Ouch

Note: Mom, you might want to skip this one.

For some reason, I am reluctant to say that I live with chronic pain. I honestly don't know exactly why. Some sort of weird stoicism, perhaps. Maybe I don't want to say it out loud, as it were, and thus confer upon it a tangible reality and power. I know that I feel as though the amount of pain I have on a daily basis is relatively mild, and therefore don't want to whine about it too much. Then there is the fact that the fatigue I feel as a result of the arthritis affects my life much more than the pain does.

Or, at least it did. I have had a hell of a couple of months battling my body. And losing. Losing badly. As I've alluded to in a couple of the previous posts, I had an appendectomy a couple of days after Mother's Day, which was much more painful than I imagined. Even worse, the recovery was also more painful than I imagined, and lasted much longer, or at least seemed like it lasted much longer than I had imagined it would. I guess that it was only a couple of weeks, just like the Dr. said it would be, but it felt like a really, really long two weeks.

So, there was that. Surgery is a bitch, and I'd never had surgery before, so it came as a bit of a shock. But, what the hell, in the grand scheme of things, what's a few weeks? It came, it went. No real big deal, except, perhaps, to Natasha, who had to take care of me and both of the kids.

We went camping the first week in June, and I remember that although I had almost phased out the pain killers, I did take a couple that weekend during the trip, I suppose because camping is a bit of work, at least physically. In any case, the appendectomy was basically behind me. Unfortunately, what lay ahead was the worst arthritic flare up I've ever had

It started on that Sunday night, after we got back from camping, and I can see by looking it up on a calendar that it was June 8^th. It began just as it has on other occasions, with swelling and a fairly sharp pain on the top of the left foot, from the little bony point to where the leg starts. There must be some joint in there that seems particularly menacing to my immune system. Forces get mobilized, and by means of the miracle of immunological effectiveness and efficiency, the menacing invaders are repelled without prejudice.

Or, they would be if they were actually invaders. In fact, it's actually just one of the hundreds of joints connecting two bones in my body. Just trying to do its job. Doing a decent job of it, too, as far as I can tell. A clear cut case of immunological brutality. A vicious, and unwarranted attack on a poor little joint working hard and playing by the rules. What can you do, though? That thin white (blood cell) line cannot be broken, at least not without leaving yourself vulnerable to actual attacks from real menacing interlopers.

I limped around for those first few days, in a fair amount of pain, perhaps equivalent, but not necessarily noticeably more intense that some other flare ups in the past. A few days later, though, it worsened.

The pain spread, and intensified. The self-styled keepers of my health and well-being apparently deemed it prudent and necessary to enjoin in the battle joints adjacent to the original in a line up to and including the big toe. They also redoubled the concentration of their efforts, with a corresponding increase in the amount of swelling, and a resulting amplification of the pain.

Walking became almost impossible, and I was returned to status of invalid, laying on the couch, and in need of help for basically everything and anything. I hopped to the bathroom, but that was about it. The only help I was able to give to Natasha was to let Lupe sleep on me. I tried to help with Ruby by engaging her, but was pretty bad at it owing in part to the painkillers I was now back on and in part to the general grouchiness brought on by the constant pain. The low point came one evening as I lay on the couch, trying to get comfortable.

I couldn't. And what created the fulcrum in my mind upon which the idea of the pain could leverage itself into multifarious incarnations, was this; I was forced to confront the fact that the reason I was having such difficulty was because the weight of the quite light fleece blanket was enough to cause an excruciating amount of pain to shoot through my body, like a lightning strike directly into the pain centers in my brain. I almost started crying, but not from the pain itself.

Not that this was the most painful moment, or was in some other way the necessarily emblematic moment. Perhaps it was just the most ridiculous moment. In any case, it was the moment.

The moment upon which was born a newfound depth of understanding of the beast of chronic pain. The frustration. The helplessness. The hopelessness. The distraction. The, well, the pain.

I would guess that it was June 14^th or 15^th when this occurred, and it's now July 10^th. My Father's Day post recounts getting the killer steroid medication, which made it quite a bit better, but I am still limping slightly, and I still feel a really sharp, red hot needle stabbing kind of thing in my big toe if I bend it too much.

So, I feel like I've had a little taste of both a bout of intense pain as well as some lesser nagging pain in the course of the last few months. I would have said, before these last few months, that I couldn’t imagine having to live with real, long lasting chronic pain. But now, I think that I can imagine it. I can’t yet say that I feel as though I have truly experienced it, but I think that I now have glimpsed enough to have an inkling of what it might be like, if not for others, at least what it might be like for me.

It seems the easy way out, somehow, to talk about it in standard metaphors; it's like being adrift in the ocean, fighting to stay above water; it's like walking endlessly across the scorching sands of the desert; it's as though I am falling through a tunnel, a fading light glowing in inverse intensity to the pain itself.

But it feels nothing like any of these. It feels anti-poetic. Above all else, it feels. For someone who has so steadfastly lived a life inside his own head, this is a strange irony. I know that the pain is a result of the nerve signals that travel through my body causing a corresponding reaction within my brain, which in turn creates the sensations that I experience. I know that studies show that placebos are surprisingly effective in suppressing pain, and that even more interestingly, covertly administered morphine is far less effective than when the patient knows they are getting it. I know that this implies that, regardless of the signals sent to the brain, that pain is generated in and lives in the head.

So, here, is the strange irony; the pain is one of the few experiences capable of taking me outside of my head, and forcing me into the moment, into the experience itself. This sounds like a wonderfully zen-like gift of awareness, of being in the moment. The problem, of course, is that the moment is filled with pain. It actually feels like distraction, yet it isn't. I am distracted from the ability to think about the experience, but I am by no means distracted from experiencing the moment itself. To the contrary.

In my lifelong quest (or at least my adult life) to get out of my head and into the world, to actually experience the world, this is jolts me there. Fantastic. Perhaps I was better off in my head. Or, at least I was until conspired with my immune system in an awful, and awfully devastating alliance against me.

Not that I am complaining too much. It really wasn't all that great in my head lo these many years, what with the existential angst and such. This is worse in it's way, sure, but it could also be so much more worse. And in addition to being a bit player in Ruby's World, I have the opportunity to really bond with the super smiley boy laid out before me as I embark on the paternity leave.