What is it Like, Not to Hurt?

I had a strange thought just recently, and I haven’t been able to get it out of my mind. Well, that’s not so unusual: I write songs, poems and stories, and I imagine many more than I ever write down. When Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote the fragment “Xanadu”, aside from his being in a sort of opium dream, someone knocked on his door and interrupted his creative fugue, or whatever it was, and the remainder of the poem was lost forever. Reality intrudes rudely all too often, and creativity is a fragile thing. Coleridge never said who was at his door, but whoever it was likely left with his ears burning, at least. Those of us who can create sometimes treasure those moments when right brain and left brain are not just talking, they’re jamming on improv like a couple of old jazz musicians who’ve found “the Groove”, and it sounds like there’s just one musician with four hands – or maybe more, or maybe it’s a story or a poem that reads like it came from Someplace Else, came through the writer more than from, if you know what I mean. Still, even for me, this was an unusual thought, in that I‘ve clearly developed the habit of not thinking it. That’s not a good habit for an artist to develop, so I looked at it more closely. There are years, even decades of work in this not-thought, a work of closing down a part of my mind, of diminishing my Self, carefully and deliberately, if not consciously, whatever that is. The thought, always with its companion thoughts, is this:

I can remember no time without pain. To be more clear, I can remember doing so many things that I loved – I have an excellent memory: I can remember smells, sounds, tastes; I even have a kinetic memory – I can remember the feel of standing in the ocean waist deep, being floated slightly, and moved gently back and forth by the water, feel the warmth of the Gulf Coast water, almost blood-warm near the shore in places, but there is no memory in my mind of what it feels like not to hurt, nothing of what it’s like to choose to do a thing – or not do a thing – without deciding if the price in added pain is worth it. Oh, I know there were times when I didn’t hurt, and I can even remember running (I can still hear the wind generated by my passage in my ears!), jumping, climbing trees, rocks, even mountains without worrying about how much time I would have to spend curled up alone until the pain faded enough for me to move (I’ve always disliked an audience for my pain, even showman that I am. I avoid friends and others when my old, disliked but unavoidable Companion comes to call in force), in payment for a bit of work, a piece of joy, for making love, or cleaning the yard, or working in the garden, or washing dishes, or holding my child or a grandchild, a niece or a nephew, or, or – or anything, or everything; anything and everything at all.


Every smallest motion, it seems, carries its price tag of pain with it, right on the front in big red, lurid numbers that I can’t avoid seeing and considering before acting. Even the choice of bending over to kiss my beloved, who must, herself, sit in a chair or lie in bed hurting, hungry for air her lungs won’t allow her to have enough of even on 24-7 oxygen. Even for that, there’s at least the momentary consideration of the price in pain.

I cannot remember what it feels like to not hurt. And that saddens me. I know there were such times in my life – there were many. I simply can’t recall them, though. I realize that I have now lived more than half of my life in pain – needless pain. What is it like to have no pain – none, anywhere?

I don’t know; I truly cannot remember.

I used to hike all over the mountains picking mushrooms for meals. My wife and I were the ones the Poison Control Center called for Central Oregon hospitals that had cases of mushroom poisoning to take care of (we have a nice little certificate of thanks from the Poison Control Center). I was a martial artist from age nine (I was a skinny, “four-eyed” kid who loved books on mythology, paleontology, paleoanthropology and archaeology, astronomy and astrophysics – and this was in third grade – oh, and I loved Mark Twain, and almost any science fiction – and kids loved to pick on four-eyed freak bookworms like me, so, growing up on military bases, I learned martial arts, cross-trained with Marines and others in things the military likely wouldn’t have approved of, read Dad’s manuals on Aviation Ordinance, and later grew up into a 6’2”, 240 pound athlete (I weigh 160 now, up from 140 lately).


I hated violence, didn’t really understand it at first, but I knew that more skill meant less need to cause real damage in defense). I loved to climb rocks, mostly because I loved to rappel. I played music professionally (fifteen instruments, self-taught, and I have a 3 1/4 octave vocal range with perfect (relative) pitch, and on my old regimen, I could even haul some equipment around, carefully of course. I love to cook, bake my own bread, do massage, run energy, do sweats with Native American friends (I can’t now, not with the medication patches, so my medicine drum sits in my closet). I played tennis before I was hurt, and after, I still spent weeks alone in the Mojave desert, or camped out in the mountains of Oregon.

I worked regular ambulance after the military – I was Navy Hospital Corps – was a Paramedic Neonate Transport Tech at a time when neonatology was a new field; we often flew in a small, nine passenger plane. I worked ER and EMS for over a decade and saw a lot of trauma, but my favorites were OB, nursery and neonatology. I got to stand amidst miracles all the time there; that was how I saw it. To me, pregnancy and birth were always a miracle, however often it happened. I assisted with over sixty deliveries, and delivered six myself, including my own son. It was a kick, seeing my name on the birth certificate both as father and “attending physician”.


When EMS turned out to pay too little for a family to live on, I sort of snuck in by the back door (that means some friends took a week to teach me the basics, then I lied my ass off on a resume that gave me years of experience at uncheckable companies and went out and found work and learned really fast) and worked as a Senior Drafter, then a Design Drafter in Aerospace temporary service (job shopping) because it paid three to five times what working direct did. I worked mostly in digital electronics, and did some mechanical drafting and design. I could take a list of parts and connections with labeled signals, or a pile of hand-drawn schematics and verbal descriptions and turn them into schematics to standard, then use that to design and make original drawings of multi-layer circuit boards good enough, if they wanted, to use for photo-etching into circuit boards. I got to travel frequently, meet and work with all sorts of people, and found the work challenging and fun, as well as finally getting to work at something that paid well.

I did other things, too, over the years. I worked in a logging camp, I did landscaping, house construction, welding in a muffler shop, I was a bodyguard, did temporary work as an ER tech and nursing assistant, played music where I could, did electrical, then electronics assembly – I did what I could and what came to hand during a long, slow “recession”; I had a family to feed. I attended school when I could, but circumstances always forced me to quit and go back to work.

I led an active life. I loved life, was always an enthusiastic participant, interested in everything. Then, when I got hurt, suddenly, with no record whatsoever, I was an “addict”, and nothing I said would get anyone to run any tests other than x-rays for over a decade. “Your back is fine, there’s nothing wrong. You’re obviously in for drugs, and you’re not getting any, so go away”. After the years it took to get into the VA system, sometimes a VA doctor would give me a few days worth of codeine, tell me to come back in three months and walk out of the exam room and disappear, or an ER doc would do the same when I came in, desperate, having been awake and hurting for days, and testily ask why did I have to come in right now – what made it so much worse at this particular moment? I was blacklisted from every ER and clinic I could reach for a long time. They did no tests, because no one looks for answers they think they already know, and they already “knew” I was an addict.

Still, even now, with tons of psych tests (all showing a surprising stability), a long history of cooperation with doctors, none of diversion or abuse (except for being labeled an abuser by virtue of needing help with the pain), six back operations, MRI’s, CT scans, bone scans and lots of other tests, all of which show that I have severe damage in my back, along with DJD and arthritis and I MUST be in pain, I still run into doctors like this one I am being forced by the VA to see. I’m fifty-one years old, and I have been hurting nonstop since I was twenty-eight, though I could have, with one simple operation, been working all this time, instead of living in parks, sleeping under bushes, washing in gas stations or once by breaking the ice off a bird bath in someone’s front yard and washing in that.

I used to quit eating for the last week or ten days of the month because I couldn’t afford it, and there were no food stamp programs for healthy-looking young males. Now, trying to care for a terribly ill wife, both of us on SSDI – we get a whole $10 a month in food stamps because we “make too much money on SSDI” – I find myself falling back to where I started. This idiot doctor (idiot, coward or simply uncaring, it doesn’t matter – the effect is the same) is taking away all the medications that gave me back my life, and is trying to substitute garbage that I know doesn’t work, or that is dangerous according to many reliable sources, or that I simply don’t know and dare not chance, because if any of it incapacitates me, my wife is alone and helpless. He won’t believe me. He seems to think I can’t read, and he will not acknowledge my decades of study and personal experience. Worse, he ignores me when I tell him that I can’t, I don’t dare take a chance on being incapacitated by an unfamiliar medication – and some meds have done just that in the past, like SSRI’s – because if I can’t function, my wife is utterly helpless. There simply is no one else to take care of her – no programs, no nothing – no one but me. But none of it seems to matter.

After all I’m just another addict, right?

But it really, really bothers me that I cannot remember what it felt like not to hurt.

Ian MacLeod
heyokat@gmail.com
Advocate: Pain Relief Network
2007-12-25

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