From Abortion to Acupuncture

How I learned how much pain I can endure

Brenda Usher-Carpino reflects on what she’s learned about her pain threshold

I broke out into a sweat that poured from every pore. Instantaneously. A flash flood of fight or flight. Respiration bushwhacked and severed. I knew I had to endure. The pain was stunningly acute yet everywhere at the same time. I then understood why two nurses had lingered in the room, each occupying a post on either side of the bed, awaiting a cue about which I was still clueless.

They had taken turns reassuring me that I was going to be just fine. I had thought it odd that each had taken a hand. Pat. Pat. Pat. Rub. Rub. Rub. Words of comfort. Words of consolation. Words of genuine care. They stood by the bed emitting empathy that left me curious yet curiously unconcerned. They stroked my arms, caressed my hands, smoothed my hair and still I had no idea what was about to transpire.

Transpirer, the French verb for to perspire or to sweat. Little did I know that something was about to transpire to cause me to sweat profusely. The good doctor hand-cranked an enormous screwdriver into my pelvic bone. I witnessed the effort it took to penetrate the intact status of my skeletal structure. The topical anesthesia did nothing to quell the quake of searing discomfort. You cannot deaden bone, I had been informed post procedure, only the muscle tissue connected to it. I had no idea why they didn’t put me under. Was it the assumption that Black people can withstand more pain than others?

The bone marrow biopsy would determine whether or not I had middle-age onset leukemia; my white blood cell count was dangerously low. He repeated the procedure to collect a second sample from the other side of the pelvis. I wondered if he was the Devil incarnate—like Josef Mengele or Dr. J. Marion Sims, the “father of modern gynecology” who experimented on enslaved African American women—I wondered if he got vicarious pleasure from inflicting such pain in order to study my case. What must it be like for any human being to be the subject of medical experimentation? Because it still goes on today. On prisoners and many who are held captive by economic and classist forces. Prescription drugs. Mind-altering amphetamines given to children to control their behavior. Clinical trials. A morphing monster like de facto slavery.

A great deal of managing pain is knowing or having some sense of how long it will persist. This is a vital training concept when it comes to exercising. You can control the amount of pain you put yourself through, weighing it against the benefits. Having some sense of duration presupposes seeing a light at the end of the tunnel.

I learned in my Lamaze classes that the average labor is six hours. My neighbor gave birth to her third child one month before I had my first and only. She was in labor for two hours. That was heartening. Knowing that I wouldn’t have to live the rest of my life in such pain, I was able to bear the detonation that racked my bone structure to its marrow, sixteen-and-a-half hours in and out of excruciating, bone-bending pain.

Even the pre-Roe v. Wade abortion I had in 1967 during my junior year at UC Berkeley didn’t prepare me for the pain of true childbirth. Nearly four months along, desperate and deathly afraid of “committing murder” (a fetus—viable or not outside the womb—was considered to be a “human being,” and therefore an abortion would’ve amounted to “infanticide”), my best friend at the time—the kind of “fixer” friend everyone needs—hooked me up with a resource. The off-duty nurse who performed the procedure couldn’t tell me how long it would take after she had sterilized me and inserted the long, rubber-like tube into my uterus. She had said that it would hurt no more than bad menstrual cramps, and I knew what that was like, having endured since the age of eleven excruciating menstrual pain every twenty-one to twenty-four days. I had already been convinced that being a woman was humanity’s greatest curse. The long journey into night and the next morning accompanied and assisted the greatest physical pain I’d experienced up till then.

Pain can be a good thing, signaling when something is wrong—like a fever or an abscess—even if the pain is psychological or psychosomatic, letting us know that something is wrong somewhere and we need to heal. And there is much evidence that the parasitic nature of a fetus is not necessarily a woman’s best friend.

I expected horrific pain in childbirth. My mother had often spoken of how each and every one of her six children had caused as much pain during childbirth as the one before. Her small frame and narrow hips seemed unfit for baby-making. I had also been frightened in my formative years into believing that woman was condemned to painful reproduction because Eve defied God’s command and fed Adam the apple of knowledge. Her act wasn’t recognized as the brilliant gesture it was toward the future of humanity, so, she had to pay for her egregious unveiling of human curiosity. As such she became the primordial scapegoat for sin and evil in the world. Woman. I am woman.

Original curiosity, a sin stolen from woman and given to man as a virtue. Curiosity is the basis of all science and inquiry, and therefore progress. As a transgressor, woman became the primordial scapegoat for sin and evil in the world. Punishment for such transgression was the infliction of pain…in childbirth. Scientifically, there is the hypothesis that we might have evolved too swiftly, nature eager to develop a large-brained organism to dominate over all other species, and the only way to do that was to create a creature with a brain as massive as it could be, yet still pass through the birth canal. This would, indeed, cause pain.

All punishment is pain. Not all pain is punishment. Pain could be an imperfection of evolution working things out on its own without a blueprint. Yet in the biblical way of thinking, pain is punishment. God wields the reins of pain. Punishment and pain. Synonymous. Pain is atonement. I expected pain, to atone for being a woman. The discomfort was so great I wanted never to give birth again! The physical assault remained in my body for weeks, eventually retreating to a quiet place. The emotional experience slowly became a memory, severed ultimately from its cause through the simple passage of time.

Pregnancy and childbirth are a wounding of the female body. The physical, emotional and psychic trauma is real. January 1, 1982, I courted a mild form of postpartum depression, wondering and questioning why I had brought an innocent and helpless being into the world, a world so foreign and dangerous as to require years of physical and intellectual growth for a human to be equipped to deal with the adversarial forces. My selfishness exacerbated an already hovering anxiety and fear of the unknown, the possible, the farfetched, the dreaded. It happened during one of the worst storm-driven winters, one that caused a neighbor’s house to slide down the hill and crash in the glen. A storm that created devastating mudslides and loss of property up the coast and down. It’s a miracle that the majority of us survive to adulthood, a space and place where most will be compelled to repeat the cycle of reproduction to answer the call of the survival of the species.

Just the act of being can cause excruciating pain.

I was standing on the ice having a chat with a fellow skater. Just as we learn to hold our pee or our poo, I had long internalized the technique of standing on ice without falling. To those unfamiliar with ice skating, that might seem like a “duh”. But if all forces of gravity aren’t balanced, down you will go. When speaking of playing the piano well my father used to always say, “In control out of control.” Shoulders loose and fluid, elbows bent with tension (the tension that should have been in my knees when standing on the ice), hands freely supported by wrists enabling the separate articulation of ten fingers. It’s a balancing act.

I relaxed too much on my heels. An awkward jabbing of my elbow into my side as I crashed to the ice. Each night for weeks, the pain of embattled ribs consistently took my breath away as I sought comfort during sleep. Primordial screams of distress accompanied one uncomfortable position after another. Homeopathic medicine proved to be a joke.

Developing sciatica is often an early sign of aging. A set of vertebrae subjected to the pull of gravity over time and the compacting of the spine and therefore a pinching of the nerves. The acupuncturist in the family law attorney’s office I worked for at the time asked me how much pain I could take. I wondered how I should know. I had given birth. I had had a bone marrow biopsy. I had fractured my ribs. My car had rolled over my ankle on its way down the driveway with my four-year-old inside in her car seat. I dislocated my shoulder when swinging with all my might at my older sister’s head and missing—she ducked—after she had taunted me more than I could bear. Twice—as a young girl and as a young mother—I had had a vehicle door slammed shut on my hand, causing me to pass out and an eventual shedding of badly assaulted fingernails. I had had an abortion, one that most people in my life still don’t know about to this day.

Pain sensation is relative. I believed I could take a lot of pain but my ex thought I was a wuss for going under (“passing out”) in the dentist’s chair.

“How much pain can you take?” the acupuncturist asked me.

“In spite of the painful experiences I’ve endured in my lifetime, I don’t have any way of really knowing,” I responded.

My abiding ailment is sciatica in my left buttock and leg. The discomfort often demands that I stand—whether at a concert or a sporting or theatrical event—sometimes for as long as thirty to forty-five minutes or until the pain lessens. Sitting isn’t an option during a flare-up. The good doctor took a needle from somewhere, placed my right hand in his, stuck the needle into the boney sinews on the back of my right hand and began to push-pivot it on an axis. The pain fell short of childbirth pain, bone marrow biopsy pain, and fractured rib pain, but pain it was. Sharp and concentrated. But not enough to concede to it. Maybe I’m just fucking stubborn. My mother always said that was my most salient characteristic. Stubbornness. I also never uttered a sound during childbirth, with my mother encouraging me to “go ahead and scream,” while my OBGYN and then-husband chatted about sports, eyes now and then glancing over at my draped knees.

“I screamed my head off with every last one of y’all. It’s okay,” my mother coaxed me.

I couldn’t.

The acupuncturist looked at me and said, “You have high tolerance for pain.”

Okay, there you go, I thought. Or maybe I’m just stubborn and find the outward expression of searing pain too undignified.

What I do know is, high tolerance or not, pain is an inevitability in life. I’ve been fortunate to have suffered so little compared to others. I’d finally learned how much I could endure in the way we all must: by doing it.

And, no, I didn’t have leukemia.

Brenda Usher-Carpino was born in San Antonio, Texas. She is African American, and she is a lesbian. Her family moved to Berkeley, California, when she was ten years old. She is a multi-genre creative writer. Brenda was married to a White cis male for over twenty-five years and they have one daughter. Much of her creative nonfiction stems from this relationship, in particular, a memoir she is currently crafting. Her play, Blood Types, kicked off this collaboration. Brenda graduated from Berkeley High School, then started college at U.C. Berkeley during the outbreak of the Free Speech Movement, and graduated in 1968 with a B.A. She also holds an M.A. (CSUH/EB), a PhD (Stanford), all in French Lang/Lit; and an MFA (Mills College), in that order. Since her earliest memory, Brenda has been drawn to the craft of writing as a form of personal expression, communication and creativity. She has also been a commercial model/actor, theatrical actor, classical vocalist, and world-class athlete. Brenda is divorced. She currently lives with her daughter and partner, and her 3½ year-old granddaughter