On Female Pain

How is it possible to be in this much pain, and not be believed? This question is informing a large swath of popular culture at the moment, though in that instance the pain referred to is typically emotional rather than physical. But there is physical pain, too. A recent piece made the rounds of the things people read problematizing the assumption of female pain that we all live with. That sex will involve pain. That the pain is not important.

Yesterday afternoon I was reduced to begging, in tears, on the phone, for painkillers, and I wasn't given any. I awoke from egg retrieval surgery writhing. The pain was acute. I was gasping. Tears sprang to my eyes. I can't properly account for the pain, or describe it. The nurse asked if it was like menstrual cramps, and it assuredly was not anything like menstrual cramps. It was a slicing and a burning. I begged for help. I sobbed. They finally relented and put Dilaudid in my IV. The pain receded into a dull roar, though it took away my equilibrium. I sat swimming in pain and confusion as my husband was brought back to me. I slowly dressed. They gave me a hot pad, which made my skin hot, and still in pain.

We got home and I was installed on the couch and almost immediately fell asleep, with my knees up, which I didn't think was possible. I was curled in sleep from the pain. I dozed fitfully in the last Dilaudid haze, and woke up with a tearing and a roaring and I started to cry.

I was told to take Tylenol. I did.

Finally, we called the doctor. Weeping. I was told they'd leave a message for the nursing team. The nursing team never called back. My husband called. They put him on hold to transfer him, and instead of transferring, they hung up on him. We called and called and called. I finally made the doctor's assistant go downstairs and physically locate a nurse. The nurse called back and told me that what I was experiencing was normal, and they would not give me a prescription, and they were sorry.

Earlier in this process I had an imaging procedure that involves rinsing my insides out with iodine. I experienced cramping during the procedure, and burning pain afterwards - for three weeks. I called them, worried. They said they doubted it was because of the procedure. I asked to be checked to make sure nothing was wrong. They said I should talk to my regular doctor. I said I didn't have a regular doctor yet, I had started treatment with the clinic the minute I moved to New York City. They shrugged and said it wasn't because of the procedure. I said it had begun right after the procedure, was occurring in the exact same region of the body as the procedure, and had never happened before. I insisted they look at me. They did, and shrugged. Nothing wrong here, they said.

Pain is temporary, fortunately. But when one is inside it, and it is bad enough, it becomes consuming. It replaces my identity. I did not recognize the woman who was weeping and begging on the phone last night. I knew I sounded like a manic drug addict. But I didn't know what else to do. How can you beg without begging? How can you convince someone that while most people do not experience "discomfort" like this after these procedures, that human experience actually falls along a bell curve, and out here, in the long tail, I am suffering so much that I do not even recognize myself?

It's hard not to read their persistent doubting of my account of my own experience of my body through a lens of gender. The highest ranking doctors in this practice are all men. Most of the residents and attendings are also men. The nurses are all women. The entire power structure of this system consists of well-paid men telling women that they should give over control of their bodies, that they do not understand themselves, that only expert men can help them. The fact that they cannot experience our pain, be it emotional or physical, means that the pain does not exist. We are as guilty of hysteria as any fainting harpy in Freudian Vienna. And it doesn't matter.