Pain is a funny thing. Once you live with it a little while, you forget it is there. You just feel tired and out of sorts, but you don’t really notice anymore and you don’t really know why. Pain is boring. And then the cessation of it comes as an epiphany, almost stunning—like falling in love.
(Hammered by Elizabeth Bear, page 171.)
This strikes me as a profound quote, and could spark many different essays. For me, it brings to mind a marginally related issue which will then lead me off on a completely unrelated tangent. Since this is my nature, I ask that you indulge my rambling, and appreciate the above quote even if it doesn’t prove entirely relevant to the post it inspired.
I suffer from migraines headaches. As best I can determine, I have suffered from them for most of my life, and first missed school because of them at age 11. However, I didn’t realize this, and was not formally diagnosed, for some 25 years. The primary reason for this is the dozens of well meaning people who echoed variations on the phrase: "If you had a migraine headache, you’d know it." The implication was always that a migraine was always an overwhelmingly painful headache that made you want to split your head open with a rock to escape. I didn’t have that. Yes, I occasionally felt like someone was putting an icepick through the back of my skull, but it wasn’t that painful. And mostly what I felt was mild vertigo, nausea, hypersensity to sound, aphasia, etc. Nobody told me that all of these were associated with migraine aura and that you could experience them without the headache and still be suffering from migraines. Instead it was "Don’t worry, you’d know."
As in the initial quote, you don’t necessarily even notice when you are suffering. When I snap at my lady after she makes a reasonable suggestion, I have to explicitly stop and say "Oh! I must have a headache." And then, more importantly, I must beg her forgiveness — since the headache is an explanation, not an excuse. When I find myself talking at twice my normal speed and at an unacceptably high volume, I excuse myself for a moment and go take an Advil, because I figure I’ll notice the headache sooner or later. (I highly recommend the liqui-gels — they really do seem to work faster.) In both cases, my point is that I’m not conciously aware that I’m suffering from a headache or associated migraine symptoms. I have to notice the secondary or even tertiary effects and then work back to noticing the primary cause.
Some days I feel like I’m blessed, because I can work through these migraines, rather than having to immediately stop everything I’m doing to lie down. Other days, not so much: 25 years of ignoring a treatable condition because it wasn’t bad enough, or because nobody could put the right name to it — that kinda sucks.
I’ve dealt with the same thing when I started developing kidney stones. I got exactly the same line. "If you ever have kidney stones, you’ll know." Actually I didn’t. I felt a severe pain in my lower back, and I presumed it was muscular cramping. After trying every measure I could think of to relieve the cramping, I asked my lady for advice (very reluctantly, since it was 5am, and she was sound asleep). My lady, luckily, has more sense than I do, and suggested that it might be a kidney stone. I then promptly contacted my father, who was quite familiar with the symptoms and who doesn’t think that 5am is a particularly obscene time to be awake, and he was able to confirmed that the symptoms matched. I had also learned the interesting lesson that it was not the intensity of the pain that made it unbearable, but the fact that it never let up. Thus the significance of the initial quote: my clearest memory of my time in the emergency room is when the medicines finally kicked in and the pain stopped — what joy!
By the second and third stones, I thought I had everything sorted out, and went straight to the emergency room (which is another story — don’t get me started on emergency rooms) to get appropriate pain-killers and make sure there were no side-effects. It seemed like conventional wisdom was almost correct. "Once you’ve had one, you’ll know." Then, my fourth kidney stone hit, and all the conventional wisdom went out the window. There was no severe pain; no warning; and no emergency room visit. There was just a very odd sensation, and a "ping" as the stone hit the side of the toilet. (I still scheduled a follow-up to make sure there were no complications. Kidney stones are usually benign, and do no damage to the kidneys, but complications are possible and can be dangerous.) It was definitely a kidney stone, and I had the physical evidence to prove it, but everything I thought I knew about them suddenly proved unreliable. Had this happened the first time, I might have scoffed at all the stories and been truly unprepared for a sudden back pain at 5am.
What lesson do we learn from this second story? Again, we learn that common wisdom is not always to be trusted. More importantly, we learn that every person and every case is different, and that "one size fits all" medical advice should be treated with suspicion.
