Musings & Meanderings

During the weekend, I was temporarily laid flat by, apparently, a flare up of inflammation starting at the nerve roots at the site of my spinal surgery. Despite the fact that I’ve lived with constant pain since 1980, there are always new levels which can take my breath away. Much of that impact has to do with the element of surprise, and also of not knowing whether an unbearable escalation is temporary, permanent, or even the beginning of something worse. Having a root canal without anesthetic, after my surgeon had watched me have an allergic reaction to each of the numerous unrelated anesthetics he’d tried on me, was easy in comparison to being ambushed by unexpected and unending pain.

We can learn to endure and accept astonishing levels of pain. Of the thousands of people that I’ve known and worked with over the past 27 years, barely a handful were cognizant of my having any health problems at all, even when they had been told that I did, and even when they’d seen me during the few years when I needed a wheelchair to get around. In the past, I found this baffling, and interpreted it as meaning that I should keep my physical disabilities a secret. This practice has worked well enough for most business dealings and non-intimate relationships. My pain isn’t me. It is one part of my private self. However, this also means that, for me, the potential for close relationships with others is limited by having to find people who can both learn to interact comfortably with someone they know is in severe pain, and who can delineate between a particular handicap and the rest of the person bearing it.

In fact, many people prefer not to know and can’t cope with even the idea of a ’sick’ person. Others invoke a mechanism which relegates any ‘invalid’ to the sidelines for the benevolent sounding purpose of convalescence. Go away now, dear, and come back when you feel better. My saddest observation is of others with some physical handicap who have internalized a view of themselves as ineligible to participate, or who have adopted elements of either victimhood or martyrdom, or both, in an unhealthy co-dependent response to those around them. My most inspiring observations are of the opposite cases, where individuals learn to accommodate a physical handicap, including pain, and manage to use all their skills and abilities which are unimpaired to a fuller extent even than most perfectly healthy people do. These people often develop native abilities far beyond the norm, and also far beyond a threshold of simple compensation. They can become extraordinary first because they have to, and further because of realizing that they can.

So, having a number of hours over the weekend to indulge my fondness for popular fiction, I should have been reading a Lincoln Rhyme novel, from the series by Jeffery Deaver, which features a brilliant detective who also happens to be a paraplegic. Instead, I read the ending of Scott Turow’s Ordinary Heroes. Although I would read anything written by Scott Turow (I’d add a brief on tort law to my bedtime reading if it was penned by him), I’d hesitated to buy Ordinary Heroes when it first came out. A son’s insight into a father’s memoir recounting a personal experience of WWII did not sound congruent with my recent personal challenges and state of mind. By their nature, such memoirs, real or fictionalized, tend to include agonized personal responses to pain, death, and sometimes torture. My reading this book at all is a measure of Scott’s ability to tell stories about flawed people in a flawed society without ever discarding an abiding faith in humanity and in the miracle of life. The book ends with an emphasis on the extent to which we invent our own lives, celebrating the triumph of free will juxtaposed against even the most powerful external forces.

Pain comes in many forms. Beginning as the age of 9, I learned about loss, abandonment, abuse, and surviving entirely on one’s own. Most physical pain cannot compare to what such lessons can inflict. In my personal journeys, which have ranged across an environmental gamut from gutters to palaces, I’ve seen many who didn’t survive. I think of people whose hands I held against death who died anyway, and of those who, for one reason or another, were simply unable to surmount their personal challenges. More often, I think of those who did and accomplished things that others, with far more advantages, were unable to, of people who endured and dismissed handicaps of every sort, physical and non-physical, reaching ever forward to invent themselves and the lives they believed they deserved.

Any ordinary person can do extraordinary things. I really believe this, and belief, of course, is the only requirement.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 12th, 2007 at 5:36 pm and is filed under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.