Ah. No. Um. The one I was telling you about is Gasp, Shake, Thank You. I’m still not sure if you’ve read it? If not, please be prepared for, er, intensity.

[runs away and hides]

Tjan, you can ALWAYS comment, there’s no need to save it for special occasions!

With your thrilling history of injury, you’ve had a lot more experience coping with chronic pain than me. And your attitude is clearly healthier. But I think we deal with pain in different ways. I simply can’t, er, enjoy it without tension and panic and the humiliation of pandering to someone else’s sadism. And you know I rigidly suppress all those emotions in everyday life. My first reaction is still to tense up and resist, but after that I do try to do the relaxation and acceptance thing. It hurts less that way, yes. But I think the most effective vanilla coping mechanism for me is simply dissociation.

To clarify about those tweets, I was happy because I was surprised by the pain – I was no longer automatically initiating the relax-and-dissociate pain management process without thinking about it. And the point when I started getting really and truly depressed about the pain last year was when I finally sought medical help and got iatrogenic complications instead. I had already pretty much accepted that I’d never type again, so what really sent me over the cliff was the thought of enduring everyone’s helpful suggestions for the rest of my life. Especially my nearest and dearest. It was a pretty awful time.

I suppose you are right, there is a parallel. When it’s fun, I don’t react directly to the physical pain, it’s all about someone else’s emotional sadism. And when it’s not fun, I can shrug off the physical pain, but it’s other people’s reactions that really do me in.

P.S. I don’t know another soul on earth who could do what you did in that half-hour before the morphine. You are just better at pain, all kinds.

In my teens I read a book, one of those long-drawn political intrigue novels of ancient China. In one description on how to survive torture they talked about the ebb and flow of pain, how one breathes through it. Reminds me of a description of the Lamaze technique, though no personal experience there I’m afraid. Or maybe I’m mixing up the novel with with the technique.

All I can say is that there are good days and bad days. Most times when I don’t pay much attention to it, it goes away by itself. Not ignoring, just accepting it’s presence and carrying on with what I’m doing. An old friend who doesn’t need you to fuss over them. But I know if the pain manages to incite a negative emotional reaction – regret, anger, grief – it’s going to hang around longer. I’d done the the best I could under the circumstances becomes almost like a warding mantra.

Under a different context, I deal with pain with pretty much the same principles. Except that the experience is by choice. Accept, disperse, sink into it, let yourself be engulfed by it. Is there really a difference?

(*) This comment specifically excludes the excruciating half an hour between the fall and the morphine injection. There is no preparation or technique to handle that. Unless one gets a limb mangled on a regular basis.

Your comments always make me reread my writing to find out if I really did what you said! And you are right about pain being useful and revealing – but you’re way ahead of me. I simply don’t have that distance.

Then again, when I’m scening, distancing myself from the pain is the last thing I want to do. When that happens, it represents some kind of failure by me or the top. I wonder if that striving for surrender, or at least raw reaction, carries over into my vanilla life? Hmmm.

Your comments are way too interesting. :)