Nurses swim in a sea of stories; we navigate our way through stormy and calm stories, stories that challenge and reward, stories that stretch our practice, and challenge our understanding. Stories are inherently relational. The stories we’re told can change what we understand and how we feel, who we are and what we bring with us to our practice. Stories can inform our humanity. Humanity is core to nursing. 

Stories are told with a purpose. Stories are a way for children and young people to reach out to their nurse and for their fears and doubts to be acknowledged. When a child shares a story about their pain, it’s an implicit request to connect and for their experience and emotions to be acknowledged. Pain stories create relational opportunities for their nurse to become an authentic presence in that moment in their life. Pain stories can be overlooked; they are not always clear, coherent or complete. They may seem trivial, fragmentary and faltering. Our role as nurses is to be attentive and attuned to the stories that are shared with us. 

Talking about pain can be tricky for adults; words don’t easily describe how pain can erode a person’s sense of self, how persistent pain can disrupt an imagined future, or how overwhelming pain can be. For children and young people, sharing stories about their pain can be even trickier. Historically, children’s positioning in society meant that their stories were likely to be disbelieved, being perceived as unreliable reporters of their experiences, their agency and ability to talk about their experience of pain questioned. Thankfully, assumptions about children’s agency, competence and capabilities as storytellers of their own pain and health experiences are being overturned. However, children’s stories of their pain can be subtle, sophisticated, direct. Not all children (or indeed adults) tell stories using words, so nurses need to ‘listen’ with all their senses. 

Stories cannot tell us everything about a child’s pain, but they can tell us some things. However, many children, especially those experiencing persistent (chronic) pain, are on long waiting lists and don’t have access to opportunities to tell their pain stories. Increasingly, environments are time-poor - pain assessments can be reduced to checklists. Numbers and stories can be overlooked. Children can be judged as conflating or fictionalising their pain to gain attention. With the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), new avenues open up with some young people expressing a preference to tell their pain stories to a chatbot rather than a person as they perceive AI to be non-judgemental. There is increasing evidence that generative (GenAI) chatbots have this sort of potential. However, if GenAI chatbots are to provide accurate, safe, empathic, and accessible means for children to share their stories and seek support, they must be carefully developed and evaluated with detailed input from experts and stakeholders.

Children in pain seek connection through their pain stories. We ignore their stories at our peril as they contain essential experiential ‘data’ that can help us attend to what matters to the children for whom we care.