A question only women can answer [labor pain vs kidney stone and other pain]

In My Humble Opinion
21

I’m male, so never had labor. I have had gout bouts and kidney stones, and I’ll take the gout over the stone everyday and twice on Sunday, thank you. My description of the pain, for those who want to know, is a rusty diesel Mad-Max chainsaw at full speed jammed into you lower abdomen/groin area for anywhere from two weeks to a month. In a bad attack, literally all you can do, even with medication, is to lie on your side in a fetal position, breathing slowly and gasping, with an occasional whine thrown in for good measure.

However, to semi-hijack the thread, has anyone considered the Australian box jellyfish on the pain scale? From what I read…:eek::eek::eek::eek::eek:

22

I’ve had kidney stones twice, but not experienced labor. Two women I know who have had both did say that the stones were more painful. One of them was my aunt who was about 80 when she had the stones, so it’s certainly possible she wasn’t really remembering how much pain she experienced during childbirth.

I want to point out though that it’s possible* to have kidney stones and not experience any real pain. My first episode I was the woman huddled into a ball in the corner of the ER, keening and moaning. The second time – stones in both kidneys, two noninvasive outpatient surgeries and an invasive surgery that had me in the hospital for 5 days – I had only occasional minor back pain that I assumed was muscular and that my urologist said might indeed have been muscular. The stone in my right kidney was obstructing and the CT scan showed that kidney to be at least a third larger than my left kidney.

  • Strictly speaking, all kidney stones are pain-free until they move or grow enough to obstruct the flow of urine from the kidney. You could easily have stones right now and not know it. I was unusual in that one of the stones was obstructing – most of the medical folks I encountered were dumbfounded that I had no pain, but my nephrologist said that if the stone forms in any area that obstructs and the obstruction happens over time the patient may not experience pain. I feel fortunate that a CT scan for an unrelated issue showed the stones – I could have been in danger of losing the kidney if the condition had persisted until I actually experienced symptoms.
23

I have a really bad migraine today. It wasn’t on the OP’s list, but holy shit this sucks. I have migraines every day, but some days are worse than others. I’m going to go curl up in the dark and whimper.

24

Chiming in to confirm that kidney stones are far worse than childbirth, the former from observation, the latter from experience. I have never seen anyone in as much pain as my husband was from a kidney stone attack. This is a guy who will rarely take an aspirin or ibuprofen, gasping in pain and begging for pain meds, turned white as a sheet. For myself, I never needed pain medicine for either of my full-term deliveries.

25

The thing with childbirth is that its temporary, rhythmic (you get a breather between contractions, they’ll give you sufficient drugs, and you get a reward at the end.

Headaches can be pretty horrible - I can get simultaneous tension and migraine headaches - one will set off the other and they’ll feed each other.

My aunt worked in a burn ward - third degree burns over a large part of your body - or electrical burns - it hurts so much they put you in a coma.

But everyone handles pain differently - and everyone has a different experience with labor.

26

I have had 3 kids (including a 9lb 12 oz’er) and I have had lots of kidney stones. The worst for me was being in labor with the last 2 but because of the stone. You can ride the contractions but since they were squeezing my left kidney the pain was absolutely excruciating.

I didn’t know I had a stone until about 5 years after my last was born. By that time it involved my whole kidney. After multiple surgeries (ESWL and laser) my left kidney is now operating at 15-16%.

I was “lucky” that when passing the stones from the ESWL I had a nice stent in place which kept the exiting stone masses from ripping me up. The biggest stone I passed was the size of half of a pea … I think it came from one of my lobes.

Then I had the fun a few years later of passing a nice sized stone while at the ER. I had an hour wait until I was medicated. The nurse was looking at me funny because all I was doing was breathing (Lamaze). As soon as the catscan came back they gave me morphine. Again she thought I was strange because it took so much before it took effect (I’m almost a redhead but after having lived with pain for so long… I guess I have a high pain threshold and pain drug resistance). There was also a saline drip going. That, I guess, put enough liquid into me that I managed to pass the stone (it was big enough to make a “clang” sound when it hit the bottom of the toilet.)

I went from mind numbing pain to instant relief. Then the tech/doctor who did the catscan asked me about my kidney and if I knew it was shriveling up. That started me on a few more years of tests, surgeries and now I am on a daily dose of Nitrofurantoin to keep the slivers of stones left from growing back (infection stones … kind of like having coral growing in your kidney). There’s a fingernail tip’s worth left in one of the lobes… so they couldn’t get it out w/o cutting me open.

Nowadays they don’t recommend doing ESWL on stones bigger than 2mm. Because, yeah, it destroys the kidney.

So I would say… stones are worse.

27

I was in labor for 27 hour with the boychik. Most of the were medicated, but I got to experience the glory of contractions before the anesthesiologist got there, and I got to push for three hours, until he crowned, then got stuck, at which point, the doctor tried two different kinds of forceps, and having forceps inserted into you around a crowning baby’s head is a special kind of pain. It also failed, so then I got to have a c-section.

In addition to this, I have had these:

tonsillectomy as an adult
broken ankle
migraines (one that lasted almost 3 days)
lower back pain that had to be treated with traction and PT
badly sprained knee
horrible UTIs

Here’s the ranking:

  1. migraine
  2. tonsillectomy post-op pain (there are tons of nerve endings in your throat)
  3. having forceps inserted
  4. lower back pain
  5. unmedicated contractions
  6. sprained knee
  7. fractured ankle (YMMV, I’m sure: it was not, for example, an open fracture)
  8. pain from UTI
  9. recovery from c-section

Wow am I glad I’ve never had a kidney stone.

One note about the c-section, is that because of some muscles that need time to heal, you can’t walk right away after a c-section. So in spite of it not being all that painful relative to some other things, it is pretty disabling.

28

Ok, I’m a dude, so I can’t comment on labour. I have had both kidney stones, and gallstones with pancreatitis that resulted in me getting fast-tracked to surgery. The Kidney stones were really bad, but even they weren’t even in the same league as gallstones. Hell, getting curb-stomped and having multiple bones broken was bad, but it wasn’t gallstones bad. Gallstones were by far the most pain I have ever experienced in my life.

For the men talking about getting kicked in the balls … I would have happily taken a baseball bat to the nuts to make that gallstone pain stop. I had one of my testicles bitten once (long story) and that hurt enough that I almost blacked out … still no comparison.

29

My mother had a gall bladder attack that required removal, and I don’t think stones were involved, but she was throwing up, and my father had to carry her to the car to take her to the hospital. She said it was worse than labor, and the recovery was much harder even than from the recovery from having me, where she had an episiotomy.

I bet it’s really a short story you just don’t want to tell.

If the point of this thread is that labor isn’t the worst pain in the world, well, it’s true.

HOWEVER, labor goes on for a long, long time. Labor is exhausting, and the pushing part not only can’t be medicated, but the woman has to be awake. When you are in some kind of other pain, doctors will do everything they can to relieve to to the point of knocking you out so you won’t experience it. That is not an option for the final stage of labor. It’s called “labor” for a reason.

My husband was in a fire, and spent two months in a pediatric burn unit when he was 8 years old. I have no doubt that he suffered way more than I did even with my long, difficult labor, forceps failure, and unplanned c-section (which was an emotional roller-coaster on top of the physical discomfort). He is a very smart man, though, and you can bet that at no time when I was moaning during labor, or complaining about not being able to walk afterwards, did he mention that he spent time in a burn unit.

No man who has been through something really painful should use the experience to play “topper” when his wife is in labor. If he wants to use the experience inside his head to try to sympathize, that’s fine, but a woman is very vulnerable during labor, and the last thing she needs is a man to tell her it could be worse.

30

I’ve had two children in the regular manner, a bout with gallstones somehow initiated by my second pregnancy, and cluster headaches.

I’ll just put it this way. I voluntarily went through childbirth again, would be yelling for the nearest surgeon if I ever had a gall stone again, and would consider pre-emptive action if I ever, ever, had to face a bout of cluster headaches again. Imagine lying on the ground and the largest truck you’ve ever seen parking on your head. It’s the most God-awful pain I’ve ever known.

31

Also remember that not everyone’s labor is long. Both my mother and I had short labors and delivered without difficulty. Both of my deliveries were about 6 hours. Most of the contractions were no big deal, and of course you get an entirely pain-free time between. Combined with the relaxation techniques learned in Lamaze and I honestly have always said it was work (there’s a reason they call it “labor”) but not especially painful. Lots of things – toothaches, sinus infections – were a lot worse.

32

I haven’t experienced labor (and may never, due to an odd uterus), but certainly the worst pain I’ve experienced was when I had acute pancreatitis. Second to that is gallstones. One of my co-workers in a previous job said that one time he’d had gallstones and kidney stones at the same time, and that was by far his worst pain experience.

33

I think I’ve heard spinal taps are pretty bad. Anyone ever have one of those?

34

No, but I’ve heard that the spinal tap itself is like the shot you get from the dentist, to the nth power, and seems to go on forever, and sometimes it’s followed by a headache that is migraine-class.

One thing about having a baby is that everyone is really nice to you. People go way out of their way to try to minimize your discomfort. If you want the temperature in the room turned down to 60’F, the nurses just put on sweaters. If you are demanding that the anesthesiologist get there NOW! no one tells you to be patient, they say they’ll go check (and they might just duck out the door and count to ten, who knows, but at least they don’t tell you to shut up and quit complaining or they’d tell your mom to punish you, which is what my dentist told me when I was eight, and I was freaking out over my first Novocaine shot, and my first drill & fill.

Now, getting a tooth filled is nowhere in the neighborhood of the discomfort of labor (and doesn’t take 30 hours), but it sure helps when everyone is doing their best to make you feel better.

A lot of women who have horrible stories are older women, who remember being alone in labor rooms for hours, with no one but a nurse looking in occasionally, not staying long enough to offer any real assurance, and sometimes another woman in the room behind a curtain, who they couldn’t see, but could hear moaning, and they couldn’t get out of bed, and might either have no pain control, or be in twilight sleep, and having a “bad trip.” There was no TV or radio, and they couldn’t concentrate to read a book. All they could do was think about how much pain they were in.

I’m not a binge TV watcher, but the day I was in labor, there happened to be end to end Law & Orders on. I wasn’t even paying that much attention, but I had them on in the background, and it’s one of my favorite shows. I probably had 12 episodes on in a row. Plus, DH was there. We played cards, we played games on the laptop. The many hours I wasn’t alone went faster than the one hour I happened to be alone because DH went to get something for the camera, and I insisted he get himself breakfast, and it happened that my contractions went from 0 to 60 in about 20 minutes during that hour. I never felt so alone.

35

Have you seen a cardiologist? It’s been discovered in recent years that some people who have chronic daily migraines have heart issues.

36

Never had one of those, or a bone marrow exam, but I’ve heard neither are much fun. The bone marrow test is especially painful because the superficial tissues can be numbed, but the bone marrow cannot, and even though it only hurts for a few seconds, it’s awful (to say the least).

37

Back in those days, they would move women from room to room depending on what stage of labor they were in. My mother mentioned 4 or 5 different rooms from start to finish, except maybe 3 rooms (prep, labor, and delivery) when she had my brother, who was born after a 2 1/2 hour labor.

I’m trying to think of the most painful thing I’ve experienced. My back spasmed one evening when I worked at the grocery store :eek: and even though it only lasted a few seconds, it nearly flattened me, and in the absolute worst place for it to happen.

38

Yeah. By the 1980s, when I was a candy-striper, it was no longer that way. The “birthing room” had appeared in response to patient requests. So I was a;ways amused when a TV show as late as 2000 still had labor and delivery rooms-- mostly for humor, so they could have annoying roommates in labor, and still have private delivery, but it was as outdated a holding the baby by the feet and spanking it.

39

For me, the big difference separating labour pain from any other pain was qualitative, not quantitative. You know when you have an ear infection or something and the pain feels destructive, like something is badly *wrong *in your body? Labour pain wasn’t like that, for me. It was utterly, savagely terrible, but it didn’t feel like something wrong. So even though the labour pain was probably worse than the ear infection in purely quantitative terms, the experience of the ear infection pain felt worse.

I’m gonna go ahead and bet you’re not in Ireland.

40

A spinal tap doesn’t actually hurt. However, the following two weeks where I couldn’t even move my head without vomiting from the pain were pretty bad.