This article is featured in Body+Soul and is republished with permission.
It was mid-afternoon in the September school holidays. I’d taken my daughter and a friend out for the morning and felt completely normal; it was just a run-of-the-mill kinda day.
Once home, I noticed discomfort in my abdomen. It began gradually, so much so that I assumed it was indigestion, took a couple of antacids and decided to rest. But an hour later, the discomfort had transformed into pain, pain that made it hard to move and one I’d never experienced before.
Still, I waited another hour, assuming it would pass, that it was just one of those random things that happen and then pass as randomly as it seemed to begin.
By 7 pm, when my husband came into the bedroom to find me curled up in the foetal position, I knew two things for sure: the pain wasn’t going to ‘just go away’ and that something wasn’t right, that I needed to go to the hospital.
Despite my gut feeling telling me to head to the emergency room, and despite the pain making it difficult to take a full breath in, the entire drive there, I questioned whether I was doing the right thing.
Am I being overdramatic? Is my pain really that bad? Am I wasting the E.R.’s valuable resources for something that could wait until the next day, when I could see my GP?
Upon reaching the ER’s triage desk, I kept second-guessing myself as I explained my symptoms to the nurse, dismissing them as “probably nothing,” and when she asked me to rate my pain using the pain chart, I told her “about a six.”
At the same time, I was now in excruciating pain, pain so intense that outside of labour and giving birth, it was the worst I had ever experienced.
I was quickly admitted, examined, and again was asked to rate my pain- my response now was seven, and I was quickly given morphine.
Over the next twelve hours, before the cause of my pain was officially identified, despite the pain continuously coming through whenever the medication started to wear off, I never reported pain any higher than a seven. In my eyes, you’d have to be ‘really sick’ or severely injured to be higher.
The next day, a scan indicated that I had appendicitis and needed my appendix removed immediately. Upon delivering the diagnosis, the doctor said, “No wonder you were in pain.”
It was at that moment that I realised what I’d been doing since the pain first started the day before: I minimised my own pain.
While I am far from alone in doing this, the CEO of the Australian Psychological Society, Dr Zena Burgess, says that it is often a response to the broader and serious issue: delegitimising women’s pain.
“Lived experience and emerging research highlight that women are more likely to be challenged about the ‘realness’ of their pain than their male counterparts,” says Burgess.
This can occur sometimes for years, “with a view that their pain is exaggerated and their physical pain is often misattributed to emotional and psychosomatic causes,” she says.
“For instance, middle-aged women with chest pain have been found to wait longer for evaluation for heart attack and were twice as likely to be misdiagnosed with mental ill-health such as anxiety compared to men exhibiting the same symptoms.”
Not only this, but Burgess says women are also less likely to receive adequate pain management compared to men, again despite similar symptoms.
“Another study found that despite girls being more likely to report chronic pain during adolescence, their concerns are also dismissed more often by physicians (35 per cent) compared to boys (17 per cent),” she says.
Minimising, dismissing, or questioning the validity of women’s and girls’ pain and undertreating their pain is a manifestation of longstanding gender bias and medical misogyny, says Burgess, “with two out of three women experiencing discrimination in health care.”
“Rooted in societal stereotypes and systemic inequities that pervade our health care systems, women and girls are portrayed as emotional or dramatic and less capable of handling pain than men, yet paradoxically are undertreated for pain,” she says.
While long-term, chronic pain is often the type being dismissed, it can also occur with other types, and the flow-on effect can be significant.
“Past negative healthcare experiences for women can be traumatising and lead to heightened pain sensitivity, increased anxiety and reduced trust in medical professionals,” says Burgess.
It can also cause women to stop trusting themselves, dismissing their own valid pain or downplaying it. Not only was this something I only realised I did once a ‘real’ cause of the pain had been identified, but for me, it has highlighted how significant and widespread this issue really is- so much so that, like me, many women are unconsciously diminishing their own pain.