My personal experience with raw, unfiltered physical pain comes from an emergency appendectomy, two excruciating bouts of kidney stones, chronic headaches and a childhood spent crashing bicycles and falling out of trees. Fortunately, I have never had the terrible misfortune of being subjected to somatic/disease related pain such as pancreatic cancer, the terror of enemy torture or, forbid, being mangled in a horrible car accident.
The appendectomy occurred when I was 25 years old, at a time when I was as fit and strong as I’ve ever been. I was bullet-proof. It came in the middle of the night as a slashing, stabbing pain in my abdomen. I stumbled to the bathroom thinking I had gas, but began throwing up stomach bile and fading in and out of consciousness. Unfortunately I was living in a log cabin deep in the backwoods of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, but with heroic effort on the part of my young wife, we managed to get to the car and make the long trip into Escanaba to the emergency room.
When I arrived I was told that I had an enflamed, infected appendix which needed to come out immediately. Unfortunately however, there had been some sort of enormous catastrophe in another part of the county overnight and all of the operating rooms and emergency staff were busy. I was told that I could not be given any anesthetic or pain killers until just before the operation and that, mostly because I was young and fit, that I would have to lay there and wait for a half hour or so. The nurses would be by occasionally to monitor my situation.
Pretty much, I laid out in the hall on a gurney alone. Doctors and nurses bustled by on missions of mercy but essentially ignored me. I was a former high school wrestler for cris’sakes. I sucked it up and toughed it out.
I laid there for two hours.
What I learned in those two hours has served me well the rest of my days. I found that physical pain has a limit. Physical pain hurts more and more and more until it hurts so bad that it can’t hurt any more. That’s when pain so completely surrounds and encompasses you that, in essence, it stops hurting. When the doctors finally came and rescued me from the hallway and ran something into my IV line that put me to sleep, I don’t remember that pain stopped, only that the white-hot tension faded to black. I now know that physical pain is exponential to a certain point but at some point it overwhelms you, you dwell in it, and it transforms. You never stop knowing for a second that you hurt… but after a while it hurts less and less, because you become more and more a part of it.
The reason I mention this is because I am going through a pain of a different sort right now: the helpless pain of a parent watching their child recover from major surgery - standing by as she grimaces and screams from the simple act of sitting up. Last week, my thirteen year-old daughter underwent lower spinal fusion surgery which lasted almost 9 hours and left her with an 18” incision and a battery of steel rods and screws along her spine. It is an operation known for its considerable pain, especially in the first couple of weeks. In the hospital she was given a pain-management button that she could push at any time to supply a shot of morphine into her system. It is illegal for anyone but the patient to push the button and the supply is kept under strict lock and key.
Within five days they had her off the morphine and in less than a week we had her home. Her pain-maintenance was shifted to other drugs which caused digestive problems and doesn’t allow her to keep any food down. We are now weathering that hurdle, but for the first time, the future looks bright.
• • •
Can this be related in some way to emotional pain? Ah, that we all had a button that we could push at any time to take the edge off of our emotional pain? How nice that would be, although I suspect that we would quickly be reduced to a button-pushing planet of bliss-addicts, unwilling to confront pain of any sort.
We have our buttons, our emotional morphine, they are our addictions and our coping mechanisms: drugs and alcohol, gambling, binge eating, shopping, pornography, anger, chocolate… We push them to decrease our pain, but the pain remains, it just gets less for a while. Better we could learn that the pain gets worse and worse until it can get no worse. Then it merely consumes us and becomes all-consuming pain. But it is not exponential, it is finite. We don’t avoid it, we dwell in it, we deal with it.
It’s no fun, but until someone comes to the hallway to get us, we simply ride it out.
Sometimes the only way to know what really hurts is to not scratch it and see what itches.
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jmac1949
Lisa Scroggins
jlsathre
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Deborah Young
I am Stretch
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Comments
Blessings to you and your family as you deal with illness and post-surgery . . .
As for your theory of relativity about pain, my father was once in the hospital next to a man who it was said had third-degree burns over 90% of his body. Needless to say, he didn't survive, but while he did, his pain was such that no drug could reach it, and his screams still ring in my psyche forty years later. How my father survived listening to that hour after hour, I'll never know.
Drugs and alcohol make a great combination. Drugs for the patient... alcohol for the parent.
All the best.
But the biggest lesson I learned about pain -- especially emotional pain -- was in AA. Let go. It's always helped me in emergency situations with my kids to let go of MY pain and concentrate on what they need to see and hear. Recently one of my girls actually told me how much she admired my ability to think fast and stay calm in an emergency (like getting her finger locked in a car door).
I wish I'd had the same ability when it was an emotional emergency. I'm better now -- I can step outside of the situation (when I have to) and do what's necessary. Later I'll laugh hysterically or sob uncontrollably.
Wise post and well-placed morals. My prayers are with you and yours.
I suffer quite strongly from physical pain with Lupus. I have now had it 20+. Pain is relative sometimes for me. being allergic to opiates causes me many problems. Now I take no pills of any kind and have not for two years. I have learned to cope with that one.
Emotional pain is a different animal to me. It hurts worse somehow, maybe because I ended a long marriage that leaves me bitter still over it all. Maybe it is because my kids from that marriage still give me so much grief. My ex certainly won the kid wars that come with marriage breakups.
But laying that aside most of us learn to cope with any pain life brings I think and are better people for it.
I am hoping your daughter comes out with a better situation in life. As a parent I am sure it is hard to cope with this. My prayers are with you and her Jeff. Always.
I have scoliosis too. I wore a Milwaukee brace (the kind that reaches from collar-around-neck to plastic-girdle-around hips) for a few years in high school.
I didn't know how hard it was on my mother until 15 years later. I was self-absorbed teenager, and it simply didn't occur to me that mom was freaking out too.
When I was in my thirties, she, a social worker, confessed that she still felt guilty that she hadn't set up some kind of support group for me. I was incredulous: before I got the brace, she introduced me to another girl who'd worn the same kind of brace and left us alone to talk.
That was a lesson that has lasted my entire life: find someone else who has had a similar experience, and talk with them. I made sure my mom knew how grateful I was to her for showing me that.
(BTW, one of my best friends had the fusion when we were 15. We met afterwards, when she was in her body cast and I was in my brace, and I never asked her about the experience of the surgery. (If I remember correctly, not all spinal fusion patients have to wear the 10-lb-plaster-undershirt these days -- a good thing.) Her back gives her more trouble than mine does, on account of its inflexibility, but it's nowhere NEAR the trouble she would have had if the curvature had been left untreated. And it's not all that much trouble, either -- mostly things like finding comfortable car seats, now that front bench seats are out of fashion. FWIW, she was an avid jogger for a while, and has gotten thru 2 pregnancies.