Daily life attitudes of women with moderate or severe chronic pelvic pain. A qualitative study.

Objective: How a woman copes with the pain might play a significant role in the management of chronic pelvic pain. This study aimed to understand the attitudes adopted by women with chronic pelvic pain (CPP) to deal with daily life problems caused by the illness.

Study Design: We conducted a qualitative study including 58 women diagnosed with chronic pelvic pain regardless of the cause. To collect the data, we used semi-structured interviews with the key question: "How do you handle the pain in your daily life?". The interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed. We conducted a qualitative thematic analysis of transcribed texts following the sequence: 1) initial reading; 2) preliminary identification of codes; 3) identification of themes; 4) review of themes; 5) nominating the themes in categories; 6) final study synthesis. The analysis was performed with the aid of the RQDA package in the R environment.

Results: Daily life attitudes varied from submission to the pain to positive coping. We identified five major categories: 1) shaping life by pain; 2) isolating from social contact; 3) avoiding sexual relationship; 4) seeking pain relief; 5) seeking positive strategies. Positive strategies were more frequent in older women.

Conclusion: Women with chronic pelvic pain adopted a broad spectrum of attitudes to deal with the pain in daily life. The depth understanding of patient perspectives has the potential to improve the multidisciplinary care of this debilitating condition.