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Respect a Woman's Pain
Kidney stones are tough. Try living with an autoimmune disease
My friend's doctor said the pain of passing a kidney stone can match the pain of childbirth. I stayed over and slept on Jimmy's couch the night his stone passed through his urinary system.
He thought he would die. I thought I'd call 911.
Talk about agony, geez — not his, mine. Listening to him moan in the bathroom, wiping his forehead, trying to make him comfortable — it was exhausting. Finally, he slammed the bathroom door and screamed. I jumped up to get more pain medication, but then I heard him laugh. I was alarmed, thinking that pain pushed Jimmy into madness, but then he opened the door with a little screened strainer in his hand and showed me a sharp little crystalline shard. "That tiny thing was ripping up your skinny little ureters, Jimmy? Ouch!" I said. "Imagine what it's like to have an eight-pound baby pass through your system."
After that, he had a new respect for women.
Men get kidney stones about four times as much as women, and women get pregnant much more than men do (ah-ha, check out this pregnant man art-hoax), but did you know that one in nine women suffer from autoimmune diseases? I'm talking lupus, multiple sclerosis, type 1 diabetes, Graves' disease, vasculitis, myasthenia gravis, connective tissue diseases, and autoimmune Addison's disease. Need I name some more?
I probably should. Because even though about 24 million Americans are suffering from an autoimmune disease according to an excerpt on AltNet of Donna Jackson Nakazawa's book, The Autoimmune Epidemic, most Americans cannot name an autoimmune disease.
Okay, so we've got vitiligo, rheumatoid arthritis, hemolytic anemia, celiac disease, and scleroderma, too. And fibromyalgia, Crohn's disease, Hashimoto's disease, ankylosing spondylitis.
He thought he would die. I thought I'd call 911.
Talk about agony, geez — not his, mine. Listening to him moan in the bathroom, wiping his forehead, trying to make him comfortable — it was exhausting. Finally, he slammed the bathroom door and screamed. I jumped up to get more pain medication, but then I heard him laugh. I was alarmed, thinking that pain pushed Jimmy into madness, but then he opened the door with a little screened strainer in his hand and showed me a sharp little crystalline shard. "That tiny thing was ripping up your skinny little ureters, Jimmy? Ouch!" I said. "Imagine what it's like to have an eight-pound baby pass through your system."
After that, he had a new respect for women.
Men get kidney stones about four times as much as women, and women get pregnant much more than men do (ah-ha, check out this pregnant man art-hoax), but did you know that one in nine women suffer from autoimmune diseases? I'm talking lupus, multiple sclerosis, type 1 diabetes, Graves' disease, vasculitis, myasthenia gravis, connective tissue diseases, and autoimmune Addison's disease. Need I name some more?
I probably should. Because even though about 24 million Americans are suffering from an autoimmune disease according to an excerpt on AltNet of Donna Jackson Nakazawa's book, The Autoimmune Epidemic, most Americans cannot name an autoimmune disease.
Okay, so we've got vitiligo, rheumatoid arthritis, hemolytic anemia, celiac disease, and scleroderma, too. And fibromyalgia, Crohn's disease, Hashimoto's disease, ankylosing spondylitis.
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