Standard pain relief just didn’t work for me

Aliza pressed the small button again. And again. The nurses had assured her this would bring pain relief during labor, so why, twenty minutes later, did she feel no reprieve? When she complained, the medical staff exchanged skeptical glances.

“You’re getting enough painkiller to sedate a 300-pound man,” one nurse finally snapped. “This should be working.”

But it wasn’t working. Just like the Tylenol and Excedrin hadn’t worked when she was a child with splitting headaches, ear infections, or sore throats. Just like every pain medication she’d ever taken had failed her, leaving her parents doubtful and doctors questioning her honesty.

They stared at her, and Aliza felt the dread of a familiar scenario unfolding.

Take Some Tylenol

The pattern began early. As a young elementary-age girl, Aliza would come to her mother with the familiar complaint: “My head hurts.”

The maternal response was equally familiar: “Take some Tylenol, sweetheart.”

But the Tylenol never helped. Neither did the Excedrin, or any other over-the-counter remedy that filled medicine cabinets across America (Advil and Motrin caused her acid reflux, so Aliza didn’t even try to use it). While other children found relief from all the sickness-inducing germs that circulated freely around the neighborhood, Aliza learned to endure.

“As a kid, I battled headaches with cold packs, and high fevers with long showers,” she says grimly. Her allies against pain were few.

When her pediatrician prescribed medication for strep or an ear infection, and she protested that she needed something for the pain, she was directed to over-the-counter remedies. “It doesn’t work!” she told her doctor, frustrated that he didn’t understand.

She only met a dismissive reassurance: “Of course it works. That’s what these medications do.”

The doctor’s confidence was unshakeable. After all, Aliza was talking about proven medications with decades of successful use. The problem, he implied, was probably her. Was Aliza taking her Tylenol correctly? Or maybe she had unrealistic expectations about pain relief?

Gradually, Aliza learned to keep her concerns to herself. Unconsciously trapped in a medical mystery, the young girl spent years feeling like a weakling with an extremely low pain tolerance, and the lonely sensation of being a misfit. No one seemed to understand. Her body was a fortress, weathering all the regular storms of a childhood marked by occasional bouts of illness — but with nothing to take away the pain.