It was beautiful today, first hearing Rob singing with so much passion, and then seeing the results of his painting. He has been having a lot of pain, so he worked on visualising the “painthing”, and hence this painting.

What is absolutely amazing to me is just how much it helped Rob to process his pain. We use a pain measurement scale to try to identify how bad the pain is. It is a completely subjective scale, but over the years we have been able to assess it by this. What is really hard, is that for me or many other able bodied people, our pain threshold would be much higher.

Just to give you some real world idea’s about how this works, Rob says he has been at 4-5 recently, because he has a lot of pain. I think for me, that would be 6-7. After painting, Rob says he is at 2. It’s amazing to me how much pain relief he can get by doing something that brings him so much joy, without the use of medication.

Acrylic on paper. A4 29.7cm x 21cm (11.69″ x 8.27″)