i have come to learn that all pain is different. No two pains are alike and I speak from experience. I shall share two of my many experiences with pain as a way of illuminating the process. One of my most enduring pains came from a ruptured appendicitis. Let me first say that I am a guy and when the average guy has a pain, he shrugs it off as something else. For me, it was food poisoning because I felt something happen to me after eating a baked potato. I went to sleep that night and the pain hit with total brute force. It was pain that divided itself into four compartments in my abdomen. I fought this pain all night in a most restless of sleeps. The next morning, I called a friend of mine, we both were in radio at the time, and I thought I might be having an anxiety attack. We had several doctors on our show, an internist, a plastic surgeon, a heart doctor, a psychologist, and the one that I spoke to was the psychologist. The reason being is that I never get sick, at least nothing that reach the level of appendicitis. As i spoke to him, he did say go to the hospital to get checked out. That was day one and I didn’t go. The pain persisted and my friend came to check on me around day three. One night I had to use the bathroom and while I was sitting there, I felt myself about to pass out and sure enough, I passed out. I woke up to a white light but it’s not what you think, my head landed in a white mop bucket and I just missed hitting my head on the bathroom counter. By day four I called another friend and told him my plight. It was late, after 10 p.m., and I didn’t want to bother him but my mind said to do this. He came to get me and while he was arriving, I literally crawled on all fours and crawled into the bathtub to take a shower and crawled back out again. He took me to the hospital and after 10 hours of preliminary exams, the doctor came to me and said that it looks like your appendix may have exploded and he pressed my stomach. I immediately registered pain and he did it again. Yeah, that hurt like a motherfucker. I was rolled into surgery and the gutted my open like a fish. Every organ inside my body had turned black, sepsis. I was told that I had only 30 minutes of live left and that nobody has ever lived for 4 days on a burst appendix.

the second pain is one that I’ve been living with my entire life but never knew what it was until last year. I found out that I have scoliosis, a curvature of the spine. When I was younger, this condition could have been treated but a doctor who saw me never ordered any X-rays following a gymnastic injury I sustained. I was paralyzed for a day but for some reason this doctor never ordered X-rays, the dick. So now this pain, that I thought was something else, has migrated into another condition called lumbar stenosis. The pain is in my lower back and it migrates down moth legs to the ankles. It also has reduced my ability to walk, stand and sit. There has been no medication that can stop the pain and I’ve been living with it. I do not want to take any pain medications that would damage my kidneys and get me hooked on them. I horse kicked me one time and the nurse tried to give me Valium. I told her she could keep that pill.

In comparing the two pains, it’s two types of pain. I’ve been told by women that a ruptured appendix is worst than childbirth but I don’t have that perspective. Four days of pain at the level in which I endured was an experience that could have had another outcome. Spinal pain and the nerve damage it’s exacting is another pain. It effects every aspect of your life. You limit yourself, you isolate yourself, you don’t want other people around you, you’re constantly angry because of the pain. I blew up at the therapist because I was mad at the doctor who didn’t order an X-ray at the time and now I have a condition that can’t be corrected because of his negligence. What can you do? You can’t stay mad forever.

Bobbie L. Washington

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