Comment by pcthrowaway

Worth mentioning in these threads is that pain is a very personal experience. No two people experience pain the same way. We must have respect for each others' experiences of pain, because we don't know what it is like for them.

It's senseless to compare experiences of pain between people. Unless it's like "a pinprick" vs. "crushed by a motorcycle" or other obviously extreme contrasts.

>> When I had tonsillitis, the pain was so intense and so persistent until the 3rd day of antibiotics, I was tempted to just throw myself off a bridge to make it stop. Had I been under the impression there was no way to make it stop in a few days, I suspect I would have.

Easy to say, harder to do. The will to live is probably stronger than you realise. I experienced a short 2 week painful illness and felt similar to you. I later experienced the same thing for 2 years. You adapt and learn to cope.

About 30% of people who end up with my particular illness, do kill themselves in the first five years. Not that severity of pain makes sense person-to-person. Pain is personal. The worst pain is the worst pain you've ever felt, and it's never surprising if you do something about that. (Your worst pain... Was yours. Is yours. Don't try and compare it. No one else entirely gets what yours was like.)

However, if you do survive the first five years... You become unlikely to suicide out of it. You've learnt to live in it.

I think the stats on that are fairly similar to endo, from what little research that there is. If you can make it past the first few years of everyone ignoring you and calling you weak, and telling you to suck it up, you are now better prepared to deal with the daily mental siege.

(Though you are under siege. And sometimes those walls do collapse, and you're broken again. You can't necessarily take on more, just become you're stronger - you're stronger but you're spending all the extra effort just to stay alive.)

But to end on a completely different note, that can make a few people stare: I'm in pain in my dreams, too. I don't remember what it's like without.