The Planet of Pain

I live on two planets. One of them is regular Planet Earth. Sure, I’m a senior with my share of aches and pains. I have to exercise a lot to keep the joints moving, and to build strength in my back to deal with bad spinal osteoarthritis. My activities are more limited than they used to be, but I can still look after my home, run errands, go to band rehearsal, meet with friends. It’s a quiet life, but I’m content with it. Then all of a sudden, I make one wrong move, or even just cough or sneeze, and I’m catapulted over to the Planet of Pain.

Someone has lit a match to my spine. The sharp, searing, white-hot pain shoots across my hip and down my right leg. The tiniest movement sets it off. It’s hard to put my right foot down, so I limp and scuttle and hang on to the walls to get around. I can’t roll over in bed. I try to find one position that’s bearable and stay put, but after an hour or so of lying down the pain is worse. It takes about ten minutes of scrabbling around, a millimetre at a time, to get from lying down to sitting up. These osteoarthritis flare-ups last anywhere from a couple of days to a couple of weeks. After a few days, I’d gladly jump off a bridge, but how can I get to one? I can’t get out the door, can’t even bend to tie my shoes.

I know the flare-up will end sooner or later, but how do I live through it in the meantime? For pain relief, all I have are Tylenol and Naproxen, and they don’t do anything for pain like that. I can’t escape in sleep, because the pain keeps waking me up. I detour to the twelfth century with Brother Cadfael, or to 50 BC with Astérix. I turn on CBC Radio and let those calm, rational voices wash over me. I’m just trying to get from one minute to the next and don’t much care what they’re saying. I just need reassurance that there’s still a sane world out there. Eventually I’ll get back to Planet Earth.

The Internet is full of advice for coping with osteoarthritis flare-ups. Most of it is pitifully inadequate and must be written by people who have never experienced a flare-up. The best advice I can find comes from the sixteenth century. The French essayist, Michel de Montaigne, suffered from kidney stones, which cause acute episodes, sort of like my osteoarthritis flare-ups. Montaigne doesn’t complain. Instead, he plays a mind game. He tries to persuade himself that the stones are a blessing. His suffering provides him with valuable training in Stoicism. During an acute episode, he can show off his courage in front of his friends. And best of all, as he says in his essay, On Experience:

Is there anything so sweet as that sudden change, when from extreme pain, by the voiding of my stone, I come to recover as if by lightning the beautiful light of health, so free and so full, as happens in our sudden and sharpest attacks of colic? Is there anything in this pain we suffer that can be said to counterbalance the pleasure of such sudden improvement? How much more beautiful health seems to me after illness, when they are so near and contiguous that I can recognize them in each other's presence in their proudest array, when they vie with each other, as if to oppose each other squarely! Just as the Stoics say that vices are brought into the world usefully to give value to virtue and assist it, we can say, with better reason and less bold conjecture, that nature has lent us pain for the honor and service of pleasure and painlessness.