Pain

.

Chronic physical pain.  Acute, agonizing, excruciating, chronic, and intensely brutal continuing physical pain.  Pain that saps the very life right out of you.  My back hurts so bad that it hurts to even breathe.  Hell on earth. 

.

It drives me down into the depths and makes me empathize with old Sisyphus as he goes through the endless and hopeless cyclical motions of his ancient curse.  (See Albert Camus’s essay on The Myth of Sisyphus to encounter what is actually a rather “cheerful” account of such existential predicaments.) 

 .

 It’s far worse if one’s painful condition is not uniformly recognized by the medical “establishment.”  Some doctors sympathize, but most just don’t understand how much it hurts.  Or give a shit.  They won’t give you legal (but controlled) pain relief medication that might help.  I most often see that very lack of remedy to be a despicable failing of the medical community.  Lack of caring (“for poor suffering creatures everywhere” – Jack Kerouac). 

.

Here I am – feeling sorry for myself.  Poor, poor, pitiful me.  I get unbelievably ugly when I’m hurting.  Not a nice guy. 

.

I admit that I don’t entirely know what medications would help relieve my acute pain.  I suppose that morphine or other narcotic pain-relievers would work in the short term, but how dangerous and addictive is that?  Sounds like bad complications.  Alcohol is the only legal short-term relief, but that’s an ancient one with its own complications. 

.

I hurt my back in the early 1970s while doing farm work.  But really, I must ask:  is it a coincidence that my major acute FMS pain started its present intensity in early 1982 after I had stopped smoking the great cannabis herb (on New Year’s Day 1980) and also had become stupidly enmeshed within the most super-stressful relationship of my entire life shortly after that?  Worst decade of my entire life.  I cannot prove any of it, but I do know for sure that my physical agony started then, along with total mental anguish.  Self-sacrifice is so primitively brutal and self-destroying. 

.

Dukkha happens.  That’s the way of it.  We are born; we live; we suffer; and we die.  But – importantly, intriguingly – in between those gates of pain we do have instances of grasping the precious gem and really living.  And we are (sometimes) rational animals who pilot our courses in astonishingly interesting directions.  That’s our glory.  We climb mountains and discover new worlds.  We have a poetic tradition of hope. 

.

I don’t know what else to say.  The pain is still reverberating deep throughout my very bones, and my mind is completely exhausted. 

.

-Zenwind.

.