Degrees of Pain

Needless to say that was the end of the recital.

Forty-five minutes later, the world that had suddenly been transformed into pixels, resumed a normal shape, and my confused body that hadn’t been sure whether it needed to exhume the contents of my stomach or just pass into a painless world, regained some balance. Thankfully, nothing had been broken.

‘You drank your milk,’ was the doctor’s acute observation.

Thank goodness I had upped my exercise too, or so I wanted to think. I haven’t yet figured out the connection between that and the pain endurance except that, the recent intensifying of my physical training has allowed me some extra lung capacity that came in handy for counteracting the pain.

As I washed my face the next morning the pain on my hand is severe. Never would I have realized that my fingers collide in that simple act of washing my face, had it not been for this injury. I repeat the act slowly to see exactly how close the right and left come.

On my evening run I can’t do any stretches with hands facing downwards. It’s too painful. I am forced to improvise. Interesting how much blood pressure is exerted on a simple fingernail.

My doctor advised drilling the nail that took most of the impact.

At least nine to eleven persons (immediate family and three friends), had no idea that ‘they did that’. Drilling in this case, has to do with placing a thick, sharp needle - close to 1mm in size - on the bluest part of the fingernail and screwing it in, so to speak, until a tiny hole starts to form. The liquid blood comes oozing out and the pressure on the nail is relieved.

It is a perfectly painless procedure. I believe everyone else was more mortified than I was. Logically speaking, if doctors weren’t going to anaesthetize you it meant that there was probably no pain or a minimal amount involved.

Pain is sometimes a psychological experience.

You don’t look, you don’t feel. It’s sort of like not looking at the news. If you don’t watch or read the news, the world is great. It’s easy to live life in a bubble.

And sometimes it’s useful to live like that because it minimizes the distractions that come in the way of meaningful work, unless of course you are an aid worker, who has to deliver assistance to those in need in a war-ravaged country.

So, the drilling took place - my father had me save a needle. I have no idea why, but I did. I suppose he will explain his reasons in time.

Usually it has some existential twist. But suffice to say, today as I write, two of my fingers are relatively unusable in so far as they are tender to the touch and feel heavy so one must be careful not to exert them as the nails are somewhat separate from the nail bed.

But I can use them if I don’t care about infection or of losing my nails, in which case they will grow back. A short-term inconvenience however is more practical in my head so I resist the urge to exert pressure. So there it is, the hand story.

The door has earned my respect. Anything that can kill my instinctive reaction of violence against inanimate objects that injure me deserves big respec’. It had left me truly floored. To think, that this thing that allows me entry and exit to my own home, also had the capacity to render me invalid as much as it possessed the ability to grant me freedom.

I can choose how I use it however. I have to know the nature of the thing. It is susceptible to the whims of the wind, something beyond its control. I however, possess the capacity to place my hand out of its way.

Pain and pleasure are our own creation to a large extent.

Can I then really truly believe that the wall does not exist and perhaps one day walk through it? How many doors and walls and unpaved roads of the mind do we really build? And how much of the pain of incapacity is imaginary? How much happier would we be should we become aware of our degrees of pain and begin to transcend them?