Gold Star in Pain
When I first read Tara Westover’s memoir about being raised in a very conservative version of Mormonism in Educated, I didn’t think we had much in common. My father was a university professor (at the college Tara later went to) and he valued education highly—perhaps too highly. But the one way in which her father and mine were similar is in their suspicion of the medical establishment.
My father almost never went to a doctor, and when he had a heart attack for the first time, he checked himself out of the hospital in a foreign country and spent weeks studying about stress, cholesterol and diet, before he got surgery on his heart—and then promptly refused to take the cholesterol medications the doctors prescribed him. He was firmly convinced he knew better than the “medical establishment” did. There was something of a conspiracy theorist in him. He was convinced that most drugs aren’t necessary and that it was just about getting patients to pay money to a system.
Of course, there is a financial incentive in our medical system. I won’t deny that. But I imbibed my father’s distrust of doctors, hospitals and medicine so thoroughly that I refused to go to the hospital for childbirth and chose to stay home when I could (one emergency hospital transport in there). I thought I was being different from my father, and in a certain way he may have encouraged my sense of rebellion by begging me to let him have an ambulance standing by while I was in labor (I didn’t ever let him do this). I hung onto this idea that the pain of childbirth was “natural” and “healthy” and that avoiding it somehow would lead to bad moral consequences.
One of my father’s last visits to the hospital, after he’d had open heart surgery to replace stents that were by then twenty-odd years old, the doctor came in to try to convince him to take a series of medications, including a statin.
“And why do you want me to take that?” my father asked.
[My brother in the background, began shaking his head in despair. He knew what was coming.]
“To lower your cholesterol,” the doctor said.
“And what is my cholesterol right now?” my father, who had been on a radical whole foods vegan diet for two decades, asked.
The doctor flipped through the paperwork. “It’s—uh, 88.”
“What would you like it to be at?” my father asked.
The doctor was confused and tried to tell my father he should take the medication anyway, but she’d lost all credibility at that point, and my brother struggled for the last few months of my father’s life to get him to take anything the doctor had prescribed because of this mistake.
This week, I had to get an emergency root canal done. Because it was an emergency, I didn’t see my regular dentist, who has known me for twenty years. The substitute dentist and I briefly argued about the medication I should be taking afterward. I wanted the option of some prescription opioids, and he was insistent that Tylenol and Advil would be plenty. My experience of my own body was sufficient for me to know that I experience really intense dental pain, but I had to wait several days to talk to my regular dentist about the problem.
When he had numbed me up again, adjusted my bite, and talked to me about the level of pain I was in, he gave me a new written prescription for medication. But far more importantly, he gave me a gentle lecture about what pain medication is for.
“You need to stay on top of the pain. If you’re always in pain and just barely catching up, you’re going to be constantly on the edge. We don’t want that for you. We want you to have almost no pain, so take the pain meds on a schedule. Watch the schedule and take the new meds even if you have no pain. Don’t wait for the pain to hit to take the meds because then there will be a nasty lag.”
Indeed, I’d been waiting until the pain was bad enough that I thought I “deserved” to take the pain meds. And then it took an hour or two to be able to function (or sleep again).
This gentle nudge was like a bolt of lightning. I hadn’t realized until that moment that I’ve been involved in a kind of pain Olympics for my entire life, trying to win a gold star for enduring the most pain. Maybe I should have more medals on my walls than I currently have for races I’ve been in. But it’s obvious to me that the main reason that I do so well at endurance races like Ironman triathlons and ultra marathons is that I have a very high pain threshold. But why I feel like I have to prove this (to myself) again and again, I don’t know except for being raised in an environment where I watched my father always refuse to take pain meds and congratulate himself on that, while my mother took her meds and my father seemed to look down on her fot it.
He was in a pain Olympics, and I wanted his approval, so I joined in. Even when he directly told me he didn’t want me to be in the pain Olympics I was engaging in, I was still busy proving myself.
No more. I’ve been a good little girl, taking my meds every four hours on schedule. And guess what? I’ve been more functional than I was when I wasn’t doing that. And no one is counting the pills that I’m leaving in the bottle to give me a gold star. No one.