What is the difference between sackcloth and ashes and chronic pain?
– You can always take a shower and change shirts.
– Nobody knows how many millions of Americans live in constant pain, but a staggering number of people know the basics.
– No fewer than 86 million Americans have visited a doctor at least once seeking relief from pain that lasted for a month or more. That estimate comes from the American Chronic Pain Association (www.theacpa.org).
– Most of the 86 million find cures, of course. But millions of us don’t.
For us, chronic pain accompanies every move we make; it casts a constant pall over our thoughts and actions.
Chronic pain limits even the dreams we dare to dream of finding a cure.
So how many of us hag-ridden chronic pain victims are there? A poll commissioned by drug industry giant Bristol-Meyers Company in 1985 concluded that 21 million Americans had chronic pain.
Today, 16 years later, you can be sure there are more still.
You see us all about you — the arthritic letter carrier; the school teacher out for the week with lupus; the Parkinson’s sufferer who ran the United States Department of Justice; the talk show celebrity hobbled by multiple sclerosis and afflicted by muscle spasms; the guy in the next cubicle who can hardly bear the migraine headaches; the pretty young woman with fibromyalgia; the cancer victim; the waitress with carpal tunnel syndrome; the technology-beat columnist with a metal plate bolted to his spine who “writes” by way of computer voice recognition.
On July 18, 1998, I underwent emergency surgery for a spinal deformity called cervical stenosis that the surgeons said threatened to paralyze my arms and legs without prompt intervention. My spine, which had a kink in it, was straightened by means of a bone graft. A metal plate was screwed into my vertebrae to hold things in place.
It was that or life in a wheelchair.
The various specialists who have filled my life since say that when the pressure was removed from the spinal cord the nerve bundle rebounded violently and was injured. Now my brain tries to sense my hand through nerves in the spinal cord and the injury derails the message from my hand, which causes the brain to assume that an injury has occurred and I feel pain. Unbelievably, the brain never learns that it is being tricked and the pain never stops. Perversely, it gets worse as time passes.
For all of us, chronic pain settles into the mind with the same ruthless finality as does the death of a best friend.
You can’t believe that it has struck. The dead can’t come back and your pain can’t go away.
Ever.
Chronic pain becomes the defining reality of one’s life.
One no longer is husband, father and worker; one is pain-afflicted husband, pain-addled father and pain-hobbled worker.
I am blessed with special attention from patient bosses and a cushy office job.
Even so, when annual salary reviews roll around, I greet the evaluator with a bitter laugh.
I tell the bosses that whatever they get from me is all I can give and then some more.
Each week starts with the fear that the assigned work will be more than is possible to handle. Each week that ends with the work done gives a modicum of satisfaction and bitter memories of the pain that accompanied every word forced into the computer.
Why don’t I just quit?
Because working doesn’t matter one way or the other to the pain.
One can work, or sit back
One can work with the pain or sit back and languish with it in retirement.
The pain doesn’t care which. It will be there always, either way.
C.S. Lewis called his chronic pain God’s megaphone.
The psychiatrist Viktor Frankl recounts in “Man’s Search for Meaning” that he learned about chronic pain while being beaten by a German concentration camp guard: “At such a moment it is not the physical pain which hurts the most, it is the mental agony caused by the injustice, the unreasonableness of it all.”
Why me? Why this? Why the utter loneliness of it all?
The woman I know with wrenching back pain can’t tell me how her pain feels.
She also can’t feel how the pain courses through my hand.
But we both realize the ruthless finality of chronic pain that only the cursed can share.
Life goes on and life still is good, just different and not as good as it was before.
Sunsets are not wasted on us. Nor are symphonies and poems and paintings.
But we experience them always through the haze of the pain. A joyful afternoon with the grandchildren brings great pleasure but you hear their laughter and watch the glow of excitement in their eyes through the dark glass of your own pain.
Nonetheless, distractions comfort us.
My grandchildren are a blessed tonic to draw the mind away from the always-throbbing hand. So are chats with friends at work and blaring music and movies and getting lost in a novel or magazine.
One learns to put on this kind of happy face because of the most positive lesson chronic pain foists upon us: the lesson of attitude.
The only thing in this cruel world that any of us can control is our attitude about the cruelty.
Zen, which is one of the many techniques that the armies of therapists show the afflicted, teaches that a broken vase means nothing in itself. If a person chooses to agonize over a broken vase, then the agony is not the fault of whoever or whatever broke the vase but of the person who grieves over it.
Deep in pain, one often loses the wisdom of the Zen masters and thinks instead of Nietzche’s aphorism that “when a man stares too long into the void, the void stares into the man.”
Chronic pain is the void, and staring into that particular void brings the anger that seeps through our best efforts at attitude control.
The value of anger at the void
Many of us learn the dangerous fact that anger at the void is one of the better drugs we can get; better than the Vicodin, better than the Baclofen, better than the Neurontin. Anger triggers physical changes in our bodies, the primal fight-or-flight instinct well-known to all — the bristling of neck hairs, the wild pumping of the heart, the adrenaline flowing bringing with it that buzz that drives athletes to extreme sport but leaves normal people for the most part sorely discomfited.
For pain-afflicted souls, the anger and the rush of adrenaline diverts all attention from the agony and so it becomes a welcome relief.
The rush of anger is an easy drug to get.
Jostle us on the sidewalk, drive your car too close to us as we cross the street and you may be horrified at the screaming anger. We will be horrified too.
But the regrets will come later, after the adrenaline rush is over and we must once again listen to God’s incessant megaphone and try to put that happy face back on our clouded heads.
If love is never having to say you’re sorry, then chronic pain is always having to say you’re sorry.
