(no subject)

[kradeelav]

"Pain is a very real thing to the person experiencing it. Those who haven’t felt a similar level of pain to the person suffering from pain can have trouble empathizing. In fact, there was no blood or visible damage to my body when I broke my knee – one could have also possibly concluded I was making it all up. After all, the experience is entirely within my own reality, and not those of the observers. However, I found out that during surgery I was injected with Fentanyl, a potent opioid pain killer, in addition to Propofol, an anesthetic. I asked a surgeon friend of mine why they needed to put opioids in me even though I was unconscious. Apparently, even if am unconscious, the body has autonomous physiological responses to pain, such as increased bleeding, which can complicate surgery, hence the application of Fentanyl. Fentanyl is fast-acting, and wears off quickly – an effect I experienced first-hand. Upon coming out of the operation room, I felt surprisingly good. One might almost say amazing. I shouldn’t have, but that’s how powerful Fentanyl is. I had a six-inch incision cut into me and my kneecap had two holes drilled through it and sutures woven into my quads, and I still felt amazing." (...)

" Finally, after bit over forty years, I now understand why some women on their period take naps. A period is something completely outside of my personal physical experience, yet every partner I’ve loved has had to struggle with it once a month. I’d sometimes ask them to try and explain to me the sensation, so I could develop more empathy toward their experience and thereby be more supportive. However, none of them told me was how exhausting it is to cope with chronic pain, even with the support of mild painkillers. I knew they would sometimes become tired and need a nap, but I had always assumed it was more a metabolic phenomenon related to the energetic expense of supporting the flow of menses. But even without a flow of blood from my knee, just coping with a modest amount of continuous pain for hours a day is simply exhausting. It’s something as a male I couldn’t appreciate until I had gone through this healing process, and I’m thankful now that I have a more intuitive understanding of what roughly half of humanity experiences once a month."

- On Overcoming Pain, bunnie's blog

(I ran into this blog post on a totally different rabbit hole trail from the Orange Site, to hardware hacking, to the author's experience on working with engineering/privacy solutions with Snowden himself, and was really struck at the level of honest empathy and insight in this whole post. It's rare I see a post-surgery post as brazenly open and transparent and approachable in an engineering sense, and wanted to archive at least part of it here.)