Learn From It

The features of a face effaced,
Denial of self, annihilated
Expurgation requires choice: moot.
Nihilism comes to the rescue until you realize: why bother?

Agnosticism, Gnosticism, mysticism, truisms, chrism and jism are all just fluttering fancies when Real Pain arrives. Here at SFGH, they present a scale of pain, 1 to 10 to assess your condition. They ask this every time they take vitals or administer meds. I've read about this practice. It's quite effective, the sort of relativism built into it is subjective, yet externally observable. 1 is pain-free. 10 is the worst pain you can imagine. So perhaps for a teenager, his 10 might actually be a mother's 6.

Today I answered, during a fit of another trouble-spot in this whole recovery thing: 9+. See, the worst pain I could imagine, when I thought about it, was something I couldn't possibly imagine. Pain is one of those things you can rank from what you remember, not assign from what you imagine.

I couldn't rightly say “ten”.

Several years ago, I injured my left shoulder and my right deltoid on separate occasions during lifting weights. A torn this or a ripped that or a strained whatever, each spot was a point of pain during motion, but just a tiny little point. Soreness. Right there. Right theeeere. The kind of thing that makes you put down the weights and call it a day, and wait through that day to see if the soreness resolves itself. Seven days later, all is well and you go do your shoulders workout again, right on schedule.

I am not a lithe specimen by any stretch of the imagination or the muscles, so I can't claim that my range of motion was ever stellar, but over the years, as parts bulked out and reclaimed the space around them, my range got narrower and narrower. And I got used to it.

When they brought me in to the Trauma 1 unit here at SFGH, the needed to take pictures (x-rays) from all angles, including the side where I impacted the park car's tire. Already huffing along with at least 5mg of morphine in my system, I moved my left arm up and over my head, going beyond my typical range by a good bit. I felt the strain, but that's all...and it was only for a second or two, I supposed.

For the first three days here, I had Dolores here, the Magic Button, the Fun Pump at my disposal and managed my own pain with the press of a button no closer than 20 minutes apart.

When they took Dolores away (and no fewer than three nurses asked me if I knew she was going away and looked at me like I had made Sophie's own choice, nodding and consoling and grieving for me), details both internal an external filled in...like putting your glasses on, or seeing HDTV after watching regular TV. I could feel where exactly the chest tube was inside me and after doing some of my own anatomical mapping, could know what layers of skin and muscle and other connective tissue the tube punctured in order to get where it needed to go and do what it was supposed to do.

I could also feel real textures again, catch breezes in the follicles of all those leg hairs and chest hairs (we're real casual here at the SFGH), see more details in the building across the courtyard. And, I could feel a curious soreness in a single point on my left shoulder in the vicinity of where pec meets delt meets trap. Ut-oh.

The soreness was now a point of pain, though flashy and inconsistent. Transient.

It blossomed, later that day into a point of pain that had spiked runners going down my left arm, scattering across my back and cleating their way across the back of my head. Gooooo team!

By today, the pain would return, full force, and stay. No more transience. More like intransigent in its insistance that it was here to stay. Now, 10 seconds isn't a long time—usually. Eight seconds, in bull-riding, is forever and the end. Ten seconds in abject-pain time is Timeless.

Real pain isn't a social creature. It insists on owning the limelight, the stage, the theater, as much of the material universe it can get its hands on. It doesn't require an audience and, in fact, the bodies of the audience are just more raw material for the transfiguration that pain like this brings.

In other words: approaching-10 pain doesn't leave enough of you out to observe exactly how bad this is.

The worst physical pain of my 41+ years occurred this morning and about 30 minutes after it, it started up again. This time there was some 'break through' medicine (some oral form of morphine or other opiate) in my system. It makes me thuddingly dull, and when the pain came back I was suddenly very very alert. I felt like I was in the middle of a firefight, or a martial arts match. The thrust of pain (send pain!) and the parry and block of the medicine (this synapse is now off limits, mister!) made me shudder a little. Ok, a lot.

And this was when the phone rang and it was my brother. I needed to talk to him because I'd shown him mostly the sharper edges of my impatience and frustration the last time I'd talked to him and I wanted to explain that I wasn't doing such a good job of managing things.

I explained to him all of the reasons why I was so curt and abrupt the last time (without telling him my condition, at least for a while) and then immediately found myself telling him that I had to hang up because it was difficult to hold a phone without the pain returning. He understood, of course, because he's that kind of terrific guy. But I stayed on, and explained the pain to him, and what it feels like and why it might be happening. Until I couldn't stand it anymore. Then I said goodbye and told him I loved him and he returned the favor.

I wanted to cry when the call was done, but crying was beside the point, a drop in the ocean of what was going on inside me. Futility, anger, helplessness...those were more powerful. I never wanted to give up on anything before, but there I was, ready to whore out the better angels of my nature to anyone who could give me a respite, however short it might be.

Now the pain is being managed better—one drug to quiesce neural activity (a so-called “anti-convulsive”) and the oral opiate as a fall-back. I'm also on 'round-the-clock vicodin.

When I see online ads seeking pain, when I see gay men (and all other groups and subgroups) see pain as pleasure, either in the administering of it or the receiving of it, it feels now like a cartoon. Like comparing Monty Python's dead parrot routine to Death Itself.

I'm not criticizing those who seek pain, but I can't help but think that what they're really seeking is hurt. Real pain doesn't leave you anything to remember or appreciate. Hurt is something you can savor over and over again, perhaps aligning it with parts of yourself that you've deemed deserving of it.

But no, even with this new experience, I don't know a 10. When sometime down the road I look back at my life, I hope that these episodes will have been my 10s, but only because I'm remembering something I survived and not imagining something worse.

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