Pain Has Been My Companion

 Pain has been my companion for the past few weeks. I had expected her and her little sisters, Discomfort and Distress, to spend some time with me; I knew it to be inevitable, but I didn’t really want them to hang around and I wanted them to leave as soon as possible.

Pain pills could repress them, but they had booked their reservations for a room in my psyche at the same time I booked my foot surgery and I knew that they would be around as long as they chose and I would have to find some way to live with them.

We look for all sorts of ways to deal with unwelcome guests, most of them rather futile.  What would happen if I actually invited them in and tried to get to know them?  To live and talk with Pain?  To see if there were any gifts in this adversity of being unable to walk on my right foot and to spend time waiting for healing to solidify the bones, mend the nerves, ligaments and tendons and meld the flesh together along the jagged lines of incisions and stitches?

It’s not something I really wanted to do, but my time spent in Wellspring, a program of spiritual deepening and reflection, made me consider that it could have value for spiritual growth.

I had done some preparation for my healing time…books to read, projects that could be done sitting, computer files to clean up, movies to watch.  I had some family assistance to fetch and carry, and a walker and a nifty little scooter to aid me in getting around where I needed to go.  

When the nerve block wore off a few days after the surgery, I had hoped that healing was well under way.  When I visited the doctor after 6 days, I was feeling optimistic about the recovery.  It seemed to be going so much better than my knee surgery 8 months before.

I think Pain considered my optimism to be misplaced.  My sleep became  sporadic and the numbness was bothersome.  I found I needed a pain pill after several nights without them.  Now my sick room was getting rather crowded.  Uncertainty and Fear were moving in.  Was this really healing properly?  Would there be permanent nerve damage to my foot?  It hurt.  I sat up in my bed at 3:00 a.m. 

I was a whiny crybaby…”It hurts, it hurts, it hurts,” I moaned. 

 
I felt my personality split and some mature, disdainful part of me looked on pityingly.  It made the whiny part of me whine even louder.  I don’t think my hope for an intellectual relationship with Pain was going that well.  She was having her way with me.

Thankfully, I wasn’t alone.  All three of our cats had been sleeping with me for the last few days.  This was not typical.  Often, I had one or two of them for portions of the night, but since the surgery they had lined themselves up on one side of the bed, a bulwark against the night.  

Now, KitKat, generally the most aloof of the three, came and curled around my head to give me comfort.  I was less alone; companions, human or animal, can help.  Empathy, that innate capacity to recognize the bodily or emotional feelings of others, can exist within and between living creatures.  So, Pain can open the door to positives, as well as negatives, like this caring act.

With positives and negatives in mind, maybe I just needed to dress Pain in different clothes.  Pain was, perhaps, just a side effect of healing and I needed to see her in a different light.  A process, a physical manifestation of cells doing their repair job.  Maybe it just annoying, not distressing. 

 
Not so fast. Pain has created holes for thoughts, feelings and fears to wander through.  Mortality keeps peeking through, Age and Decline also.  Optimism has not yet returned and Patience seemed to be uninterested in spending time with me.  Boredom planned a visit.  

Pain, even of this rather benign variety, is a tough opponent.  I have not yet made her into a friend, come to understand her very well or have a triumph to celebrate.  All I have to say about this visit with Pain is that I see her, I am engaged in a conversation and I hope to be wiser in the end; but if she decides to leave before Wisdom arrives, I won’t bar the door.