On Bad Pain

We masochists are generally thought to be people who enjoy pain, and it stops at that. Someone very close to me once said something to the effect of, “lots of kinky things are just fine, but not masochism, that’s unhealthy.” (She didn’t know I was a masochist.) Dictionary.com’s first definition of masochism is, “the condition in which sexual gratification depends on suffering, physical pain, and humiliation.” Which, um, bullshit. The other definitions aren’t any better. I enjoy K causing me certain types of pain, but I no more depend on pain for sexual gratification than I depend on wearing pretty lingerie, receiving oral sex, or doing it doggie style. Enjoying something sexually does not mean dependence on it. And I don’t enjoy “suffering” one bit.

I’ve had a lot of time to think about pain in the past two weeks. Last Monday night, I got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. I failed to sit on the toilet, and instead collapsed on the floor. Something had happened to the lower left side of my back. I couldn’t get up. K describes me as screaming in pain — it’s a bit of a blur to me, I just remember the agony. He had to call an ambulance. The paramedics took a while figuring out how to move me from the bathroom doorway; I warned them that if they simply picked me up, I would likely faint from the pain. (They also saw a lot of sex toys that were out — something that didn’t embarrass me at all at the time, because I was too busy crying and wishing someone would knock me out, but in retrospect I wonder what they talked about once they got off work.)

I was given a bed in the hospital emergency room next to a woman who needed stitches since she had been punched by her daughter’s boyfriend. I felt immensely sorry for myself — pain that rates “ebola” on the Hyperbole and a Half pain scale will do that. (Well, okay, I was probably more at “being mauled by a bear”.) But I was thankful that my life did not involve anyone who hurt me physically. I felt grateful for K. I wasn’t exactly forgetting that he does “hurt” me semi-regularly; it’s more that the pain he gives me is good pain, so it didn’t even register in my mind as similar to what the woman who needed stitches was feeling, or what I was feeling at that moment.

When the woman and her son stopped talking, I realized I was completely alone. A curtain was drawn between us. No one came to check on me; I couldn’t distract myself from the pain, and I started to sob again. I tried to stop myself, because crying exacerbated the pain, but I couldn’t. The Advil I had taken, which had kept a little of the pain at bay, wore off. I would have done anything to make that pain stop. It has given me a new standard of what pain is — curled up on the bathroom floor because my menstrual cramps are so terrible rates about a 2 on this scale, for which the pain I felt was a 10, if it could even be rated.

K had followed the ambulance in our car, and had arrived the same time I and the paramedics did. But it took a long time for the people behind the front desk to tell him where I was, because I wasn’t entered into the computer right away. I don’t know how long I was alone, wishing for him desperately, wishing anyone would come over and say a kind word to me. “Forever” doesn’t seem plausible, and yet that’s how it feels. Part of me is still lying on that cot, unable to move, in pain more intense than I had known was possible, crying and alone.

Obviously it ended. I’m sitting at home, at my computer, with back and leg pain that is endurable. I’ve been in pain for the past two weeks, but I know now that it will end, and probably pretty soon.

The first few days after it happened, I was taking strong drugs, and had no sexual feelings at all. But then my libido came back, and with it my fantasies. I’ve fantasized about all the same kinds of sexual things I always do, romantic and otherwise, but with one difference: I have had no masochistic fantasies. I don’t feel a thrill when K takes off his belt. I think of our floggers with indifference. A spanking sounds like no fun at all.

I believe my masochism will return, but I don’t know how long it will take. Maybe as soon as my pain is entirely gone, I’ll be eager for a flogging. For now, though, my pain circuits have been overloaded.

After the shots and painkiller the doctor had ordered for me started to work, she came back and said, “ah, you look like a human being now.”  Bad pain erases everything but itself. Good pain makes me feel whole, proud, happy. K will help me feel good pain again, someday.