Peace Body Pain Body - by Jarad Bruinstroop
ISLAND | ONLINE ONLY
I wanted to write about peace.
I’m standing behind the register at work, waiting for the end of time. A bee or wasp stings my lower back. The pain is shocking. I keep working — there is no one to cover me. The pain shoots down my leg and into my groin as though a bluebottle has clamped to the small of my back. On my break, I undress in the staff toilets, but there is no insect trapped in my uniform, no mark on my skin.
For three days the pain does not fade. A friend convinces me to spend the money to see a doctor.
The doctor examines me. She takes swabs, orders blood and urine tests and an x-ray to check for kidney stones.
I begin to use the handrail when climbing stairs.
The tests show nothing. The x-ray is clear. The doctor refers me to a urologist.
The pain settles into a burning ache that lasts from waking to sleep. I wait for my urology appointment. I take painkillers and lie on the couch with a heat pack. I move as little as possible. I’m afraid something is very wrong.
I take the day off work. The urologist examines me. He orders a CT scan and an ultrasound. The appointment costs a week’s wages.
The CT scan and the ultrasound show nothing. The urologist suggests physiotherapy. Come straight back if you start pissing blood, he says.
I learn to push myself out of bed with my arms.
I see my first physiotherapist. I do the exercises diligently, but they don’t help. I see my second physiotherapist. I do the exercises diligently even though they sometimes make the pain worse. The appointments are expensive but my mother gives me some money. I’ve been in pain for six months. My pain is officially chronic.
*
My doctor refers me to the spinal clinic at the hospital. While I wait for an appointment, she sends me to a private pain specialist. We spend half an hour discussing a popular novel he is reading. Then he recommends a series of steroid injections into my lumbar facet joints. Non-invasive, low risk, very common. His fee, plus the anaesthetist’s fee, plus the private-hospital room fee equals two month’s wages. I go home and file the quotes away in an increasingly thick folder labelled ‘pain’.
I go back to my doctor. She refers me to a medical clinic that will do some of the injections for free. I have the injections. They don’t help.
I see my third physio. I see a musculoskeletal therapist. I see a remedial massage therapist. I see a chiropractor. I see an acupuncturist. I’ve been in pain for over a year.
“At my initial appointment, the head of the spinal clinic asks me how I’m handling the pain. I feel like I’m going mad, I say. Nothing seems to help. He assures me he believes my pain is real. It hadn’t occurred to me that it might not be.”
At my initial appointment, the head of the spinal clinic asks me how I’m handling the pain. I feel like I’m going mad, I say. Nothing seems to help. He assures me he believes my pain is real. It hadn’t occurred to me that it might not be. Later I read about the link between chronic pain, depression and suicide and realise he was assessing my state of mind.
At the hospital, I see my fourth, fifth and sixth physios. Each starts with the same exercises that haven’t worked before.
I can’t shake the feeling that something might have been missed. Pain for so long without cause seems nonsensical. One physio reassures me: if it was bad, cancer in the bone for example, we’d know by now. The pain would be unbearable.
At the hospital, they call chronic pain ‘persistent pain’. ‘Persistent’ has a more positive connotation, but it also suggests the pain has agency. The pain does not persist. I persist.
The head of the spinal clinic tells me there’s no point in more physiotherapy, since I reported no benefit from it. I ask him what he would do if he were me. He says, I would try to learn to live with the pain. We are talking on the phone, so I can’t see his face. And he can’t see the expression on mine.
I have tried living with the pain. Living with the pain is what I do every day.
“I have tried living with the pain. Living with the pain is what I do every day.”
An MRI, two CT scans, an x-ray and an ultrasound show nothing that explains the pain. The pain does not respond to physical therapy. Pain without an identifiable cause is called idiopathic. Idio: one’s own. Pathos: suffering.
*
I wanted to write about peace. To find some for myself. I have no idea how this would work.
Idiopathic chronic pain is considered a malfunction of the nociceptive system. The brain is creating pain, though there is no tissue damage. Acute pain, pain that lasts as long as our tissues are injured, means something — move away, be careful, rest. Pain is meaning. Chronic pain upends the logic of body. The message that should be most important — that your body requires protection from physical harm — is now meaningless noise.
Before I began, I knew that peace would be an impossible subject. Even more abstract than pain and twice as ineffable. I’m speaking here of personal peace.
The pain is a car alarm wailing all day and night outside my window. Shut up, I am trying to work. Shut up, I am trying to be happy. Shut up, I am trying not to be in pain.
“The pain is a car alarm wailing all day and night outside my window. Shut up, I am trying to work. Shut up, I am trying to be happy. Shut up, I am trying not to be in pain.”
After dinner with a friend, we pay the bill and prepare to leave. Outside she turns and retraces her steps to find me still easing myself out of the low chair.
The pain echoes and echoes. A citation without an original source.
Drivers curse me at pedestrian crossings. They rev their engines, beep their horns.
I’m in pain and it means nothing.
I’m in pain and it means nothing — except that it can’t mean nothing. If pain is perception and perception is meaning then meaningless pain is an aporia. Too much meaning, and too little.
*
When I was 21, a government psychiatrist approved me for a pension on the grounds of psychological disability. But you’ve got to keep fighting, he said. We don’t want you ending up on the scrapheap of life.
In constant pain, the body chants: what does this pain mean?
I’ve thought a lot about the scrapheap of life. A towering pile of writhing limbs, defunct bodies. Who ends up there? Who decides?
Not long after the pain starts, I become terrified of a man who lives on my street.
Pain never means just one thing.
I’ve seen the man before and never paid him much attention. But at the bus stop one morning, he tells me to get the fuck away from him. A few weeks later, he runs at me with his arm raised as if to strike me, before swerving away.
Pain is the inevitable result of the body.
A month later, as I stand on the corner late one night, I see him waiting to cross towards me. The lights change. He doesn’t move. He isn’t waiting to cross. He’s waiting for me. A switch flips in my brain and I’m scared he will kill me. I walk in a wide arc around him. He yells at me as I pass but I’m too panicked to make out the words. I hurry down the street as best I can. I don’t know if he’s following me so I duck down the driveway of a block of units near my house and hide behind the building. I crouch in the dark for a long time.
Many thinkers have made the point that individual peace leads to peace between people. The maths is simple enough. If I’m at peace and you’re at peace, what quarrel can we have?
Our word ‘pain’ derives from the Latin poena, meaning ‘penalty’. I, of course, am too modern to believe that pain is a punishment from God, but it bothers me that this meaning lurks in the word.
I read a student’s short story that contains the word ‘pain’ eleven times and ‘agony’ twice. Too much pain, I write.
“I read a student’s short story that contains the word ‘pain’ eleven times and ‘agony’ twice. Too much pain, I write.”
The man on the street becomes a horror-movie villain in my mind. I check behind the curtains. I don’t close my eyes in the shower. I leave my house by the back door and jump the fence to bypass my street. I’m aware I’m overreacting, but I can’t stop.
Gangaji, the spiritual teacher, asks two questions. One: what do you want? Two: what will that give you? The practice is designed to lead beyond your initial answer, towards what you actually want from life. I never get further than peace. Peace is a kind of bedrock. Compare: rock bottom.
Pain defeats language. I think I am a wolf howling at the moon.
I start feeling pain in my left heel, first when I bend, then all the time. Achilles tendon, says the student podiatrist I see cheaply at the uni clinic. Make sure you do your exercises. The last thing you want is for it to become chronic.
Wolves don’t howl at the moon. They howl to connect with their pack and to warn off strangers. The moon means nothing to the wolf.
My father visits during the pandemic. I haven’t seen him for three months. We stand outside the house, two arms-lengths apart, and chat in lieu of dinner for his birthday. I have to concentrate to hear him over the pain. I don’t want to, but I wrap the conversation up. I need to go inside and lie down.
A few weeks later the pain in my heel is gone. I wasn’t diligent with my exercises. The pain just resolved, as though it was never there at all.
*
I can go months without thinking about peace.
Here is another fact about me: I haven’t slept well in twenty years. Being woken by pain is different. I wake as though a stranger has entered the room.
The received wisdom is that men don’t like to admit they are in pain.
I spend a lot of time talking with my therapist about the man on the street. My response isn’t proportionate to the threat he may pose to me. It doesn’t matter. The switch is turned on. I avoid the street whenever I can.
I wanted to write about peace. What would that give me?
Sometimes it feels as though I’ve been punched on the back corner of my pelvis. Being struck from behind has been a fear of mine most of my life. It happened once when I was walking home from school. A punch to the back of the head announced a beating which left me with a black eye and a split lip. I can’t remember if they called me faggot while they beat me. It may have been implied.
Pain has made my body weak. I can’t move quickly. I don’t lift heavy things. It’s difficult to exercise. On the street, I’m aware of a new vulnerability.
Not long after the pandemic begins, I go rummaging in my garage for a book called The Little Book of Peace. When I find it, in a tub labelled ‘books — including masculinity’, I’m disappointed. Its actual title is The Pursuit of Peace. I know all about the pursuit already.
I don’t see the man for the months I’m in isolation. It’s a reprieve of sorts.
I try to read about the structural and functional changes in the brain associated with chronic pain, but I can’t concentrate.
Faced with unrelenting pain I go blank. A curtain is drawn.
“I try to read about the structural and functional changes in the brain associated with chronic pain, but I can’t concentrate. Faced with unrelenting pain I go blank. A curtain is drawn.”
*
Chronic pain is inherently ascetic, a stripping away of the non-essential, an enforced abstinence from sensual pleasure.
We can only know peace through our bodies. See also: pain
Some lobotomy patients report feeling pain but not being bothered by it.
One morning, during isolation, I have the urge to pirouette in my slippers on the polished wood. Fuck it, I want to move. Some sense fails and I hit the floor. My spine judders like an old gate. I’m not injured, but I am aware of a limitation, a new boundary of self, which is itself an injury.
‘Pain has an element of blank’, says Emily Dickinson, but it is not blank enough.
Or perhaps it is too blank and that is why I am writing about it.
It started as if. As if a bee had stung me. As if hot wires were being threaded through my body. Now it is its own thing. It has driven off comparison, metaphor, any allies in language.
There can be no history of peace. Peace is now or not at all. ▼
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