Thinking without a Net

The time has somehow slipped by, unnoticed. I’ve already written most of today’s post…in just the last two hours. And I’ve had my espresso and taken a few pills and otherwise paid homage to modern medicine. I am now ready to be sleeping, pain-free and deep in the clutches of delightful rest. Why is it so much later now than it was when I woke? Why can I not control more of my environment or my responses to it? My toes are cold. My hands are colder. On a scale of 1 to 10, how comfortable and satisfied am I? Is it a 3? A 5? Or a 2, perhaps? Is my comfort still lingering near the bottom of the scale? Of all the saints, which one is the patron saint of serene sleep and maximum comfort? One day, I will ask the question  in a more serious way. Until then, I will substitute dreams for reality and hunger for satiation.

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My order of patchouli incense cones finally arrived a few days ago. If the outdoor temperatures were a tad warmer (e.g., 73°F versus 61°F) and the sun a bit brighter, I might go out on the deck with a cone. But it’s too cool outside for me at the moment. Inside, the smoke can be overpowering. So, I will wait.  Television writers are wont to say perfection can be the enemy of the good. I am impatient. Not perfectly so, but sufficiently. Adequately impatient. Abundantly impatient. I have taken pain pill (more on that in a moment). I may consume a relaxational gummy before long, just to scrape off some of my roughest edges; there are so damn many of them. I might want to polish those rough edges to a fine sheen, but they may be too rough and too resistant to sculpting. So, a bit of scraping and sanding and buffing may be all those edges get until I have enough energy and motivation to break through the coating of grit that dulls the shine I’m after.

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When nurses ask me to describe my pain on a scale of 1 to 20, my frustration with the question spikes. The impossibility of giving s rationale answer is akin to how I might respond  if asked to “describe the odor of a color between beige and seventy-seven.” The answer is at least as crazy as any question that might generate a reply. Pain is uniquely personal. A sensation I might describe as excruciatingly painful could be experienced as a mild irritation to someone else. Or, someone else could be in intense agony, while my experience with the same stimuli  might be barely noticeable. These variations in feeling pain may have more to do with a person’s history of exposure to unpleasant sensations than with the measurable level of discomfort. If, for example, the worse pain I ever felt was a pin-prick in the finger to draw blood for a measure of blood sugar, slamming a finger in a door could be experienced as beyond tolerable. Only by comparing that intolerable experience with something far worse—say, a gunshot to the abdomen—could the pain of the experiences be properly evaluated on a scale. Assigning a number to any point on the scale is essentially arbitrary without the ability to compare that number with others is a wasted effort. A child might experience his first mosquito bite as intense and barely tolerable; his hundredth mosquito bite may be almost unnoticeable. At this very moment, my “pain number” is comparatively low, but the same level of pain I feel right now would have felt considerably worse three or four years ago. So, I suppose it would be legitimate to say pain is contextual; whether it’s legitimate or not, it seems that way to me. I can more readily adapt to this pain than I would have adapted in the not-too-distant past. How bad is it? Bad enough to have awakened me around 5 AM, but not bad enough to have driven me to the medicine cabinet in search of hydrocodone. Yet doctors tell me to take pain medications at the earliest signs of pain, rather than waiting until the pain gets worse. My thought processes tell me the effects of the painkillers will be more noticeable if I wait; doctors say the pain will be harder to control if I let it get more intense before I respond to it. In the past, I’ve been given fast-acting injections that quickly reduced my pain. Pills do not act so quickly and so completely. For that reason, I think I would be more likely to turn earlier to fast-acting pain-killer injections. And that probably is sufficient reason to stick with the pills…and to wait until I feel a more intense need/desire to reduce the pain. I don’t think my pain has gotten appreciably worse over the years, but I think I just may be tiring of it more quickly and more often. It seems really silly to me to be constantly aware of my pain, especially considering the fact that it is rarely “bad.” It’s just annoying. But when it disappears completely, I feel such unexpected relief. Enough that, when I finally convince myself to take the pills and they start to kick in, I think I should pay more attention to the doctors’ advice.