Pain
I bought into it for years – you know, the whole grit your teeth and smile through the pain scenario. It’s funny only in hindsight because I had never been actually taught this – the whole story of women and pain and bearing it. Instead, the conditioning was insiduous, absorbed over the years from peers, older women who ought to have known better and increasingly, from media misinformation.
I was a lucky girl. I was never crippled with painful periods and consequently, never spared my friends the sympathy or empathy they needed each month. Childbirth was painful but not unbearably so. An infected tooth hurt more than labour pains as I recall. The first time, I went through a few hours of labour before an umbilical cord wrapped around my son’s neck necessitated a cesarean section. The second time, I screamed my way through a mercifully short labour until my gynaecologist snapped at me to stop yelling and start pushing.
Charmed life, it seemed. And then after a few years, the luck ran out. It started innocously enough around sixteen years ago. There was an ill advised participation in a boot camp without any prior conditioning. Shortly afterwards, I blithely reached down for a pan in my kitchen and stayed there. Five days in bed, a course of heavy painkillers blanking out large portions of the pain. I accepted the casual diagnosis of a pinched nerve or/and the precursor to a slipped disc without question or murmur. That diagnosis, right or wrong, was how I started any future conversations with doctors. Yes, I have a weak lower back, it acts up every now and again, no I’ve never really done any further tests. I rest it when it gets bad, I don’t do high impact exercises, squats are a no-no. The litany of the misinformed.
Here’s where it gets funny. Or bizarre. Maybe five years ago, the back pain became more frequent. In fact, it timed itself with mid period ovulation. Along with the backpain came cramps. Bad ones. Still, a lifetime of pain conditioning meant I grumbled, occasionally popped a painkiller but really, nothing more. It meant I could rarely ramp up any exercise routine because those two or three days meant rest and two steps back each month.
I began to mention this to doctors. Back came the replies: Ovulation. Perimenopause. Weight gain. That old back issue. Casual diagnoses. It became routine to deal with the pain and not complain too much. No-one wants to be the one whining and whingeing each month. Four years of pain taken for granted. Perimenopause became the number one suspect for all my complaints though there were times I thought I was crazy. After all, no one seemed concerned. Was I imagining this? Maybe the pain was only in my head.
Nine months ago,I almost passed out one afternoon from the pain. My abdomen was stretched tight as a drum. I was nauseous. Imaginary or not, I had reached breaking point. My son took me to the emergency room at a nearby hospital where a kind surgeon friend was standing by to give me pain meds and hustle me off for a CT scan. Note: this was the first time a scan had ever been advised in over twenty years of recurring lower back pain and almost four years of midperiod cramping. The CT scan didn’t show any abdominal issues and I went home, armed with the first of what would be four antibiotic prescriptions. The pain came back the next month. Over the next two months, four doctors became involved in my case. They suspected:
1. A twist in the intestine
2. A hernia
3. A blockage in the colon.
4. Autoimmune disease
5. Good old fashioned gastroenteritis
A second CT scan, X-ray and an MRI still couldn’t pinpoint the problem. When I ended up in the hospital for the third time, the doctors finally decided to perform an investigative laparoscopy. A thirty minute procedure turned into a three hour stay in the OT. I woke up, minus my ovaries, blessedly pain free (that might have been due to the amazing cocktail dripdripping into my veins) and best of all, with a diagnosis: endometriosis. The most basic Google search will tell you that one common symptom of the condition is…wait for it…lower backpain.
A possibly isolated episode of a catch in the back twenty years ago became the artificial foundation of my medical story. As with most untruths, the telling and retelling of it shaped it into hard fact.
Is it just me or are women in general conditioned to live with pain? Does the act of childbirth predispose us to bear all kinds of unrelated pain, even after our child bearing years have been and gone? I know better now. This is not being strong. It is not being Mother Earth or the Goddess. It is definitely not being a martyr. This is simply the repeated telling of a lie: that a woman bears pain and doesn’t complain about it.
I’m done with that lie. I promise myself that all pain will be heard, attended to and actively treated until I am free of it. I advocate to my tribe of women: the pain we feel is real. It is not our imagination. We are not hysterical.
Pain is not a part of our biological or social selves. I write of physical pain here, but it is equally true of mental and emotional pain. Talking about pain is not weak or attention seeking. Don’t let doctors, well meaning but clueless family and friends or our own conditioning tell us otherwise. Raise our voices, insist we be heard. Insist that the pain is real. The fallout: all the little barbs and admonitions, will be well worth the healing.