Pain

PAIN

Pain
You knock on my door again
Letting yourself in
Before I bid you enter.
You are not a stranger to me
But hang there in my corners
Like a dusty cobweb
Long after the spider who bit me
Has gone.
Soon
I’ll throw open my shutters
Reach up my broom
And sweep you out again.
But not just yet today.
No, not just yet today.

When I first wrote this, it was part of the process of dealing with the pain of breaking up, of a bad marriage, of unsuccessfully trying to find a new special someone. It wasn’t long before it took on a new meaning.

Part of running a dry cleaners is making sure the chemical “perc” or perchloroethylene stays clean. Otherwise it simply redeposits everyone else’s dirt on your clothes in wide, dirty streaks. The process was called “cooking”, and is done by dumping a certain amount of perc into a large drum, redirecting the heat from the boiler which is already there at the machine to dry the clothes to also heat up this drum so the perc will evaporate and the gunk will stay behind. Eventually you go in and scrape out the gunk. In other words, it’s a still, just a different product than corn whiskey. With the busiest store in the chain, we needed to do this daily, distilling part of the perc while leaving some of it in the system to keep cleaning without shutting down the work. It was a tricky process, since overheating meant the gunk boiled back up out of the drum and coated whatever you were cleaning, and underheating meant no boil at all. I had that mastered.

Just like a car, however, changing the oil alone wasn’t enough. The filters had to be changed every so many thousand miles (hours) as well. These were big heavy cylinders on the top of this machine. Changing them meant full shutdown, draining everything out of the filters, and then climbing the big cradle of shock absorbers that this machine rested in. Best drained overnight, changed before morning start-up. One late spring day in ‘85, I was in this process when a customer came in, and the distraction caused me to lose my balance. I landed on my feet - hard! - right on the concrete floor. I felt a sharp pain on the bottom of my foot, so intense I couldn’t walk or stand on it for a few seconds. But the customer always came first, and as soon as possible I made my way up to the front counter to take care of business. Task oriented, that’s me. By the time the customer left, I hardly felt the pain, or remembered it.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the end of it. I had torn a tendon in the arch of my foot, and the foot tried to heal itself by sending a spur of bone back in the direction of the tendon. It’s otherwise known as a heel spur. It feels like there’s a rock in your shoe, except it’s inside, not outside your foot. The technical term is plantar faciitis. The worst part is that the cleaners had literally no chair on which to sit. After all, we were supposed to be working, not goofing off, right? By the end of each 9-hour day I was nearly in tears. It was enough to send me to the doctor, finally. Which led me to a workers comp claim, doing my job from a wheelchair (it actually worked), getting demoted to a much smaller branch, and finally being laid off. (It seems they thought it didn’t look good to the customers to have a lady in a wheel chair waiting on them, no matter how successfully.) It also led to a prescription that caused depression, a cortisone injection which was worse than the spur, and eventually the discovery of 1) Motrin and 2) arch supports. Two years later and a new, mostly sit-down job, spurs gone.

WHEW!

Pain, I found out, like poverty, is not ennobling, contrary to popular conception. I figure that the only folks who actually think so are the ones who have not experienced either. I believe the only reason that idiocy continues to be touted is because it is a self-righteous excuse for lack of empathy. It enters political thought as a justification for not reaching out to help the less fortunate. The real experience grinds you down, steals your energy, erodes your hope, draws the line for you between “survive” and “thrive”. Without that experience, even the best-intentioned person only imagines that they “get it”. You can try for empathy, but never really get past sympathy.

I owe my daughter an apology. I had a failure of empathy, a complete lack of real understanding of what she was experiencing, until I came to experience it myself. I am truly sorry.

As a child she had juvenile rhumatoid arthritis. First, it shattered my deeply cherished belief that she, my firstborn, was perfect in every way. (Yes, mothers can get these funny ideas.) Second, she didn’t act like she was in pain, conveniently letting me forget what I’d learned. If she wasn’t limping, wincing, crying, how bad could it be? I had a lot of other things to deal with that demanded much more of my attention than she did. Third, I had no idea what it felt like myself. Complete failure of empathy.

Perhaps there is some kind of cosmic justice after all - or karma, if you will - that decrees when you can’t find empathy, it’ll put you in a position where it forces itself on you. Many years later, I've got arthritis. Not just in the knees either, though those are the worst and most constant. The finger joints come and go. The most “interesting” times are when you can both hear and feel the bones grinding against each other. Then it’s not just the pain, it’s that there’s something particularly nauseating in the idea of what’s happening. But really, it’s the pain.

The “best” knee simply has osteoarthritis. Glucosamine Chondroitin actually helps that one. The other one also has tears and spurs. It seems that every time I fall, I land instinctively on two hands and that one knee. Four of six falls in the last few years have been due to ice - yet another reason I want to retire to Arizona. The other two were caused by tripping over things I knew were there, at least until I turned suddenly to go somewhere and momentarily forgot.

They reminded me.

This is the knee that earned me my handicap parking sticker. (The day I asked my doctor about that, I got a look at the x-rays. Disturbing!) This is the one that hurts not only deep inside, like somebody magically inserted the sharp end of an icepick behind the kneecap and broke it off, but radiates pain up and down the front outside with each movement, even the non-weightbearing kind. Just the slightest torque, such as from rolling over in bed, is enough to get my attention, even waking me from otherwise sound sleep.

Ibuprofin is my friend.

Of course, it also raises my blood pressure, so that’s being treated and monitored. And the Ibuprofin only brings the inflamation and pain down to manageable levels so long as I don’t actually DO anything much, like walking or standing. But it’s time to head off to work now, so I’ll save the diatribe for why I no longer have health insurance, and thus expensive treatment options, for another post.