Pain

I got a bit of a pain in my stomach, one morning this week

In truth, I reckon it was the worst pain in my stomach I ever had.

For two hours, starting at eight thirty am, I was crippled.  I couldn’t stand up, ‘couldn’t lie down.  I shuffled around the house from room to room and wished fervently for this pain to ease.

And, after the two hours, and some drugs, it did.



There wasn’t any of those rather gross drippy pukey things that can sometimes go with tummy ache.  It was just a pure pain, blunt and tight.  Afterward, someone rather unsympathetically suggested that it was a fart that went the wrong way.  That may well be all that it was.

But it showed me some things.  For starters, it showed me that I’m not nearly as good with pain as I thought I was. 

I always reckoned I was something of a tough cookie.  I never take sick days, no matter how I feel, I struggle-through.  And those few times when I have seriously injured myself, I have bourne the injury with a fair measure of stoicism and calm.  So, yeah, I’m Indiana Jones, me.

But the other morning suggested to me that, in my life, I have been blessed not to have known much real physical pain.  Also that the degrees of pain I have known may have been relatively low on some acknowledged Richter Scale of Unease.

This thought worried me quite a bit.  It’s easy to be blasé about what may lie in store for you in the future when you haven’t had an actually taste of it.  It’s like watching someone getting lashed with a cat o’nine tails in an old pirate flick and you say, “I could take that…” and then someone casually flicks the beast at your own bare back and you finally have yourself a little context for your statement.

Because when my own little pain hit, there was nothing else in the world.  Beforehand, I had a meeting to get to, calls to make, there was worries about stuff… none of those continued to exist while the pain was in town.  There was only The Pain.

The other thing I got from my twinge was a little more respect.  Respect for the people who suffer.

Apart from thinking I am Iron Man, I also reckon I am a pretty emphatic person.  I reckon I share in people’s pain a little.  It turns out that I was wrong about that too.  Someone close to me regularly phones up and says they are having a ‘bad day with their stomach’.  Until the other morning, I had not the first notion of what they might be talking about.  So, if pain is a part of your life, you have my sympathy – and a little more understanding than I had this time last week.

The last thing the pain did for me was it have me a little context.  When it was gone, I felt released -  delivered from something - and all the meetings and the phones calls and the general weight of the day ahead did not seem as heavy as it had before.

I’ll try to hold on to my feelings of empathy and release.  I’ll try to hold onto the fear a little too.  But, like the pain, these feelings dull and lessen quickly as time passes.

I may have to read this post back, to remind me.

That’s why I wrote it.