Laidupedness

IN THE MONTH OF MAY the sharpshooters began to stand down. That electric nerve pain, worst kind, transmogrified to arthritic inflammation, pulsing along the nerve corridor like I was a bioluminescent sea creature. Lately I have lots of painless moments, or so they seem upon casual observation. If I inquire too solicitously my body usually reports that Pain is in fact still there, perhaps sleeping.

The controversially-called 'painless' moments are strictly conditional. I get to have them if...and you don't want to hear the ellipses contents. In brief, absurd limitation paired with ibupanacea.

I've had to cultivate some weird other kind of discipline. The kind where you don't do stuff--not even the sensible, responsible things your brain says to do. See the chickenshit on the patio, but don't hose it off. Hear the coffee beans crunch underfoot, but don't sweep up the resultant grounds. Faced with a heap of dishes, wash only one dish.

The little feline Buddhist nun understands such things. If her water bowl is empty, she says, Do not attempt to reach it! Merely open the door, that I may go and drink from the water garden. She is conducting clinical trials on the efficacy of feline saliva, applied topically, on spinal disc regeneration in humans. With a sample size of one.

I READ BOOKS about The Back and about Pain, trying to learn from them without being steamrolled by their high church pronouncements. Bed rest should not exceed 1-2 days. I agree: it should not. Not least because it FUCKING SUCKS. But what would general medical wisdom have had me do instead? Keep moving about until my screams summoned the neighbors?

I hold as my bottom line the oath I felt like a lot of doctors failed to make me: First, do no harm.

The research I do and the interactions I have about my back problem are often painful themselves, though I do learn from them. In such case I must unbandage the wound, saying, This hurts and I wish it would get better. That invites clucking opinions and facile judgments as readily as sympathy or genuine help. Princess SHao brought what I really wanted: chocozucchini bread.

AND NOW FOR a quick lesson in making a person's hardship their own choice and fault. It's a neat trick: 1. Think up something the person should be doing. 2. Suggest it to the person. 3. Sit back and relax! If the person fails to be better, it's on them! You tried.

Nothing I hate more than people's little self-solacing notions of What I Should Be Doing. The suggestey shit pricks me til I bleed with self-doubt. The philosopher JBird said what I really wanted to hear: that my ass retains its splendor.

But what would I have people do in lieu of solacing themselves? Doesn't provision of empathy require suffering along with me? How can I ask that?

AFTER THREE MONTHS of laidupedness and discouragement, I gave myself the following advice:

This will last...some amount of time. Some awful, unbearably long period of time, way beyond reason. The progress will be invisible slow; setbacks many. You won't have the support you need. Won't have options that could make it easier. Instead eight million things will conspire to make it harder. You'll often be mired in depression. Your self-confidence will wear down. Your life will get all off-track. You'll get farther and farther from being as you were. You'll lose your fitness and your beauty to some extent or other. You may not even feel like yourself; you'll feel like you are the Pain. Fully parasitized. All this will happen. Continue happening. Even so it will end. You'll get well.

That has proven useful. Eventual wellness is a damn fine promise, one beyond the reach of many who are unwell.

FINALLY, for Lolo, a word on bullshit-skimming. You see, ordinarily I care about a lot of dumb shit, like what people think about the things I do, and why I don't make more money, and whether quoting rappers makes me ridiculous. But with Pain at my back, how can I possibly care? Jay-Z said it best:

I used to give a fuck

Now I give a fuck less

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Fun Times With Chronic Pain, Part MCCXLII

STILL DOING my bid. Pain Prison, cell block 1722. Pain is not my constant experience. I get free from it sometimes and quiet it often. Rather, Pain is the bars and the guard. The walls seem penetrable, and I start telling myself that if I dared to walk through they'd give way. But what happens instead is I walk into a wall. Then Pain gets mad and I spend a day or two on lockdown.

Today I'm on lockdown, in bed, in a painstorm. The storms come less frequently now, and I had gone a record six days without one. Of course I was not without pain on those good days, but I could manage and be comfortable--so long as I didn't do anything wrong. In the concept of wrong Pain shows its capricious tyranny. Yesterday a walk and a stint in a reclined position turned out to be wrong.

This is where rope-a-dope pain management gets tricky. The initial strategy is clear: you feign surrender, let Pain think it's winning. So far so good. But like...you don't actually mean to give Pain the victory. And at some point along the fake surrender, perhaps when your muscles atrophy and your joints forget their parts and the nerve down your leg is so battered it goes haywire, making pain signals out of thin air, Pain does win. Can't have that. So the question is when and how to start punching back.

I try this or that: an exercise, a stretch, an activity. Maybe just moving about the house for twenty minutes. Sometimes I do these things and Pain is powerless to protest. Then I get a bit stronger, a bit more able. Other times I do these things and they open me up to a big fat punch. Then, like today, I stagger, curse myself and Pain both, hate being here, watch the painstorm pass, re-group, prepare for the next round.

Pain justifies the mixing of metaphors.

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