Pain

Pain interests me.

It's one of those universals, right? I mean, everybody experiences a wide variety of pains throughout their life. Physical pains of many kinds can derive from insect stings. (That link, by the way, leads to one of the best-written brief pages I've yet found on Wikipedia).

I have differing pain tolerances for different sorts of injury. I've often cut myself almost without feeling it and I can take a punch in many places and keep right on going, but pinch me or sting me and I'll scream like a little girl.

My wife lives with pain every day of her life. She suffered from Osgood-Schlatter disease in her teens and she's one of the unlucky ten percent of sufferers whose symptoms have persisted into adulthood. Back pain is a constant threat with her and she suffers from occasional migraines as well. Her attitude towards pain was instilled in her from a very young age: suck it up. To even admit to feeling pain, in that family, is a sure sign of weakness. To be weak is a venial sin. To appear weak is a mortal sin.

Her parents, both of them, cope with pain I hesitate to even describe. Her mom's developed an allergy to her own skin, which is flaying off her hands and feet in particular. Her dad is something of a medical marvel: a lifetime in construction has seen the rotator cuffs in both shoulders COMPLETELY detach, i.e., all four muscles have ripped and then atrophied. There are no muscles within three inches of either of his shoulder joints, and the ligaments are basically the only things holding his shoulders in place. They're so stressed that he can pop his shoulders out of joint just walking, and a simple arm curl cases a "Popeye" effect that's gruesome to watch. He has trained his neck muscles to do some of the work his shoulder muscles used to do, and he's scarily strong (as is his daughter). Unless you saw his joints pop out--or unless you were exceptionally good at reading faces--you'd never suspect he was anything other than normal. But the pain level he, ahem, shoulders must be excruciating.

In fact every parent of mine, step and in-law included, lives with pain of one sort or another as a frequent or constant companion. And not one of them wants to talk about it, or in some cases even admit to it. Pain's almost Gothic, that way: a madwoman in the attic, whimpering and moaning and sometimes screaming for attention...but the shame of the family, never to be spoken of aloud.

This is, of course, ridiculous. As Spider Robinson says, "shared pain is lessened, shared joy increased--thus do we refute entropy". Acknowledging and discussing pain neither belittles others' pain nor elevates yours. And pain might be considered a weakness, but dealing with it indicates strength. In a sane society, we'd all of us be sharing pains as routine therapy.

This goes double with emotional pain, which can occasionally cause physical discomfort, but is no less real when it doesn't. There are still a disturbing number of people out there who discount emotional pain entirely on the basis that "it's all in your head". Yeah, buddy, so's my entire life. Emotional pain comes in just as many flavours as the physical kind, from the ugly ripping pain of a betrayal to the sucker punch of grief to the throbbing ache of depression. And like physical pain, everyone seems to have different tolerances for different kinds. It seems to take longer for people to build up an emotional defense against pain: witness the unending psychodrama that is teen life. Adults so easily forget how keenly felt every little slight is at that age.

As I age, I'm starting to experience pains I'd never considered before. Last night, for instance, I awoke at 1:10 with the odd and distinctly unpleasant sensation that I had somehow tied my back into a clove hitch. I nearly fell out of bed and hobbled my way downstairs for some Tylenol, which took the better part of an hour to kick in. Once it did, all was well and all remains well, but I'm sure I'll feel that again sometime soon. (You folks who disdain drugs: if I promise to say I admire you, will you promise not to look down on me for using them when I feel I need to?)

Like many, I can live with my own pains, but hate to see other people suffering. I find physical pain monstrously unfair. Spider Robinson, again:

[T]he human pain system was one of God's very worst designs, even worse than the scrotum. A child could do better. What good is an alarm system with no off switch and no volume knob? For two million years of evolution, the overwhelming majority of our most poignant pains were urgent warnings of situations we could do nothing about. For all but the last century of that two million years, the agony attendant on an inflamed appendix served no useful purpose whatsoever, probably lowered the victim's resistance even farther. It's taken our minds two million years to adapt to our stupid bodies and invent medicine. Until we developed dentistry, what use was a toothache? Were we supposed to bash ourselves in the mouth with a rock? Why should passing a gallstone hurt so much--or at all? Even now, with so many medical tools at my disposal, most...pains... are superfluous, redundant information, pointless misery. Some of it is false information, referred pain. Yet we still have no really satisfactory way to switch off the alarm, and all the ways we know to mute it have undesirable side effects.

Emotionally, I've striven mightily to live by the Buddhist maxim that "pain is what the world does to you; suffering is what you do to yourself." Seen in that light, pain has a purpose, just as evil does. It's not the pain that matters, but what you do with it. Art of every sort bears abundant witness to this truth.

But physical pain is another beast altogether, and I still struggle to understand its purpose. Oh, sure, it's the body's signal that something is wrong, but does that signal have to be so bloody loud? And does that Buddhist maxim apply equally to physical torment? I mean, I admire the hell out of people like my father-in-law who live with what, to me, are intolerable amounts of pain, without giving voice to suffering. But my admiration doesn't lessen whatever petty pains I feel and it sure does frig-all for him. If you can't ameliorate pain, I guess the only other option is to live with it.

It just doesn't seem like much of an option...