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

[Spice_Weasel]

@RivkahChaya

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 don’t have labor to compare it to, but my infected gall bladder/gall stones were hands down the worst pain I’ve ever endured. I vomited 11 times in 9 hours, just pure bile, and spent most of the time begging for death. That experience is not even anywhere in the neighborhood of anything else I have ever been through (endometriosis, knee surgery, etc.) I remember coming out of the OR just full of relief because the post-surgery pain was nothing by comparison.

And I remember the doc just looking at me grimly, saying, ''It’ll bring a grown man to his knees."

[Baker]

My urologist once said he’d had female patients who’d borne children tell him that the stones were worse.

[Spice_Weasel]

@Baker

My urologist once said he’d had female patients who’d borne children tell him that the stones were worse.

I think eclectic wench makes a good point here, in that there is really no fruition to gall stone/kidney stone pain. It’s just pain. Whereas with labor pain, you’re actually working toward something, well, productive. Just based on what I know about human suffering (“he who has a why can bear almost any how”), childbirth is a pretty huge ‘why.’ Gallstones, not so much.

ETA: We might also keep in mind that the body releases hormones following childbirth that are specifically designed to make you forget how much childbirth sucks.

[Baker]

I do remember a similar thread, that I can’t find now, in which one poster popped in to say how her sister, while in labor, started passing a stone! :eek:

I never had kids, but if that had happened to me I’d tell the doctor “Give me drugs, I’ll bond with the kid tomorrow!”

[puzzlegal]

I’ve birthed two babies without drugs, and the pain of childbirth varies enormously depending on the details of the delivery. One wasn’t much worse than bad intestinal cramps, and the other (an undiagnosed breech delivery) hurt enough that I remember thinking “now I know how people can die from pain”.

But the hormones or something from pregnancy dulls the memory of the pain. So the two incidents of pain that I remember more clearly are a broken bone (I spent the night fantasizing about cutting off my arm, and only restrained myself because I knew that would actually make the pain worse) and the time I removed a bandage from a just-beginning-to-heal wound on my fingertip. That time, I nearly passed out from pain, and did drop to the floor. I didn’t rise to finish cleaning and re-bandaging the wound for several minutes, because the pain was that overwhelming.

Oh – I can’t speak to kidney stones, but my mother says passing gall stones feels very much like delivering a baby, except that you get pauses between contractions with the delivery, and not with the stones.