Pain

I just realized I can’t remember what it was like to be in constant pain. It’s wonderful and freeing and also I want to have a record of it, if only to better appreciate its absence. 

In the years of my pain I described it as living inside a cage that was slowly shrinking. At first it was more like a large field in which I only occasionally bumped into the fences. Over time it slowly shrank, cutting me off from favorite places. No more gardening. No more knitting. I saw doctors and doctors and spent endless hours in therapeutic exercises, but could never restore access to the freedom of movement I had lost. No more backpacking. No more weaving. My life was just shrinking, shrinking, shrinking. No more lifting laundry baskets. No more driving. No. No. No. 

I was left sitting quietly, hands still, spending all my energy and focus on softening the muscles that were spasming endlessly, and enduring the numbness and pins and needles and the feelings of crawling insects on my skin and the stabby knives always invisibly poised around me to punish any movement. 

I forgot what it felt like to sleep more than an hour or two at a time. I forgot what it was like to take a walk. I remembered having done so many things and how much I enjoyed them, but my cage had contracted so much I could barely move inside it. 

I’ve started describing it, in retrospect, as having had an invisible elephant sitting on my shoulder constantly stabbing me with knives. The slowly shrinking cage metaphor feels more true to my experience, but the elephant is funnier and conveys the immensity of the experience better. It’s so hard to convey the inexorable shrinking of the bounds of my life. 

Finally I decided to once again see a doctor, because something needed to change. I accidentally, luckily, walked into the office of my gentle, ruthless surgeon. He conceived of the complex and extreme surgery required to banish the elephant from my life, and open the door of my cage. Seven fused vertebrae! Seven! He removed the elephant and restored the spaces the elephant had crushed. 

I woke up in the recovery room obviously in pain from the 9” incision down the back of my neck and the 6” slash across the front and the aching of bones that had been drilled for screws and rods. But that wasn’t what I noticed first when I returned to consciousness. What I noticed was that I could move my arm without pain. I made a big arm circle and said out loud, “the nerve pain is gone. It’s gone!” Then I started crying. It took a while for me to even notice the surgical pain, because suddenly the elephant was gone from the room. 

The contraption of rods and balls and screws that looks like a tinker-toy cage around my spine is now the only constraint on my life. Only my bones are held in stillness, with the gaps between them now held constant, giving my nerves and muscles freedom to move. I am two inches taller after surgery, regaining the height I had lost as my vertebrae fell against each other like collapsing dominoes. All that recovered space is allowing me to expand back into my life. 

Sawrey Gilpin – Study of an Elephant