Two Kinds of Pain, Two Kinds of Time

Most nights I’s helping Christa with pre-pregnancy stretches, counting slowly like I’m a physical therapist who learned everything from love and mild panic. She shifts her weight, tries to breathe through it, then that flash hits—shooting, bright, immediate. The kind of pain that doesn’t politely knock. It kicks the door in.

Pregnancy has brought her this acute back pain that arrives like something you can’t predict. She can be fine, mostly fine, and then suddenly she’s not. It’s not “a little sore,” not “tight,” not an inconvenience. It’s an alarm.

I’m there, steadying her, trying to be useful. And while I’m focused on her—her face changing, the small involuntary sounds, the way she goes still—I realize something uncomfortable.

I’m used to pain.

The Background Hum

If someone asks me what my pain feels like, I stall. I reach for metaphors and they slip right through my fingers. It’s not one clean sensation. It’s a field. A texture. A hum that’s been playing so long I sometimes forget it’s music.

Chronic pain is weird like that. It can become part of the layout of your inner life. Not in a noble way. Not in an inspirational way. Just… in a practical way. You adapt. You route around it. You build a day with it in the room, and, eventually, you stop introducing it to people.

That’s the thing I keep noticing: chronic pain can become familiar enough to be almost invisible—until you try to explain it, or until it spikes and reminds you it still has teeth.

The Cruelty of the Spike

Christa’s pain is different. It demands attention every time. It doesn’t let her habituate. It doesn’t let her bargain. Even if it’s “only” a few seconds, it steals the whole moment. And if it comes back again and again, it teaches a particular kind of dread.

Because recurring acute pain doesn’t just hurt in the moment. It reaches forward.

It makes you flinch at the future. It turns ordinary movements into questions. Will standing up do it? Will turning wrong do it? Will laughing too hard do it? It sets traps inside your own body.

Chronic pain wears you down by staying. Acute pain terrifies you by arriving.

That’s why, counterintuitively, acute pain can feel worse in certain ways—especially when it repeats. It doesn’t give your nervous system a chance to normalize. It keeps resetting the clock back to emergency.

What I Can Do

I keep counting. I keep offering my hand like an anchor. Not because it fixes anything, but because it changes the shape of the moment. Pain isolates. Love interrupts the isolation.

After, she exhales and the room returns. And I’m left with the strange clarity of it: my pain is a long sentence I’ve learned to read while walking. Hers is a sudden shout, over and over, that won’t let her hear anything else.

I don’t need to decide which one is “worse.” I just want her to get a break from the shouting. I want her body to feel safe again—if only for a few quiet minutes, while I count and we both pretend, just for a second, that breath is enough.