What do I care?

A woman was sobbing loudly and screaming at invisible people in front of the library today. I had been out all morning and was looking forward to getting home and eating peanut butter with homemade Parmesan crackers, so I walked on by. When I reached my bike, I looked back and saw that the only other person in the area was an adolescent boy who was beating a hasty retreat.

“Damn, I’m stuck,” I muttered. “Any other minute of any other day, and there would be a hundred drunks, druggies, pimps, whores, punks, Goths, hippies, skinheads, panhandlers, and homeless people standing around with their sleeping bags and pit-bulls admiring one another’s tattoos and nose-rings.”

“I’m having a panic attack,” she said when I asked how I might help. This didn’t fit with what I had witnessed, but I still felt relieved that she might not be out and out psychotic. She calmed down remarkably fast, so fast that I wondered if her hysteria hadn’t been a ploy to get my attention.

She sat on the edge of a concrete planter, and I sat beside her while she told me her sad story. To wit: her “boyfriend” neglected to tell her that he has AIDS, but she loves him anyway although he lost all interest in her after they had sex. Her “partner” doesn’t know about the affair, and she doesn’t plan to tell him because he would beat her up.

“Lady, you are just too stupid for words,” I thought. Still, I couldn’t bring myself to leave, at least not yet. I had decided to help, and, by god, I was going to do it—for five more minutes anyway.

She said she had walked for miles hoping to work the virus out of her system before it put down roots. She asked if drinking a lot of water might wash it out. I said I doubted it, and I then made an unforgivably practical suggestion about going to White Bird Clinic to be tested, and I tried to console her with the thought that she might not have AIDS anyway, but even if she does, people nowadays live for years with the virus.

When I finally got up to go, she thanked me sarcastically “for making fun of a serious situation.” I hadn’t done this, so I figured she was just trying to provoke me into staying, but I honestly didn’t care. The fact is that I never cared. I had done my duty as I saw it, but my heart was at home eating peanut butter on homemade Parmesan crackers.

Maybe you would have cared. Maybe you would have listened without passing judgment, but I can’t imagine how. I really can’t. The only way I can feel warm and fuzzy toward my fellow human beings is to not be around them very much. Still, if you would have cared, I hope it’s you who stops to help on the day that it’s me standing in front of the library screaming at invisible people. Not that I am given to such theatrics. No, not me. I realized when I was a little boy with a screaming sister that screamers get all the attention but none of the respect, and I came to hate them on both counts.

Chronic pain: is it for you?

Here’s how I see chronic pain. Let’s say you take it into you head to help the poorest people on earth, and you are sent to a city dump in Cairo or Mexico City. An hour after you fold the seat-table on the 747, you are standing amid Third World filth, smelling the overpowering stench and looking at the emaciated children with maggot-filled sores, and you think, “My God, I can’t take this.” But you discover that you are stronger than you thought and, after a few months, you get used to it. You still hate it, but you get used to it.

Today, I went to see Shan, my number one physical therapist (I see three in all). If I don’t have less pain in the next two weeks, Mark will want to do a joint replacement on the same shoulder that he did the decompression and tendon repair on in March, so Shan suggested a drastic approach. His “drastic approach” was to stick needles deep into my muscles and tendons. This made them twitch so violently that I bent some of the needles. Every time I thought that he surely must be finished, he would have me change positions and stick me some more. Sweat poured off me, yet the pain still wasn’t as bad as much of what I experience everyday. I tried to carry on a normal conversation. “You handle this better than anyone I’ve ever seen,” he said, and I took it as a better than average compliment. Afterwards, I was sore but a lot more limber.

I realized some time ago that if I want medical people to take my pain seriously, I have to hang tough when they hurt me. As an ob-gyn nurse, Peggy often gets patients in early labor who claim that their pain level is a ten on a scale of one to ten. Peggy will say, “Ms Babymaker, you need to pick a lower number because you’re not leaving anything for later.” I always try to leave something for later. Not that I would act any differently otherwise; I’m too macho for that. Sometimes, macho is good. Of course, emoting is good too. It’s just a question of when. I cry easily (real easily) when I’m touched or grieving, but never when I’m hurt or angry. That’s just how I am, and I like it.

The last time I cried because I was hurt or angry, I was in the fifth grade, and got into a fight with a former friend, Jack White, after school. Jack brought three other friends to the fight, and when they saw that I was winning, they penned my arms so Jack could beat me up. Only he never threw the first punch because I began sobbing at the recognition of such treachery as I had never thought possible. Aghast, they let me up without a word spoken, and I walked home still sobbing. My best friend, Grady Green, was sitting on the porch, and he consoled me. I’ll never forget that, although I don’t even remember what he said. For all I know, he didn’t say anything. That afternoon contained one of life’s saddest moments followed by one of its sweetest. I wish I had a male friend like Grady today. But I digress.

I was dizzy when I left Shan, and that wasn’t good since I was on my bike and a half hour from home with a lengthy errand to do en route. I knew it would be better to skip the errand and go ice my shoulder, but macho kicked-in again. When I finally got home, I iced my shoulder for ten minutes and then ran another errand, followed by more ice, and finally a third errand. If not for ice, I don’t know how I could bear the pain. I try to limit narcotics to the nighttime, yet I still have to get up every two hours for a new ice pack. Demerol, Vicodin, Percocet, Norco, Dilaudid; none of them are sufficient without ice. It’s quite the experience to be passed out on narcotics and sleeping pills, only to be instantly awakened by a pain that comes screaming through the darkness like an arrow out of nowhere. Fortunately, I can usually get by on either the one or the other as long as I supplement it with ice.

A lot depends on how bad the pain is, and that varies, but I would say that what annoys me worse than hurting all the time is not being able to do so many things. Even small things like running the vacuum cleaner. I’m still hoping that I’ll be back to normal in about a year, but if I have to have my right shoulder operated on again (before I have the left one done), it will be closer to two years, and there’s even the possibility that the left shoulder will require two surgeries too since it and the right one look like mirror images on an MRI.

I wish I could have avoided all this, but it hasn’t been a total loss, although I can’t think of much good to say about it either. Really, the only thing that comes to mind is that it has shown me that I’m tougher than I thought—and more adept at suffering. I might hope that it has also made me more compassionate, and maybe it has.

Despite my toughness, I think about death, a lot. It all comes down to how much pain and disability a person is willing to tolerate. I’m not near my limit because I still have hope, and I also have Peggy to consider. Death does seem like an easy way out though. I think that, well, what if I lose hope that things will ever get any better? What if I come to believe that I will always need someone to mow my fucking yard and vacuum my fucking floor, and what if I conclude that I will never pass another day without significant pain? That would be a hard row to hoe, but I could do it. I just hope I won’t have to.

I roofed a dentist office in the early ‘80s alongside Jack Tindall, the sixty-year-old man who owned it. Out of the blue one day, Jack turned to me and said, “You’re a master, and I’m a past-master.” I thought it was a strange thing to say because he was a rich man, and he didn’t have to be on that roof if he didn’t want to. Now, it’s Jack’s turn to be dead, and my turn to be a past-master, and the fact that I have the money to pay someone to mow my yard and vacuum my floor isn’t enough to compensate. Money seemed more magical when I was young and strong. Now it’s mostly good for paying medical bills. That still makes it my best friend, because without it I would be left to suffer and die like so millions of others in “the greatest nation on earth.”

If all I had to look forward to was a continual downhill slide, health-wise, I wouldn’t want to live that way, and if I didn’t have Peggy, I don’t know that I would. Some days, it’s hard to see the point, and my fantasies turn toward how I might escape. I’m only sixty though, and I do have hope for a better tomorrow, if not next year, maybe the next.

So, tell me boy, what'd you wanna burn the woods down for? Did them squirrels do something to piss you off?

“Nothing lasts; therefore nothing means anything.”

I found this sentiment in the blog of a sixteen year old. I couldn’t have written it when I was her age because I still believed, despite serious doubts about the Bible, that life had an ordained meaning. I also lacked her insight into how quickly it is over. The years I had already lived seemed like a long, long time, and I anticipated living several times longer. I still felt as lost as she, but lost in a way that I didn’t know how to articulate—not that anyone ever asked. My best guess about how to deal with my lostness was to set the woods on fire. It seemed like such a crazy idea that I thought it would get me committed to a cozy mental institution where a fatherly psychiatrist could fix me.

Why this faith in shrinks? Did you know any?

No, I had never laid eyes on a first year psychology major much less a bona fide psychiatrist, but I had read Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, in which a psychiatrist helped one of the condemned killers come to terms with his execution. I figured that, if a shrink could make a fellow feel okay about being hung before dawn in a Kansas prison, he could make him feel okay about anything.

I didn’t burn the woods down, partly because I didn’t want to burn the woods down, and partly because I worried that I would be sent to a reform school instead of a mental institution. For years, I continued to feel alone. Other people didn’t seem to share my angst, and my ever deeper and ever more raging questions about ultimate reality made me feel like a freak. I imagined that everyone else must have already found the answers I was seeking, and that their lack of apparent depth simply meant they were miles ahead of me, as if the rest of the world knew something that I didn’t. But, if this were true, I wondered, why wouldn’t they share the answers, and why did most of them seem so unintelligent?

I still feel alone, but it has moved beyond what I had thought was a remediable defect and into what I regard as the human condition. If you’re congenitally cheerful or believe in Jehovah, you might not feel it. Otherwise…

I wrote at length to the teenage blogger, pointing out that impermanence need not imply futility, although it does, in my mind, lead to sadness. All that I treasure, all that I protect, will be lost in a mere two or three decades. My photos, my writings, and the other artifacts of my life will, likely as not, end up in a landfill. Peggy will die, either a few years before or a few years after me, and in a few more years, all that we were and all that we did will be forgotten. These things will occur in roughly half the time we have already lived. If you can remain unerringly cheerful in the face of such a future, I envy you. I also suspect that you have embraced answers that are as groundless as they are comforting.