The Miracle of Pain Relief

Real estate billboard, San Francisco 

As I carry on the hard and not always satisfying work of pushing sixty, I sense a diminishing recall of my first twenty years - those years of high energy, limitless interest, gigantic enthusiasm ... all constrained by fifteen years of going to school.

I'm forgetting, for example, the names and faces of the children who shared my confinement. Teachers are a blurred mass of half recalled features over a fading soundtrack of expressions of dismay. I don't recall if I ever learned any math. 

But I still remember Howie MacDonald who taught me history in Grade 11 at Trenton High School.  

Howie was physically slight, mordantly sardonic and adept with blackboard diagrams. He always had a dot of chalk dust on his lower lip. His suit jackets were too big for him. 

Howie laced his own opinions among the lessons.

More than once he told us of the three things that scared him. Plague rats. The deforestation of the Amazon. And antibiotics. Howie was afraid of these things in 1973. Pretty prescient. Except for the plague rats.

Howie shared with us too the very short list of human achievements that he admired. He was not impressed with space flight, computers or microwave ovens.

But pain relief. Howie saw that as the single best use of thousands of years of accumulated human ingenuity.

I was sixteen years old then. I had no idea what Howie was talking about.

I do now.

I have, in the unsettling argot of medical diagnosis, "moderately severe" arthritis in my right hip. Having read these words, my GP set me on the path to an appointment with an orthopaedic specialist; the goal is a new hip.

We estimated six months to a year to post-operation; my GP agreed I'd need some pain relief as a stop gap measure.

I have written about pain before. For example, there's this from November 2009:

I have an abscessed tooth. It hurts.

My dentist explained the pain this way: “When the tooth starts to die, the nerve loses its ability to reset after a shock.”

In other words, instead of just going “ohmigod!” and then settling down after experiencing heat or cold, the nerve gets stimulated and goes “ohmigod! ohmigod! ohmigod! ohmigod! ohmigod! ohmigod! ohmigod! ohmigod! ohmigod! ohmigod! ohmigod! ohmigod! ohmigod! ohmigod! ohmigod! ohmigod! ohmigod! ohmigod! ohmigod! ohmigod! ohmigod! ohmigod! ohmigod! ohmigod! ohmigod! ohmigod! ohmigod! ohmigod! ohmigod!” forever.

It is like a blow from a sledgehammer combined with a blast from a blowtorch. Except there’s no sledgehammer or blowtorch. Externally, there’s nothing. Internally, there’s this demanding presence, ineffable, ineluctable and relentless.

For sufferers of dental pain at least, there are the multiple miracles (and mixed blessings, I know) of pain killers and antibiotics. And root canals. 

Pain from arthritis of the hip is much less localized, much more variable than the agony of a dying tooth. A lot of the time the pain isn't even in the hip. It's down the leg or in the groin. Sometimes it's a shooting pain. Sometimes it's a throbbing pain. Other times it's a general ache combined with a feeling of pure incapacity. 

I won't walk. Don't ask me.

Untempered by humanity's single greatest achievement, the pain of arthritis instills in this sufferer a sense of loss, despair, anxiety and futility. It is mean and dreadful.

But, add a few grains of aspirin, or acetaminophen or ibuprofen, or whatever, and, hey, the pain's as forgotten as whatsisname who taught me social studies when I was in grade 7.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen