Although this blog is dedicated to the discussion and exploration of matters prostate and urological it isn't going to be all doom and gloom. Somehow after going through many years of 'suffering' I now find myself hell bent on discovering the humour in that - toilet humour perhaps - of which there must be plenty. If I didn't I suppose I'd become a miserable and resentful glass-half-empty kind of bastard - which I'm not. I'm a half-glass-full'er (subtle different) That's the best I can do given my complex urination constraints.
However there's no avoiding the subject of physical pain and it will weave in and out of other topics in this blog. It has been a constant in my life - and no doubt most people's with prostate complications so I have lots to say on the subject. It's an interesting subject to boot.
SOLDIERS 11
When I was a kid I had a box of plastic medieval soldiers with which I played in the sand pit with my neighbour JK. Pointed helmets, heraldic banners, flowing uniform, big shields and very cool chainmail.
With these we'd spend hours acting out ferocious imaginary battles. In our mind's eye as we twisted and turned our little plastic men between finger tips there was much screaming, clashing of swords, spear throwing and breaching of imaginary castle walls.
It was chaos, bloody mayhem and suffering. Valiant soldiers were run through or decapitated. Skulls were smashed to bits with bludgeons. Limbs were chopped clean off with axes. There was no limit to the savagery in our vivid imaginations!
During these battles I often wondered what it would be like to have your arm chopped off at the shoulder - LIKE - WHAT SORT OF AMAZING PAIN MUST THAT BE JK!!? With no experience to go on we hadn't a clue so we once tried to find out by deliberately cutting each other. A small 'nick' from a penknife was all we could manage and it was all we needed!! The resulting few drops of blood sealed our understanding of inflicted pain. My God those men went through hell.
I brought that fascination with pain in to my adult life. Since then when I get a knock or an injury I often still refer back to those impressionable childhood days when I learned the concept of battle field pain from invoking the ghosts of men who'd lived and died many hundreds of years before.
Before connecting to my own experience of pee-pain I want to dwell a bit on what pain is and how it affects us, so here's the sciencey bit ....
According to the British Pain Society pain is ....
"An unpleasand sensory and emotional experience associated with, or resembling that associated with, actual or potential tissue damage." They go on to say 'Pain is always a personal experience that is influenced to varying degrees by biological, psychological, and social factors - and - "Through their life experiences, individuals learn the concept of pain."
In layman's terms this means - pain isn't one thing, it's a feeling, an experience, an understanding, a shitty sensation of the body causing a negative emotional reaction. We learn how to experience pain and that varies from person to person.
There are five medical categories of pain. These are:
* Acute pain
* Chronic pain
* Neuropathic pain
* Nociceptive pain
* Radicular pain
Of these five only two - ACUTE and CHRONIC - refer to the perisisence or longevity of the pain. Acute pain is a pain of relatively short duration that normally goes away when the body heals the associated wound - like after a fall or with toothache. Chronic pain is pain that isn't specific to an injury, doesn't go away and carries on continually for more than 3 months resisting treatment with drugs.
How can we understand how painful a pain is?
The answer to that is simple - we can't. No one can adequately describe or quantify a level of pain - theirs or anyone else's. People have different pain thresholds - some low, some high. There's no scientific measure for it.
Our body 'gives us' pain to alert us to the need to look after some aspect of our health. Its like a fire alarm. It occurs for many different reasons. An injury like a fall or a cut brings pain but so does a hidden ailment - flu or a pulled muscle - or a disease like malaria. According to the UK's National Health Service the 20 most painful CONDITIONS are:
Source - (https://www.physicianpartnersofamerica.com/health-news/pain-management/nhs-list-of-worst-possible-pain-experiences/ )
This NHS list has been widely shared through other reputable medical and news outlets so one assumes it has as stated the weight of research behind it. Other internet sources list cancer as another of the most painful conditions - that seems to be a no-brainer and seemingly a big oversight by the NHS.
I would also include man flu in that list of painful conditions. I know that for some strange reason only men get it but I've had it a good few times and it's always indescribably and unquantifiably awful! Women are so fortunate to be immune to it. 😉
In terms of acute and acutely painful experiences I'd put Chinese wrist burns, a dead arm, a kick in the balls, waterboarding and being lifted by the scruff of your neck by your sadist maths teacher JT at the top of my own list titled 'PLEASE GOD - NEVER AGAIN!'
After much trawling of the internet I can't find one medical or non-medical source that includes 'benign prostatic hyperplasia' in its list of most painful conditions - nor even an article that focuses on the pain that accompanies condition. This surprises and concerns me because I have been through the satanic pee mills and I know just what depths I have gone to - and on a scale of one to ten it's way WAY beyond 11!
Could it just be that I have a very low pain threshold and that in the whole world of men with enlarged prostate conditions only I have had this experience? How do I even go about finding that out? Perhaps reactions to this blog will help me to do so. Fingers and legs crossed for that.
S-O-C-R-A-T-E-S
SOCRATES is a mnemonic acronym used by emergency medical services, physicians, nurses, and other health professionals to evaluate the nature of pain that a patient is experiencing. In terms of the severity of the pain however it still has no system for calculating the level of pain.
SOCRATES pain evaluation
I reckon there are only two ways to know that someone is in the most severe pain they can take.
The first is if the sufferer is highly distressed and begs to be allowed to die - crying out "I can't take anymore. I beg you please put me out of my misery .... kill me right now!"
The second is if the sufferer falls unconscious, their nervous system being unable to take the sensory overload.
The pain of childbirth is often used as the measure for the worst pain and without a doubt that pain must be extraordinary - pushing an object the size of a bowling ball out through a reluctant but expandable 3 inch opening - I'm so glad I'm a man!
Of her experience of childbirth my friend GM said:
"The morning I experienced my first induced labour there was a woman screaming very loudly in the room next door. It really sounded like she was being tortured. I asked my obstetrician why? He smiled and said “You’re going to find out shortly!”.
Over the course of the next 16 hours I did find out!
Thankfully the cry of a healthy baby helps to dull the memory of labour pain. So I went back to be tortured on 3 more occasions. The next 2 deliveries were sheer agony.
For my fourth delivery I went the C-section route deciding that a pain free delivery would be much better for me. However this time the little bugger wouldn’t come out. A scheduled C-section turned into an emergency C-section and it took 45 minutes of pushing and pulling to get him out.
Twenty years on the leg press at my gym brings me straight back to those laborious times."
I really feel GM's pain ... well not really but on a scale of 1 - 10 I get the feeling she was ticking the 11 box - depending of course on the pain relief drugs flowing through her body at the time. Maybe she was just floating around with the fairies in la-la land!
Epidural ain relief is often used during childbirth so it must be a pretty bad trip - sometimes literally unbearable. However even some women who've been through the experience say they've been through worse with much more mundane conditions - broken bones, migraine headaches and root canal treatment. (See - https://www.verywellfamily.com/things-that-hurt-worse-than-childbirth-2759379#:~:text=And%20almost%20every%20pain%20you,may%20not%20be%20for%20another)
So childbirth isn't the right measure for levels of pain - they vary too much from one delivery to another.
I think the only truly reliable indicator of literally unbearable pain is the loss of consciousness. After all who can really tell how much pain someone who's asking to be killed is actually in? They may just have had a really bad day at the office!
However when your mind reaches the point where it just can't take any more of what the body is giving it and shuts down - that surely is the definition of full-on unbearable pain - the mother of all pain - the painmeister - the paindemic - the painy dreadful.
TO BE CONTINUED ....
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