Pain- Its not that painful after all!

Meeting childhood friends is always one of the most awesome experiences of life, even if it is on a daily basis. And meeting after a year or so! Well, words can’t describe..

So, I met one of my bestest friend after almost a year. There was doe like shine in her eyes and skin with the radiant glow. Dude! She has completed almost eight months of her pregnancy. But the things have changed, we used to discuss the story or movie characters and how our respective favorite stars had played the characters. And now we discuss how the one who is not even born would turn out to be like one of them. (Though, I wish to have a niece, who grows up to be like me.)

Despite being fat, she looked gorgeous. I was so happy to see her like this. But one thing really bothered me. She used to be a person who would cry in pain on the sting of a stupid needle. How would she bear the labor pain?

Unable to control, I finally asked her “Aren’t you scared?”

“Scared of?”, she asked.

“The labor pain.”

“Pains no longer scare me. I have learned to deal with pain.”, she said.

“How?”

“Remember what you told me, I came to see you, when you had met with that road accident?”

(Ohh yes! I usually don’t forget. Even if all that I had talked about, was an absolute crap.)

Almost a year back, I had an accident that tore a part of my muscle, had stitches, a ripped toenail, and some bruises here and there. It was dead painful, but thankfully the docs gave me the injection and medicines to relieve the pain. In the bed rest period, I had nothing much, to do, other than watch movies and surf the net.

And as the legend says, ‘only those things come in front of your eyes that are in the back of your mind’ (Don’t bother about where this legend comes from, it’s my original). The pain was in the back of my mind. So the movie that I got to see was – The Fault in Our Stars; and the most catchy dialogue that I found in the movie was “That’s the thing about pain, it demands to be felt”(when there were a couple of even better lines in the movie). While changing the channels on TV also, the advertisement that caught my attention was of a pain relief gel that has a tagline “Dard me bhi kuch baat hai” (There is something special about pain). And when I ask my best friend (read: Google), about how to not think about pain, it redirected me to a poem – ‘The Mystery of Pain’ by Emily Dickson. Finally, my brother also gave me a lecture, on how we girls cry over pain so much.

She had come to see me some days after I returned from the hospital. She was the only one who could actually feel the pain of my wounds. It was evident from her scared eyes. “Shhh! It must be really painful”, she said, inspecting my injuries. Though it wasn’t actually that painful, I had taken the painkillers after all.

But, I had to be a stud. I had to prove that I belong to a race higher than all you homo-sapiens. So I told her (under the influence of all that I had seen or read about recently), “yes, it is painful.”

“But what is a pain, it’s just another feeling, like the ones we get through our other sensory organs i.e. our eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and skin. We see something beautiful; we admire it and get mesmerized. However, if there is something ugly in front of us, we are ridiculed by it. We feel better, eating something yummy rather than something yuck. But all these; the things we see, hear, taste, smell, or touch are simply senses till the time they touch our sensory organs. Later, it is our brain that decides whether that feeling is good or bad. For example, sweet is just a taste; I find it fabulous, whereas you dislike it. Why is there a difference in preference for the same taste? It is because my mind tells me that sweet is the best taste, and your mind tells you to dislike it. Same is the case with pain as well. It is just another feeling. We find it bad because our mind that keeps telling us to dislike it. And, like us, our mind can also be trained, not to dislike the pain. And once we are able to do that, we would be able to feel the pain just like any other touch. Maybe like the cold breeze we love to feel on our face on a windy day in autumn or the warm sun-rays in winters. Trust me, all we need to do is focus on the feel rather than thinking about whether it is good or bad. I do the same and see, I am not crying with the pain”

I now remember, she got too carried away by what I had told her. She had taken it seriously. But it’s amazing for me how I helped, at least, one person in my lifetime, in dealing with the biggest nightmare ‘The Pain’, and how I made it ‘not so painful’ for her. This is despite the fact, that after she went and; inspired by my own speech, I decided not to take the pain-killers and rather feel the pain, but it was unbearable. I had to resort to medicines. If not me, at least, it helped someone. I am so happy.

But wait! What if at the time of labor, she starts focusing on how the pain feels, instead of pushing the baby…..

Ohh God!

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