The Weekly Meat

Hurt

Apropos of nothing (you want justification, get your own blog), a few thoughts on pain:
 

I. One Saturday, when I was seven years old or so, my dad left me alone in the car for a few minutes while he ran into the hardware store. I was in the front seat, and I got instantly curious about the dashboard. I pushed in a black round button. A minute later, the button popped out. Curiouser and curiouser, I saw that I was able to pull the button out of the dashboard. I did, and turned it around in my hand. The other side had incredibly bright, tightly wound orange coils. I touched the tip of my index finger to the coils.

I grew up in a non-smoking household. So, while I thank my parents for my limited exposure to secondhand smoke, I curse them for never mentioning the purpose of a car cigarette lighter. As you might imagine, it's an incredibly goddamn hot thing.

It was years before that fingertip regained its print.

II. I learned the word "torque" in the wee morning hours of February 23, 1980. I had been doing some twilight skiing the night before, and had badly broken my leg. It was what orthopedists (also a new word for this then 11-year-old) would qualify as a typical above-the-boot spiral tib-fib fracture. Essentially, the break was caused by the downward force of my body weight in combination with the fact that while my left knee was turning one way on a horizontal axis, my left ankle was moving the opposite way. The break spiraled up the tibia, and the force of the whole thing caused the smaller fibula to snap.

As the doctors explained, if you take a foot and a half long stick, hold it with one hand on each end and quickly twist your hands in opposite directions until the stick splinters, you get a good sense of how it all works. And, as I learned a few years later while watching some special effects show on TV, if you try the same with several stalks of celery, you can even make it sound like breaking bones!

I was a kid, and being treated in an otherwise excellent hospital, but I was given absolutely nothing for the pain — a fact that is incredible to me now. It's tough to explain to anyone who hasn't experienced it, but I'd have loved even a horse bit to grind my teeth against. Any muscle movement in my leg would twist the break even more. It was medieval and ungodly.

III. About 10 years ago, and just days before my sister's wedding, I managed to shatter my wrist. It was a dandy, involving both forearm bones, and several in the wrist itself, replete with "pulverized" fragments and the like. How I managed to do this at a ski mountain in mid-August isn't really important. What matters is that it was excruciating.

A passerby asked if I was OK, and I told her no, that I just broke my wrist and I'd love a ride down the mountain. I hopped in the back of her car. She asked my name and I told her. Then promptly passed out.

At the hospital, I asked the ER nurse for something for the pain and she cheerily returned with two vicodin. Gritting my teeth, and with an 11-year-old's hell in the back of my mind, I said something to the effect of "Maybe I didn't make myself clear. My wrist is currently somewhere in the vicinity of my fucking elbow. I've got a Blue Cross/Blue Shield card, and I'd like something only the slightest bit less potent than what killed John Belushi." Ah, she understood. She handed me the vicodin and apologized that it was all she was able to give me, but that she'd send the doctor right in. I thanked her and swallowed the vicodin.

The doctor appeared in the doorway a few minutes later. He cheerily asked how I was doing. I simply took my broken left arm in my right and held it out for him to have a look. Without taking a step closer to me, he just kind of made a grunting "Oh." sort of noise, leaned back into the hall, and said, "Could I get 100 of demerol and 30 [unintelligible] in here." He then came into the room and smiled. Through the agony, I tried to smile back.

IV. There exists a 0–10 scale for pain. Ten is pretty much reserved for drug-free birthing, passing kidney stones, burn victims, severe bone fractures, and perhaps, sustained blunt force trauma to the testes. It is both physically, mentally, and emotionally disabling.

The thing about extreme, crushing pain is that the moment it is alleviated, you have no real concept of what you've just felt. Clearly, those pain synapses are there for a reason — and likewise, they can occasionally be overridden for the very same reason: self preservation. Once the demerol hit, it brought the pain of my shattered wrist down to tolerable levels — 6 or 7 — and I could barely imagine what I'd felt only moments before.

I haven't been back to 10 on the scale since the shattered wrist. But playing hockey, I've since cracked ribs, separated my shoulder, torn cartilage, had my shoulder scoped, and broken my fibula. Because I've felt 10 before, I have only the vague sense each time that, though I'm in a world of pain, I'm still far from the top of the scale. I've hit 7s and maybe 8 in the past few years — and sneezing with cracked ribs is a miserable experience I'd wish on few outside those presently "working" or advising in the West Wing — but it's all been relatively manageable.

The human body is incredibly resilient, and amazes me in its ability to absorb tremendous amounts of abuse and slowly heal itself. Despite the amnesiac fog of pain, the mind is slower to heal — and rightly so, I think. Though I can't conceive of what number 10 pain feels like, I have some idea. And I'm not real keen on being there again. Birthing is not an option for me, but it's one of the very few pain projects I'd willingly take on. So, aside from that, I'll still play hockey, but I left behind my thoughts of buying a motorcycle the day I shattered my wrist. Accidents happen during everyday life, and I can roll with that, but there's no need to put myself out there in that sort of way — especially when I have so much other clearly important stuff occupying my mind.

That said, some amount of pain is life affirming. I'm not a masochist or tough guy by any stretch, but the day after a hockey game, when it hurts to get out of the car at the end of my commute to work and I find myself hobbling a bit, it feels good too. When the muscles I'd forgotten about ache, and I've got a welt across a foot or arm, I'm alive in ways that I'm not while sitting and working at my desk.

V. I've said what I can. Here are Trent Reznor's thoughts on the subject, via Johnny Cash.

In Waiting

With the season upon us in which we tend to receive those folksy yearly recap letters from far-flung friends, I thought it might be an appropriate time to post this piece — which could very well have stood as a sobering, non-traditional holiday letter for AKL and me exactly three years ago. You need to know up front that ultimately, things turned out quite well for us, and we couldn't be happier (or more tired). But life reveals itself slowly, and as a time capsule, this seems no less worth putting out there. --BK

My wife AKL and I have been trying unsuccessfully to have children for the past two and a half years. Recently, we had our third miscarriage.

Three times we have been through the unbelievable loss and hurt — I never again want to hear a sound as sad as AKL’s open sobbing through the bathroom door when we lost the first — and then the shift into medical crisis mode, and then the aftermath: weeks or months of emotional fragility.

All the while, we lived in social awkwardness. As our pregnancies were not yet public knowledge, there was no public acknowledgment of our losses. So we kept going to the office, feeling distracted from the same work we hoped would distract us from our far more complex troubles. We wore no armbands, nor dressed in black — nothing outside the norm, but for a handful of hushed, coded conversations and emails. Coworkers and friends may have wondered, but they didn’t pry, and we didn’t offer, assuming most would not have been prepared for our honest answer when they asked us perfunctorily, “How’s it going?”

Our second loss was in July 2004, and we spent a horribly uncomfortable week cringing at every mention of the “DNC” (Democratic National Convention) — in our hometown of Boston, no less — while dealing with our impending “D&C.”

Full disclosure: we’re card-carrying pro-choice Democrats. But when you have a miscarriage, even early in the first trimester, rhetorical, clinical terms like embryo or fetus or viable go out the window, because in your gut what has just happened is that, quite simply, your baby has died.

Throughout, friends and family have tried to be helpful. Though it feels nice to be loved, their attempts at help are generally centered around stories of their friends or acquaintances who went through similar travails to eventually succeed. People who have three boys now and are happy, or some such. While I understand the hopeful message of these tales, because they’re about success, they don’t have much to do with our present situation. And with each loss, we pay a higher emotional price for our hope. Yes, we might wind up being those folks. But we might not. We might be the friends who tried and tried and then, because the trying was killing them, stopped trying on their own and either tried to adopt, or didn’t. We don’t know.

Sometimes I convince myself that one’s ability to have kids must be inversely proportional to one’s desire to have kids. Surely, if we were a couple of 15-year meth addicts, we’d have our own basketball team by now — but we’re not. AKL and I are 33 and 37, respectively (“you still have so much time,” you say); we have a home, steady jobs, a healthy relationship, love to give, and we have wanted children since we got engaged nearly five years ago. We waited two years: until we had gotten married, until we moved out of our little condo, until AKL finished grad school, and then we were ready. But nature doesn’t work according to human timetables. This difficult fact that none of us gets to decide when we might have a baby underscores our biggest struggle: the powerlessness of our situation. There are certain things we can do to help our prospects, but there is far more over which we have absolutely no control.

I thought about waiting to tell our story, to see how it all turns out. Maybe — hopefully — it will have a happy ending (yes, we understand, full of new challenges). But to wait would be to miss the real story, which is about our trying to cope with the agonizing uncertainty of right now.

Because the truth is, we’re having a really difficult time with it. The week or two after each miscarriage was emotionally — and in AKL’s case, physically as well — grueling, but together we muddled through, in crisis mode, on adrenaline, love, bad movies, and comfort food. The lingering psychological aftermath is tougher, as post-trauma, we find ourselves struggling to regain our bearings. And each time, we are forced to re-address the question of why we want children to begin with, and how we feel about ourselves without them.

AKL and I communicate well, but when we do nag or argue, miscarriage is the elephant in the room. When we talk about our cats, we’re really talking about our children. When we talk about our friends or our family or a possible vacation, we’re really talking about children.

It has been a long time since life felt normal. Before monthly planning and hormone spikes took over our sex life. Before the losses and the hospitals and the specialists. Before a nurse handed me a sterile cup and asked me to produce that certain sample (healthcare-subsidized porn at the ready). We’ll never regain the absolute joy of finding out we’re pregnant: the big ultrasound, talking excitedly about names, hearing a heartbeat….

That unfettered innocence is gone, and our story is rooted in the present. The ending is uncertain. We do what we can, but the rest is beyond us. So we sit and fidget with the not knowing. Today first, and then tomorrow, and then the next. Waiting to see where, eventually, it all leads.