Pain is not the same
I learned a good lesson about an individual's response to pain or trauma. It is very difficult to know what someone else is feeling so it is unwise to make assumptions about their response. Even when we are having the same experience or they are experiencing something that I have gone through before, I cannot make snap judgements without sufficient knowledge.
Once, I was out mowing my lawn when something like lightning struck a finger on my left hand. It is a pain I had experienced before and knew I had been stung. Surely enough I look around and a fog of little demon wasps was swirling behind me. We call them yellow jackets.
Yellow jackets are ground dwelling wasp around here. They are small and very aggressive. A hole in the ground the size of a golf ball is sometimes the only indication that danger lurks there. I have been stung as many as a dozen times in a single encounter. But, on this day, something very different occurred.
This was only one sting on a finger. This should have hurt fiercely for a few minutes and then subsided but it did not. The pain did not go away for hours. I ended up sleeping in a chair that night with my hand in ice water to keep the pain down enough that I could sleep. That had never happened before and hasn't happened since.
Why didn't I go to a doctor? It was a single yellow jacket sting. There was no swelling to speak of. I wasn't having any signs or symptoms of an allergic reaction. What was I, a grown man, going to say? But Doc, it hurts??? I have sanitized and superglued more than one deep cut back together myself rather than going to a doctor.
If one of my children had suffered a yellow jacket sting and was still complaining about it hours later, I would have admonished them. After all, I once had multiple yellow jackets go up my pants leg because I was standing over their hole. Why were they carrying on so about one, little sting?
To this day I do not know why this was so different. Perhaps the stinger triggered a specific nerve? Perhaps it got into a tendon or ligament? I will never know. I do know that something I had been through many times suddenly hit different. There was some variable at play I knew nothing about. But I did learn from it.
I encounter people going through life experiences that I too have gone through. It is tempting to think that I know what they are feeling and can advise them if they are being overly dramatic. After all, I went through it, it hurts, but not that bad.... However, there can be variables at play that I know nothing about. Because I went through the same thing does not mean we will have the same experience.
Likewise, to look at someone else and think that they are handling life better than I am is not a fair assumption. In my mind we have the same experience and they hardly blinked. Are they stronger than me? Or am I just being silly? But, there can be variables at play for you that make the situation more intense than it was for someone else.
We have to constantly assess ourselves and how we are handling stress. We also have others in our lives that we pay attention to and try to be a source of strength. My point is to know more about the situation before we snap to judgement.
Once, I was out mowing my lawn when something like lightning struck a finger on my left hand. It is a pain I had experienced before and knew I had been stung. Surely enough I look around and a fog of little demon wasps was swirling behind me. We call them yellow jackets.
Yellow jackets are ground dwelling wasp around here. They are small and very aggressive. A hole in the ground the size of a golf ball is sometimes the only indication that danger lurks there. I have been stung as many as a dozen times in a single encounter. But, on this day, something very different occurred.
This was only one sting on a finger. This should have hurt fiercely for a few minutes and then subsided but it did not. The pain did not go away for hours. I ended up sleeping in a chair that night with my hand in ice water to keep the pain down enough that I could sleep. That had never happened before and hasn't happened since.
Why didn't I go to a doctor? It was a single yellow jacket sting. There was no swelling to speak of. I wasn't having any signs or symptoms of an allergic reaction. What was I, a grown man, going to say? But Doc, it hurts??? I have sanitized and superglued more than one deep cut back together myself rather than going to a doctor.
If one of my children had suffered a yellow jacket sting and was still complaining about it hours later, I would have admonished them. After all, I once had multiple yellow jackets go up my pants leg because I was standing over their hole. Why were they carrying on so about one, little sting?
To this day I do not know why this was so different. Perhaps the stinger triggered a specific nerve? Perhaps it got into a tendon or ligament? I will never know. I do know that something I had been through many times suddenly hit different. There was some variable at play I knew nothing about. But I did learn from it.
I encounter people going through life experiences that I too have gone through. It is tempting to think that I know what they are feeling and can advise them if they are being overly dramatic. After all, I went through it, it hurts, but not that bad.... However, there can be variables at play that I know nothing about. Because I went through the same thing does not mean we will have the same experience.
Likewise, to look at someone else and think that they are handling life better than I am is not a fair assumption. In my mind we have the same experience and they hardly blinked. Are they stronger than me? Or am I just being silly? But, there can be variables at play for you that make the situation more intense than it was for someone else.
We have to constantly assess ourselves and how we are handling stress. We also have others in our lives that we pay attention to and try to be a source of strength. My point is to know more about the situation before we snap to judgement.
56-60, M
