American Pie: Pain
John Merchant tries to externalise the way he is feeling after a recent knee-joint replacement by writing about the illogicality of pain.
I’m trying to write about pain because I’m in pain and need to find a way to externalize the way I’m feeling. Pain is so illogical. It serves no purpose. I have heard it said that pain is nature’s way of telling us that something is wrong. That being the case, the logical extension of that theory is that we should be able to respond remedially to the signal.
Certainly, if we touch something hot, the pain stimulates a reaction to withdraw. But since pain has been around as long as we have as a species, I find it hard to believe that before the advent of modern medicine, mankind would be capable of doing anything about most internal pain, except suffer.
The intensity of pain is irrationally linked to its cause. A paper cut is quite painful, but the cause is of little consequence. Anyone who has experienced the sheer intensity of migraine headaches could hardly be expected to believe there was nothing life-threatening in its origins, yet such is the case. Conversely, many patients with even large brain tumors experience no pain at all.
Pain is at once graphically tangible and nebulous. Enlightened, contemporary medical care places much emphasis on pain management, and on not allowing patients to suffer unnecessarily. In the four weeks that I have been living with significant levels of pain, following a knee-joint replacement, I have probably been asked 15 or 20 times by a nurse or doctor to quantify the level of my pain on scale of one to ten. Each time I have wanted to say 10, but my intuition tells me that there is unimaginably more intense pain than anything I am experiencing. So I settle for 5 or 6.
Pain embodies fear, and, anecdotally, I would say that fear intensifies pain and makes it more difficult to endure. A toothache can be excruciating, but not as difficult to deal with as, say, angina, because one knows that it isn’t life-threatening and easily can be remedied. Angina, or undiagnosed abdominal pain, is more difficult to live with because of what our fearful imagination tells us might be the outcome.
If there is a message for us at all in pain, it is telling us to stop doing whatever it is that makes the pain worse. Yet modern physical and occupational therapy says to us that we have to be willing to cause ourselves pain in order to recover mobility and range-of-motion. I accept that on one level, but it’s a daily psychological struggle to suppress my instincts for self preservation.
Pain seems to have no dimension, yet I think it would be easier to portray pictorially than in words. Edvard Munch’s picture “The Scream,” perfectly expresses the way I feel at this moment, yet I could not put it into words.
It is incomprehensible to me how the very sick deal with chronic, intense pain. As I look into the faces of such sufferers, I see what they are feeling; the endlessness of it, its constant presence, the draining of their mental and physical resources. My heart goes out to them and I fervently hope I never have to go down that road.
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John can be contacted at wordworks@hvc.rr.com
