Send in the pain

I don’t understand this pain. It’s not big, as pains go, but I’m not a connoisseur of physical pain. I know about emotional pain; and how to milk every last drop of indignity out of childhood insults. But physical pain? I’ve had a few bicycle wrecks. There was the year I seemed to keep hitting my head on sharp objects. Those things were assuaged with cuss words.

But what to do with mystery pain; pain which simply pops in one day and doesn’t go away? First there’s denial.

“What’s your problem? A little pain never hurt anybody, did it?”

“Well, actually…”

“What are you, some kind of girl?”

“Well, actually...”

“If I went to the doctor every time I had a pain I wouldn’t get anything done.”

“M-kay.”

You try ignoring the pain. Your degree of success is directly proportional to your circumstance at the moment. Say, picking up a check from the lottery commission versus listening to Dick Cheney speak. And so, because life is unfair and you have C-Span, you are in agony. Oh, all right. Mild but persistent discomfort.

Thus you reach stage two: Anger.

“Darn. I can’t run six miles today and do 50 stomach crunches with a barbell on my chest. Darn.”

But just about when you think you’re going to be able to enjoy stage two, you discover you are a Methodist, and therefore you must feel shame, for A) feeling pain, and B) not running a marathon anyway, you enormous wimp.

Then there’s stage three, which comes along either three minutes or three days into the pain, depending on your character or complete lack of it. Stage three entails bargaining.

“I promise to noticeably curtail my consumption of mid-priced California wines to bring about an end to this sensation that my vital organs are in a meat grinder.”

Ah, but it’s never enough, is it…a grape is a grape is a grape, blast it.

Left alone with your meager thoughts, unable to escape them by drinking yourself into oblivion, there’s only one thing left to do. You must face facts. You are obviously dying. Your body is clearly in the grip of some fatal pestilence. You’ve reached stage four, when you finally agree to see the doctor because you already know what he’s going to say anyway.

“Pee in this cup. You have a bladder infection. Take this antibiotic and drink lots of water. Don’t mention it.”

And finally, stage five. You feel like an idiot.

Now at my age, I zip through these stages pretty quick, simultaneously even, thanks to a discovery I made by leaving Nebraska. That would be my Jewish friends.

When my Jewish friends feel something amiss in their bodies, they go to the doctor. Boom, right to the doctor. No denial, no shame, no weirdness. There may be non-Jewish people who do this, but I don’t know any. I first observed the phenomena with a sort of detached smugness, because well, they couldn’t be expected to be as tough as I, a hearty Midwestern sort. Then I noticed which of us expended more mental energy on the simple act of self-care, and it wasn’t them. I’m nothing if not mentally efficient. Some may say “lazy,” but quibbling about semantics is mentally inefficient.

So now when I have mystery pain, I go to the doctor. Just like that. If the pain doesn’t subside immediately, I can skip the shame and go straight to the drama of dying. It’s so liberating to cast off all of those unhealthy emotional maneuvers, that I almost forget about the pain.

Just kidding.

Sunday, September 22, 2002

Copyright 2010 by Deborah McAdams. All Rights Reserved. For Reprint Rights, click here.