I’ve spent over a decade in the army where you’re taught to pride yourself into “embracing the suck” and the whole “pain is all in your head” mentality. I have now taken a different career path and realized that this kind of mentality is only useful in very specific cases and is otherwise very bad. But to this day I still tend to downplay and hide my problems/pain whenever things are wrong.
That nearly got me killed a year ago when I showed up at the ER with pulmonary embolism (likely caused by a COVID infection) and the doctor dismissed it because I didn’t look in pain enough for it to be that. The doctor sent me home untreated. It would have likely killed me had I not returned the day after to see another doctor who luckily took me seriously and got me a CT scan that revealed the problem.
Something similar happened to my dad. His “ignore the pain education” came from growing up on a very conservative family farm in the 50s and early 60s rather than from the military, but the result was about the same.
One day, he rang up his GP complaining that his chest “hurt a little bit”. His doctor, knowing how much pain he would have to be in to ever mention it to others told him to get to the nearest hospital immediately.
My dad did so, (DRIVING HIMSELF) and sure enough, his heart was so clogged up that he needed an emergency quadruple bypass.
If he’d had said the same thing to a doctor who didn’t know him and his insanely high learned pain threshold, or followed his initial instinct of not complaining , he would have died home alone at only 50.
Instead, he celebrated his 73rd birthday with friends and family a little over 6 months ago because he went against his son of a farmer “training”.
I’ve spent over a decade in the army where you’re taught to pride yourself into “embracing the suck” and the whole “pain is all in your head” mentality. I have now taken a different career path and realized that this kind of mentality is only useful in very specific cases and is otherwise very bad. But to this day I still tend to downplay and hide my problems/pain whenever things are wrong.
That nearly got me killed a year ago when I showed up at the ER with pulmonary embolism (likely caused by a COVID infection) and the doctor dismissed it because I didn’t look in pain enough for it to be that. The doctor sent me home untreated. It would have likely killed me had I not returned the day after to see another doctor who luckily took me seriously and got me a CT scan that revealed the problem.
Something similar happened to my dad. His “ignore the pain education” came from growing up on a very conservative family farm in the 50s and early 60s rather than from the military, but the result was about the same.
One day, he rang up his GP complaining that his chest “hurt a little bit”. His doctor, knowing how much pain he would have to be in to ever mention it to others told him to get to the nearest hospital immediately.
My dad did so, (DRIVING HIMSELF) and sure enough, his heart was so clogged up that he needed an emergency quadruple bypass.
If he’d had said the same thing to a doctor who didn’t know him and his insanely high learned pain threshold, or followed his initial instinct of not complaining , he would have died home alone at only 50.
Instead, he celebrated his 73rd birthday with friends and family a little over 6 months ago because he went against his son of a farmer “training”.