Perspectives on Pain

As I write this, my dear friend Stacie is either a mother--or damn close to becoming one. When she called me just before noon, the doctors had broken her water and given her an epidural and she was dilated and having contractions--all terms that have only become familiar to me in the last several months as I've heard them from my friends, my sister and my step sister-in-law (who just had her third!).
Apparently, the confluence of all these events indicate that Stacie's baby was about ready to come out and face the world--even if her mother just wanted a nap (she'd only gotten two hours of sleep last night). Stacie's doctor predicted she'd have a new baby within eight hours. That was seven and a half hours ago.
In the meantime, I told Stacie I'd call some of our other friends with the update while she tried to get in the last few hours of uninterrupted sleep she'll have for a long, long time.
When I called Joy to check in and let her know about Stacie's impending motherhood she sounded a bit muffled. I asked what was up. Turns out she got electrocuted at the dentist's office this morning! Q: What's worse than getting a root canal? A: Getting an electric shock to your gum when the wiring in a dental instrument misfunctions. Worse, her mouth--or at least her mood--was in such bad shape after the experience that she had to reschedule the filling she was there to get.
But hearing that Stacie was in labor, she says, helped put things in perspective. On a scale of 1 to 10--with a torture scene choreographed by Quentin Tarantino rating a 10--we agreed giving birth would rank slightly higher than an unintentional gum frying, if only because of the time element. Labor can last for several hours (more than 24 in the case of one good friend, who has actually blacked out entire hours of the experience in her memory) while an electrocution--though it carries a higher risk of death--usually lasts just a few seconds.
If the past is any indication, I should be well equipped for giving birth (though I've also learned from past experience and anecdotal evidence, that having an epidural is probably not a bad idea regardless). I seem to have a higher threshold for pain than some. A few beers and I didn't feel a thing when I got the tattoo just above my hip. The most painful part of getting a tattoo was the amount of money it cost to get it removed once I sobered up. But I endured the 10 laser treatments to remove same tattoo without any numbing cream, just a couple minutes with an ice pack beforehand (which, I'll admit, may be more reflective of my impatience to just get the damn thing off than of my tolerance for pain).
I once had surgery on my ear while I was conscious, a decision that meant enduring more than a dozen shots of local anesthesia. That was pretty unpleasant, I'll admit, but it was the tugging and snipping of my ear that really creeped me out. (I had to have some extra cartilage removed from my ear lobe and figured I'd save a few bucks by opting for local anesthesia. Note to readers: if you're going to skimp somewhere, anesthesia is not the place to do it.) Another time, I was accompanying a friend of mine to get his belly pierced. And then I decided, on the spur of the moment, to do it myself. After my friend watched me go through it, he chickened out.
But I had a relatively pain free day today. My husband, meanwhile, figures he got into at least 10 to 12 fights this afternoon. Amazingly, he walked away with hardly a scratch, though his right thumb is jammed and slightly swollen and he has bruises on his forearms and shins. That's because Victor's fights occurred at his karate dojo under the watchful eyes of an instructor, who usually stops the fights before there's any blood. Though I watched a video once with Victor called "Fighting Black Kings" that captured some training sessions at the dojo in the mid-1970s before a world tournament in Japan. In one particularly bad fight, a student took an accidental blow to the nose (punches and kicks to the front of the face are prohibited--even in full-contact fights) and started bleeding all over his once-white gi. But Victor assures me that is the exception. He is a first-degree black belt and goes to "fight class" almost every Saturday. The worst injury he's sustained in more than six years happened last summer (fortunately, a week after I added him to my health insurance) when he broke three toes during a fight--painful, yes, but the sort of injury even non-karate practitioners can get. Albeit, it sounds a lot better to say you broke your toes kicking a black-belt oppponent during a fight than kicking a jammed door, as I did my senior year in college. Trust me.