The Joy Menu #70: Pain
And at every juncture, each time I saw a doctor or a specialist or a nurse or a phlebotomist, they’d ask “And the pain?”
Years ago, I had an injury that became a protracted period of medical uncertainty and ongoing, ineffective treatments: antibiotics and shots and anti-inflammatories and the wrong therapies repeated again and again.
One morning, I had gotten in the bath (a habit picked up during an earlier protracted period of illness) and looked down to see ribbons of blood snaking up from my penis like seaweed. My father drove me to the urgent care, and then to the ER, and then to a hundred other appointments and tests and checkups and blood draws and assessments.
(If this were a novel, we’d be foreshadowing later drives to hospitals and oncologists and radiation treatments on his behalf: me at the wheel and him riding shotgun. But we’re not).
I told my father I was practicing to be an old man. Limping to the bathroom in the middle of the night to piss. Doctors’ gloved fingers confirming the shape and texture of my prostate. Ultrasound scans of my testicles confirming they were, indeed, testicles. Cameras inserted inelegantly inside my body to take snapshots of my ventricles, entrails, and linings. So many warm vials of my blood. So many afternoons reading magazines in waiting rooms.
And at every juncture, each time I saw a doctor or a specialist or a nurse or a phlebotomist, they’d ask “And the pain?”
But it was never really pain. Not exactly. I thought of it as intense discomfort.
One afternoon, we drove to the urologist’s office in Santa Ana. We passed the swim club where we’d had lessons years before. The taste of chlorine like a breath mint gone sour in my mouth. We passed the school where I’d gotten lost on the way to take the SATs. I’d called my father in a panic and he’d talked me through a reroute (I made it just on time). Passed the government buildings where I’d had my first paid job – compiling executive summaries for a County Supervisor while eating M&Ms from the bowl on the secretary’s desk. The tightness of the tie I wore pressing on my neck.
No – it wasn’t comfortable, but nor was it painful.
Pain would have been more acute. More imposing. Pain would have stolen my laugh.
Even now, it can feel like a piece of me has been taken and remains unreturned. Like a thing long held was wrenched away and my body is still calling it back. Or trying to.
Even today, I want it back.
I lay in bed and feel it spasm. It’s physical – a clench in the abs, a cramping of the cavity around the heart. I want the way things went to have not been the way they went; the illness to not have eaten his sentience, his body (which held that illness with unnecessary grace) to have not been so accommodating. For his skin to have not gone cold against my skin.
I want and it hurts to want – and it hurts that the wanting is futile.
I ask: are grief pains like growing pains? Evidence of slow changes concentrated; an unseen process felt, in a sudden lurch, all at once? Are they a coming into form, a stage of a process – a process itself which has been happening, quietly, on its own? Which only now, suddenly, makes itself known? (Don’t say “like a cancer.”)
I wake tonight from a dream and have nothing to laugh about. (So little is funny in the dead of night). In another town, another decade, another body altogether.
Will each grief-spasm appear tomorrow as a lengthening, a growing, a new stage of healing, of life?
If so, let me be honest: I’d rather have the pain.
I fold my body like a fetus: someone robbed, held at gunpoint, left, unsure of what was taken and what remains. What hurts: the rawness of loss or the something that’s been removed?
One day, we went to a BBQ at a family friends’ house – I’m sure my father would have preferred the blood lab – and on the way home I tried my best to explain the discomfort. Like an aching, I said. Like a muscle has been stretched, and filled with liquid, and then beaten, and then drained too fast; a hose that’s bent and stomped on, so little rivulets of water squeeze out of tears along the side.
He drove. He listened. He nodded.
Unpleasant, he said.
Uncomfortable, I said.
Not painful? He asked.
I shrugged.
Then, it was the fear that it would be like that forever. Now, that it won’t.
That I’ll run out of feelings, run out of thoughts, run out of stories, run out of things to say.
Eventually, even this cycle of writing has to end. But then what? What then?
There’s nothing to say about there being nothing to say. There’s nothing new to say about there being nothing new to say.
That’s uncomfortable; but is it painful?
Onward,
Joey
"Pain would have been more acute. More imposing. Pain would have stolen my laugh."
"Then, it was the fear that it would be like that forever. Now, that it won’t.
That I’ll run out of feelings, run out of thoughts, run out of stories, run out of things to say."