The Rock
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Thunder ripples through the cumulonimbus cloud encroaching on the walls of the valley as I stretch backwards over a rock. Spine shattering pops of release ricochet down my back as I bend back over the rock, counting seconds silently as the camera’s timer winds down. There is a sweet stretch-I linger over the rock after the shutter fires, eyes closed, rock ridge pressing between my vertebrae.
I’ve lived in intermittent chronic pain my entire life, with the intermittent becoming intractable several years ago. Pain is an intimate sensation-everyone has their own relationship with it, their own emotions bound up in the experience of neurons flaring warning signs. For myself, pain is a neutral phenomenon, not inherently negative or positive, but rather a banal, varied sensation that resides everywhere, though not all at once.
By the river I was making an ode to Prometheus, the Titan bound to a rock doomed to have eagles eat his liver endlessly for the sin of stealing fire from the gods and giving it to humans. I stumbled back and forth from the camera to the rock, carefully backbending over and resting against the steep slope of the river boulder, feeling the beginnings of what would bloom as bruises later in the evening in the middle of my spine.
I have a habit of injury. It is partly a feature of hypermobility-my tissues extend and tear far easier than someone without hypermobile tissues. It is also tied to chronic pain to me, in the way that I never quite know where the edge of ability is. When it all aches, there is a severe subtlety in knowing when the pain turns from the normal amount into an injury. It is a mutable line that fluctuates impossibly, a fluidity between what is acceptable and what is beyond my limits.
Physical therapy is a constant companion, a tool aimed to reduce the amount of injuries I experience (and theoretically bring about a reduction of pain which has not yet materialized). There is a saying of performing exercise into discomfort, but not into pain, yet in my body the line between those two things is blurred, pain being the baseline of sensation. When asked to demonstrate the range of motion of a joint I am often told to stop when it hurts, yet what am I supposed to do when it hurts at rest? Hence I often score higher on function assessments than is accurate to my life, as it is relatively easy to lift my arm above my head once under the gaze of an assessor, yet my shoulder often slips from its socket when I put away dishes on the highest shelf.
Blood rushes through my jugular as I invert on the rock again, my face growing flushed with the effort of clinging to the rock with my arms. Each day, Prometheus’ liver would regenerate so that his torture by the beaks of the eagles could continue. The human liver is capable of regenerating even if 90% of it is removed, though at the time of Titans I am unsure if that was known. I wonder at the sensation of a liver growing. The liver itself has no nerve endings, though the fleshy capsule encasing the vital organ is quite sensitive.
Doctors are often confused at my lack of interest in pharmaceutical pain management, by my acceptance of pain as a part of my life. Through my tumultuous experiences in the medical system, I’ve learned that for me, with all my sensitivities to medication and temperamental brain chemistry, every pill I take is a heavy roll of the dice with disadvantage. Very little helps in the positive, and often the trade off far outweighs the impact.
This reluctance to try new treatments without adequate research and argument for them has resulted in misconceptions about the nature of my pain, or that I am incapable of managing it. As someone with a migraine disorder who has been hospitalized multiple times because of it, in the ER it is often assumed that I have done nothing at home to try to manage the overwhelming, soul rending pain that forced me into a hospital setting. Because I am not on a prophylactic or abortive medication-due to having tried many without any positive effect and plenty of negative ones, I am often spoken to like I have no experience with pain management, despite accommodating pain daily. Rather than recognizing that the pain I am seeking help with has exceeded my experienced capacity to mitigate unpleasant body sensations, I am frequently assessed as being in less pain than I am experiencing.
Certainly a lot goes into this attitude. There are strict protocols in medicine about the administration of pain medicine, insurance companies dictate when in a treatment plan a medication can be offered otherwise they won’t pay for it, nurses and doctors are increasingly overwhelmed from a flood of patients experiencing chronic and acute conditions while navigating a crumbling health system. Because I don’t see the point of dragging myself to a neurologist who only offers the same type of treatments over and over, the system views me as a non-compliant patient, or even an incompetent one.
I wonder about the mental state of Prometheus. In the myth, he is tortured for eternity, yet when does eternity become repetitious? Does the torture diminish with its banality? At what point might the pain of not only being devoured, but regenerating, become a mere fact of life? Of course, in some versions of the myth, Prometheus is freed by Hercules, a happy ending for the Titan that brought civilization to humanity.
When I first became aware that the chronic pain, the discomfort of my skin and perpetual ache in my joints, the headaches and gut pains and pelvic issues, was becoming increasingly present, without the stretches of time where it would slip under my threshold of awareness that I had experienced in my teenage years, there was a panic. At that time I was dealing with significantly more acute pain from endometriosis (a pain I still deal with, though less-so after several surgeries) and was approaching a place of non-functionality. It is the same panic I feel during a flare of status migrainosus, that the severity of my pain will become unmanageable and remain at distressing levels forever.
It is difficult to be neutral with pain that feels like you are being disassembled. Acute pain lights up the world with danger, an internal warning bell that clamors and resists being ignored. In the way that nervous systems work, however, the presence of acute pain doesn’t make the awareness of chronic pain less once the crisis has passed.
As my heartbeat rushes wetly in my ears, a shiver inducing sound rends the air as a tree from the ridge splinters, apparently of its own accord. The tree falls unseen in the woods as thunder echoes in the reverberations of shattering wood. There had been no flash of lightning, no indication that the brewing atmosphere was the source of the treefall, yet a jolt of something like primal fear came over me, a feeling that I should get out of the storm. In response to the adrenaline or the change in barometric pressure, a static flush of neural activity washes over my trigeminal nerve, body at alert beyond a clarity of senses.
In paying attention to my body closely, in a way that I was always discouraged by doctors and adults around me as a child experiencing disturbing physical sensations, I’ve come to learn the various inflections of the pain I experience. The sweet tension of a deep stretch, the sharp edge of a knee injury, the lactic acid burn of fatigue-all are sources of information about the state of my body. It has become a way of perceiving reality, a lens through which my physical experience is channeled. I no longer see pain as a punishment, but as profoundly human.