Pain
Yesterday while working at the farm, I was lucky enough to be on the receiving end of a conversation about how poorly men handle pain and that men could never deal with childbirth. I’m so freaking sick and tired of this narrative. For some reason, people fail to understand that everyone is different and this means that everyone handles pain differently. To put this in a different perspective, let’s go to an office environment where the temperature is set to 74 degrees Fahrenheit, the males in the room are either content with the temperature or they are warm, whereas a majority of the women are cold, have coats on, or have their feet in front of a portable heater. So it is perfectly normal for the males to be warm and the females to be cold, but if the shoe is on the other foot and we are talking about pain, this doesn’t apply.
I had a bowel resection in 2012 and the day after the surgery, they want me to get out of bed and stand up and take a few steps. They don’t want you to lay in bed all the time. The nurse told me that it will be the most intense pain that I have ever felt and that it is the closest to the pain of childbirth that a male will ever get. I have to say that it was painful, but certainly, not the worst pain I have ever felt. I mean it hurt, it really fucking hurt, but still. So I stood up, took two steps and I was told that I can sit down now in the chair. I was to sit in the chair for 30 minutes and then move back to the bed for the rest of the day, but the next day, I had to walk down the hall for a lap.
The moral of this story is that not everyone handles pain the same, just like not everyone handles cold temperatures the same. The way the human body reacts to outside stimuli is different for everyone. This also stands to mean that if four people have fibromyalgia, two are male and two are female, they will all experience different symptoms of fibromyalgia. Some may experience different levels of fatigue and each may experience different levels of pain. I have a co-worker who has Fibro and she doesn’t have any of the fatigue to speak of, but she does have mild pain. I’m sure if you asked a dozen women who had at least two children and ask them to compare their child-birthing experiences across their children and across the other dozen women. I’m sure that they all have different experiences.
In my case, I experience minor fibromyalgia pain on a daily basis, but when I have flare-ups, it often feels like I have been hit by a damn bus.
