Make no mistake, and you certainly don’t need me to remind you of this, life provides each one of us with steady doses of various kinds of pain. Today mine is mostly located in my urinary tract, aggravated by a coudé catheter placed after a surgery it seems unlikely I needed in the first place (with a second catheter inserted in an ER after 7 stressful hours straining to urinate the next evening after removing the first). It is day four of the catheter and piss bag, and I must say, it is uncomfortable, occasionally painful and a fucking drag in many different ways.
There are all kinds of pain. Every kind of pain is made worse by enflamed emotions. The realization that the pain we are suffering, the result of someone else’s thoughtlessness, is unnecessary, could have been easily prevented had we not misplaced our trust, is maybe the most tormenting thing we can learn about our pain. In the hours after leaving the ER the other night I was in a rage against the negligent, confident, smiling surgeon who’d done no tests, relying on tests done by a prior sociopath who had done no tests either, before forging ahead blindly with surgery under general anesthesia. I sincerely wanted to punch his lights out. This rage certainly made the physical pain I was experiencing much worse.
I have found, and I confirmed this again the other day, that sitting in a quiet place and writing out a schematic of what is going on, explaining it to yourself as simply and directly as you can, as if you were talking to a sympathetic friend, can give substantial relief from the emotional part of pain.
My initial angry writing was a torrent of what happened to me as a result of a ten minute surgery I spent 14 hours in the hospital for (4 of them in the ER correcting the painful condition I was left with), why it was all so gratuitous, and inexcusable, and disrespectful, and avoidable and sickening and fucked up. That menu of gristly details went on for a few pages. I then emailed my cousin, an expert in medical malpractice, and briefly laid out my case for a breach of the legal standard of care that a doctor, even in a soul-dead corporate medical culture like ours, owes to a patient. These writings gave me slight relief, to have the ugly details set out on paper.
It was the following day, when my anger had cooled slightly, along with the inflammation of my abused urinary tract, which had been torn by the “non-invasive” procedure (first do no harm), that I was able to distill the pain down to the principle of trust. Much of the pain I was feeling was about a violation of trust. What is trust, how do we know when we can trust somebody, what do we do when someone proves they can’t be trusted? Turning to these philosophical questions, illustrated with details of two lying, defensive, unethical doctors who blamed their patient for their own inattention to the patient’s best interest, reduced my anger by a substantial margin. I felt much better after writing this.
Writing that gave me a better frame to look at my current frustrating situation through. This same analysis can be applied to many things in our current world, where liars are frequently rewarded with great power and those who cling to the truth are seen as somehow weak and contemptible. We don’t need to make an explicit connection to a corrupt and threatening new status quo to consider the basic question, an important one for everyday life: how do we know when we can trust somebody?
I have to say, in passing, that a new detail installed by WordPress on a page they no longer support (this particular design), the automatic, intermittently undefeatable “group blocks,” makes editing almost impossible once you’ve gone on to the next paragraph. I will have to go over this again on my phone to make it more clear, and the thought of that extra step makes my irritated urethra clench a bit. What is it with these fucking tech bro motherfuckers, who know better than any of us what features we want suddenly disabled, what new inconveniences coders like Big Balls will insert into formerly useful apps to make us appreciate their dull genius even more than we already do? I see now that there are three dots that can be clicked on, in addition to the normal options for formatting, and one of the options in that second pulldown menu is “ungroup”, which allows editing, but it took me weeks to discover that fix of something that wasn’t broken before in any way (and the fix of their new ‘improvement’ doesn’t work every time, as it happens). Nazi fucks.
Anyway, my point here is to underscore how helpful it can be to sit and sift through aggravations, with as few distractions as possible, and by writing and clarifying, readjust your perspective. The expression of your point of view, and the knowledge that you have set it out plainly and understandably, provides that crucial feeling of being heard, if only by yourself. If you need to explain it to someone else, you have a link you can send them, and the confidence that they will grasp what is eating you and why it is reasonable that you are feeling in the hands of cannibals.
At the moment there’s no medication I can take for the discomfort and intermittent pain of having this irritating catheter in my body, strapped to a piss bag I’m constantly having to drain. There is a kind of self-healing in laying out the good reasons for my anger and considering how to protect myself from anything like this ever being done to me again, no matter how adept the smiling psychopath is in presenting it as my best and least invasive option for curing a medical ill.
I recommend it to you, my invisible friend, as an exercise that can go a long way in self-soothing. Once you get yourself into the habit, it becomes a fairly straightforward path to partial pain relief. In the context of severe pain, I have learned, partial relief is nothing to sneeze at. Whatever practice you can develop for calming the enflamed emotions that accompany all pain is helpful. Try writing for a few minutes the next time you can’t get the thought of smashing someone’s smug face out of your mind. If it reduces your pain by 30%, you can give yourself a gentle, loving pat on the back.
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