferers. I therefore welcome whole-heartedly everything that the cabinet secretary has said. I was not being flippant when I said that we would like all three ways of delivering the service to be implemented, because I think that those who suffer from chronic pain would like that approach.

I suspect that having one centre has appeal because of the cynicism that has grown up among sufferers about the lip service that is paid by health boards and the variable delivery of treatment across health boards in Scotland. A physical centre would exist and would have to be resourced, but I think that many people would also like the option of a local facility to which they would have access.

Jackie Baillie talked about sending people to Bath. Has anybody been to Bath of late? From Scotland, that is a monumental journey for anybody. I do not suppose that taking one’s family there is the equivalent of trying to get there while suffering from chronic pain—although with my family it would feel very similar—but it takes a long time to get there. I ask members to imagine doing the 1,600-mile round trip while suffering that degree of pain. Having a facility in Scotland is therefore a major step forward and I welcome that.

Some 780,000 people suffer not as I do, periodically for a 72-hour period, but for weeks on end or permanently—for the whole of their lives. Chronic pain is not a sexy condition in the sense of lots of nurses standing in front of a brand new, shiny building that we can point to while saying, “There we are. We’ve now addressed it.” It is a condition that it takes will, courage and a sense of purpose to deliver progress on. I think that the cabinet secretary is up to that task. I will not say that he is Prince Charming to the Ice Queen of old, although Jackie Baillie tried to turn it into that metaphor, but I think that he is genuinely committed to our making that progress.

In a fraternal way, I lend my support to Ms Baillie’s amendment. More important than anything else, this must be the watershed debate after which chronic pain sufferers will be able to say that parliamentarians finally rose to the challenge and made a commitment to deliver real relief to those who suffer from the condition.

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