Sorry if I'm being weird: I just had a migraine

Are women really built for pain?

I’m six hours into the aftermath of a migraine. It’s my second this year - a lot for me (my mate P, who gets one a week, would think me amateurish). I’ve had ‘em since late teenage, though I didn’t identify them for a decade. I just thought that’s what headaches were: stabby brain assaults foul enough to shut you in a darkened room for a night. In my late 20s, the lights started - the “aura”, vision-disrupting sparklers on my peripheries, twisty turny trippy zig zaggy prisms criss-crossing my line of sight - and I finally understood.

Mine are sparked by: stress, flying, drinking a smidge too much wine on a hot night (three-and-a-half glasses, when I should have stopped at three n a bit). They last for seven and a half cringy, squirmy, pain-wracked hours, generally finish with me being sick - migraine’s dramatic pukey finale.

They’re shape shifters: sometimes, they’ll come with a side order of room spins, sometimes they’re pure brain-muddling, reality-warping head pain, sometimes, they’re all nausea, baby! They’re very particular, there’s a specific beat to them, a trajectory; they exist on their own trippy spectrum of oddness - like drugs, but mean. Mean, mean drugs. They leave me listless, knackered, relieved; hollowed out by the vanishing violence.

That’s me, right now.

Did you know women are three and a quarter times more likely to get migraines than men? Bet you knew it instinctively, even if you didn’t have the raw facts. It’s presumed to be partly hormonal, partly a consequence of what the (wonderful) University of Edinburgh’s Professor Andrew Horne, the country’s leading expert on endometriosis – the debilitating menstrual cycle-related illness the broadcaster Emma Barnett spoke about recently – calls “the chronification of pain”. I interviewed him for the book I’m working on, on women’s bodies. He explained that, because women experience so much more pain than men in the course of our lives - from bogstandard period pain, on – that alone can damage the biological and neural systems in us which process pain, making us more sensitive to it, giving us yet more pain. This, Professor Horne says, is precisely why women should ask for help, far earlier, and far more often, than we do. “I often feel,” he told me, “with the women I see: ‘How have you coped with this? How have you put up with it, for so long?’ I think women are very accepting of pain.”

I met a bloke at a party recently (not in that way! In a caj, chatty way!), who said: “Well, women are built for pain, aren’t you?” He meant it as a compliment, I think; certainly as a given. It’s the go-to perspective of the ages, isn’t it? This idea women endure pain better - because we are supposed to feel pain. Pain is our destiny! Our biological reason d’etre is get pregnant and give birth, both of which involve pain, ergo: the experience of pain, all pain, even pain which has nothing to do with babies, like migraine pain, is somewhat fundamental to who and what women are! And anyway: what were we expecting, with our hormones? Pain is pretty much our fault! It’s certainly ours to slog on through, without complaint. I’m pretty sure women have internalised this, I know I have. Know my jumping off point on pain is, if I think it isn’t going to kill me, I’ll get on with it.

But let’s think about what that actually means. Think about baby girls having the expectation of a lifetime of pain “acceptance” thrust upon them. Think about that recent report into birth trauma, which found that 30,000 women a year develop PTSD after giving birth - a contributing factor to their inadequate treatment must surely be: “Pain’s the gig, love! What did you think was going to happen?” Think about the terrible underfunding in research into women’s health (and pain), think about Neurofen’s 2023 study into the Gender Pain Gap between men and women - which showed it to be getting worse (which means it can’t even be just about our hormones - because they haven’t changed). Think about Professor Horne’s “chronification of pain”, the idea acute pain, only begets more pain. Then tell me again that women are “built for pain”. That because (some of us) give birth, which hurts, we need to resign ourselves to all other pain - like it’s practise! Like we’re somehow training up for child-bearing, with, I dunno: fibromyalgia, migraines.

So screw that. Enough. For the first time: I’m calling a professional about my migraines. I’m asking for help. Maybe society hasn’t had enough of the idea women are “better” at pain, that pain endurance is written into our specifications, like we’re cars and pain is our crash test… But I’m not going to play my teeny tiny part in that nasty game anymore.