Bracketing Pain

I

I lay in bed for most of the afternoon, not feeling incoherent, just extremely uncomfortable. Soaking up the blood with gauze, listening to classical music, and trying to process my feelings toward and about the pain. There was an awful time when the anesthetic had worn off and I hadn’t got my medication yet. I don’t think I’d make a very good soldier, and I’m sure how long I could last with some sort of terminal disease. The pain (and I doubt it was objectively as bad as lots of things people routinely go through) was stupefying; it demanded complete attention and left me not knowing what to do. I tried to concentrate on other parts of my body that felt fine (my knee feels great, my arms are in good working order, etc.), but as much as I tried these attempts were overwhelmed. The pain, for that relatively short time, beat me and left me weeping. I’ve never felt anything like that in my short live, and for that I am thankful.

I want to capture my feelings from that time today for future study. At the University I spent a great deal of time and energy studying theodicies. Philosophically I was/am very fascinated by pain and the impact it has on our existence; today was perhaps the first time that I was able to enter into (albeit not very deeply I imagine) real intense physical pain, and as I lay there listening to Haydn I tried to bracket my experience, tried to understand what my mind had done, how it had reacted.

One thing I considered is that vocal responses to intense pain and to intense pleasure can be materially nearly identical. Grunting, weeping, moaning and punctuated exclamations are sounds that humans make in both situations (I imagine someone hearing these sounds with no context and wondering whether the person who was making them was having sex or dying). In both intense pleasure and intense pain everything outside of the experience fades to the background, and our sense of reality is altered because reality, for the moment, has taken on a new identity. I almost feel that the definition of ecstasy ought not to be restricted to pleasure, ecstasy ought to describe certain kinds of pain too.

I have many things to think about and a great deal of getting better to do. At the moment though I had better have a bit to eat (lukewarm applesauce), for I need to take my meds again.