PAIN IS ALL IN THE HEAD. IS TOO! UH HUH!

Blog number 149                                               Feb 12, 2008

Remember me telling you about falling off my chair in a restaurant and tearing my rotator cuff and not being able to tell where the pain was coming from, or that I was laying on the floor and people were staring at me?  Well, just today I found out a few things about that from a book by a girl who had a similar pain but was much more aware than I am and was thus able to notice things about it that escaped me.

She had bumped heads with another girl playing dodgeball and the other girls' head bumped her jaw where she unknowingly harbored bone cancer.

She said, "It wasn't the sensation of things happening in slow motion...it was as if time had mysteriously but logically shifted onto another plane."

In my case, it did seem like I lay there for a long, long, time, but without any awareness of how long a time that was.  Or even if it was a long time.

She said, "The pain was deep and untouchable."

Yes.  Yes it was.  In fact, I couldn't even pinpoint the location.  I wasn't even sure it was in my body.

"Because the pain was genuinely unanticipated, there was no residue of anxiety to alter my experience of it.  Anxiety and anticipation, I was to learn, are the essential ingredients in suffering from pain, as opposed to feeling pain pure and simple.  This alien ache was probably my first and last experience with unadulterated pain, which perplexed me more than it hurt me."

I don't know about that last part.  I was perplexed and I did ponder on it for a time, but I think I hurt more than I perplexed.