I know about pain. I have endometriosis, I’ve had a broken back and have been run over by a train. If anybody knows what 10 is on the one-to-10 pain scale, it’s me! But the pain of broken bones and torn ligaments heal and I felt better quickly.
The pain of endometriosis is nothing like that. This ache, this always-present gnawing, is the pain that makes me feel bad. No painkiller puts me in a happy mood with this pain. No bliss overcomes me. No drug can stop the nausea once it arrives. Only stillness helps. But stillness is so hard. I’ve felt 10 and I can tell you, this pain is worse.
Women outnumber men when it comes to chronic pain. There’s a two-to-sixfold greater prevalence and greater intensity of chronic pain syndromes in women compared to men. In fact, the International Association for the Study of Pain notes that women generally experience more recurrent, more severe and longer-lasting pain than men.
A Dutch study on pain in children showed that the difference in experience of pain between the sexes started from a young age; while in the first three years of life, boys experience marginally more pain than girls, then between four and seven years of age girls start to outnumber boys.