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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