I Currently Have Pain From A Cramp

Why do my period cramps feel like labor pain?

Medical professionals please feel free to correct me where I’m wrong, but I think I have the correct high-level gist at least.Well, they basically are contractions.When your body decides that its current uterine lining won’t be used, it wants to get rid of it. The way your body does this is by releasing a hormone (FSH) that stimulates your smooth muscles*.Some of these smooth muscles are found in your lady business area, and the FSH stimulates the smooth muscle in the myometrium layer of the uterine wall to make regular contractions that will push the unused lining out (think about squeezing a washcloth).And yes, the same muscles make the contractions used to push babies out of the same place.Speaking of painful contractions…Unfortunately, smooth muscles also occur elsewhere in the body. Like your intestines. The hormone isn’t always terribly specific, you see, so it can incidentally stimulate contractions in, say, your intestines.Now, we have tiny contractions going on in your intestines all the time, pushing your food along the tubes as part of the digestive process. But the extra push from the FSH can make the contractions a bit unruly and painful. These are our cramps.This is also why women often get diarrhea along with their periods, because the contractions are pushing the contents of the intestines out to the bowel before the digestive process is finished with them.* Your body has three kinds of muscle:Striated muscle, which is the kind we think of as muscles. The meaty bits on your legs and arms etc. that we consciously use to move around.Smooth muscle, which is found on the inside of you in the walls of most of the organs that stuff needs to move through, like your intestines, bladder, blood vessels, etc. Your body sends out signals to these muscles to make them contract in waves to move their contents along (peristalsis).Heart muscle, which is so special and important it gets to be its own category.

I have sharp pain and cramping under my rib cage immediately after I eat. What’s wrong with me?

“I have sharp pain and cramping under my rib cage immediately after I eat. What’s wrong with me?”Hi, what’s wrong with you is that you’re having a symptom and you’re asking a bunch of random strangers to tell you what’s causing it. If you want a responsible and helpful answer, go see a freakin’ doctor, that’s what they’re for! :-)Generally speaking: nobody, including doctors, can diagnose a medical problem from just a one-liner description of a symptom. You might think that “cramping under the rib cage” and “immediately after I eat” are enough detail for someone to determine the problem, but that is not true.For postprandial epigastric pain (that’s medical-speak for the symptom you describe), I can tell you that the textbook or “med school answer” top considerations would include (1) biliary colic (i.e. typically — though not necessarily — gallstones) and (2) a gastric ulcer. Chronic pancreatitis is also something one might think of. But — am I saying that it’s probably one of those two (or three) things? No! I can’t say that, and nobody else can either, because there’s not enough information in your question. (And you actually can’t really volunteer “enough information” — the information a doctor needs comes from asking questions systematically, doing a physical exam, and oftentimes obtaining various kinds of tests, like lab tests and imaging exams).What may surprise you is that I actually have absolutely no idea if those 2–3 things I mentioned are truly, statistically, the most common causes of postprandial epigastric pain, and most likely your doctor has no idea either, unless maybe if they happen to be a gastroenterologist (a digestive system specialist).But that doesn’t matter, because what your doctor actually needs to know is how to figure out what is causing this symptom in you. The symptom you describe can be caused by literally dozens of possibilities, not just the few that I mentioned.So, go see a doctor. Cheers! :-)