It’s a Saturday night and I’m Googling, for the millionth time, whether chronic migraines count as a chronic pain condition. This particular migraine has been raging at my temples for three days. I’ve given up trying to medicate and instead sit inside with the curtains drawn, watching TV with my sunglasses on. My partner urges me to call the GP again, but I know the answer I’ll receive.
The reason for my obsessive Googling isn’t to find a solution, it’s to simply stop feeling like an imposter. Chronic pain is invisible, it is intangible to the rest of the world – when I become incapacitated under a haze of agony for multiple days a month, how do I explain to others that I’m not being dramatic, that what I feel is real. Since I was fourteen, I’ve spoken to the GP more times than I can count on both hands. “It’s your period, it’s because you clench your jaw, just try to not stress,” – they all say.
I can’t help but wonder if I’d have the same dismissive treatment from the doctor if I wasn’t a woman. As very succinctly put by Fleabag (2016-2019) “women are born with pain built in”, but this doesn’t mean we should be expected to grin and bear it. Ultimately, as my best friend once solemnly explained to me, there is no getting rid of chronic pain. It is just that; chronic.
I often joke that my body hates itself, it feels like my insides were built incorrectly. Globally, women disproportionately experience chronic pain. This is due to various social factors: women are expected to endure suffering far better due to our biological roles, our periods, and abilities to give birth are unfairly viewed as experiences preparing us for other forms of pain. Much of medical research has accounted for male bodies, from seatbelt safety tests to the creation of the Body Mass Index scale. Consequently, women’s pain has not been effectively researched, we have not accounted for our differences.
Headaches and migraines are two-three times more prevalent in women than men. The research and treatment gap widens even further when we account for health conditions only suffered by biological women, like PMDD, PCOS, and endometriosis. Women are 25% less likely to receive pain relief in all medical sectors.
I write this in the middle of a flare up, afraid that when I wake up tomorrow the pain will still be there.
I have felt this gap in treatment for pain management many times before, as I’ve begged doctors to help me find a solution that doesn’t involve taking so many Ibuprofen that I end up with acid reflux. Time and time again, I am told that I’m high functioning, that I can manage this pain adequately. But what if I don’t want to learn to live with pain?
Chronic pain is incredibly isolating. There’s a distinct level of self-blame involved; it’s far easier to believe that our personal lifestyle choices are the cause of our conditions than to believe we have no control over our bodies. It is entirely hopeful to believe that by drinking more water and taking my vitamins my migraines could abate, it is entirely terrifying to believe that my migraines are chronic and inevitable. I lose autonomy through my body’s inability to conform. Through this self-blame, we deny the pain to our loved ones and remain shut inside to cope alone. Human instincts are wired to be repelled by signs of disease, it is a survival skill that has been strung through our brains since the first signs of life. Due to this, we hide our suffering from others in fear of being rejected by the pack.
It was Virginia Woolf that determined that illness is a “spiritual change” and Susan Sontag that called the body a “fortress”. Since the beginning of literature, women have been pondering what it means for our bodies to be compromised. I write this in the middle of a flare up, afraid that when I wake up tomorrow the pain will still be there. Our society is not designed for people who suffer from chronic pain conditions, it values consistent efficiency and asks that we are relentlessly contactable; physical weaknesses are relegated to laziness and a lack of motivation. I reject this, I reject the crushing anxiety that chronic pain brings,and I reject the shadows that we cast across chronic pain.
Women are being failed; we are being brutalised by a medical reluctance to be taken seriously – chronic pain is difficult enough to live with, but it is even more hopeless when you must constantly question whether your condition would be different, treated differently, if you were the opposite sex. The personal is political; pain is political, but it’s in the safety of our homes we need to remember that chronic pain doesn’t make a person irredeemably incompetent or unlovable.
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