I am not a masochist, let me get that out in the open right away. I do not like pain. I am very pain-averse. I am not the person who will push through. I am the person who will reach for the paracetamol or ibuprofen, because why suffer when you don’t have to? There is no gain in pain.
But pain serves a purpose. Pain is a warning sign. It is an indicator light that something is wrong. It is a ‘please stop doing that’ request. As much as my intuitive response is to use the mind to acknowledge the signal and then try to switch off the alarm – yeah, I get it, message received and understood, please cancel alert – that has limited application.
It can be helpful if, say, I have cut myself on a sharp paper edge or the brambles have scratched deeply and I have cleaned up the wound, antiseptic salved it, dressed it, done all that I can and it will be enough – that’s a good time to shut down the alarm system.
It is not helpful when the damage is internal and I can do little to redress the damage other than give the body time to heal.
I’m not talking about broken bones or serious infections or cancers where medical intervention by means of specialist drugs or surgery or even simple re-alignment and setting are clearly indicated. I’m talking about the tendons and ligaments and muscles, where even once we know what the problem is there is actually very little that can be done by intervention. I’m talking about the times when really the body has to be left to, encouraged to, supported to, heal itself.
I’m talking about me. Just recently. A shoulder injury. I’m not sure the precise nature of the damage. I know how it occurred and I knew from the outset that it would need to be allowed to heal itself with whatever support I could give it. In the meantime, it hurt! On a scale of 1 to 10 where 1 is a mild ‘ow!’ and 10 is ‘screaming agony’ this was probably a steady 3 to 4 in the background, an unignorable, keeping-me-awake dull pain, with occasional shifts into a 7 or 8 yelp when I made certain movements. I speak as someone who has never had children so my pain threshold might be quite low. It's all relative.
A few days later, when recovery had noticeably begun, I lost track of what I was doing for a split-second while drying after a shower. A simple everyday action of wrapping myself in a towel, trying to move my arm right across my body, with a slight uplift. That was a momentary full-on 10. I may have screamed. I definitely yelped. Even though (or maybe because) there was no-one to hear me I said out loud Fuck! That HURT! Shaking hurt. Cold-sweat hurt. Stomach-sick-take-a-deep-breath hurt. Too soon for more pain-killers – I was still rationing these by the recommended dose, and clock-watching to do it - but the ice pack was ready in the freezer, so I strapped that on before I
even thought about getting dressed or the fact that I was wandering around stark naked and the blinds were open. Yes: that kind of pain. The kind that blocks out reality, at least for a moment.
I strapped up, covered up, and settled down to read while my body slowly subsided back to a background three-and-a-bit. It would take all day to get below that – not helped by my trying to figure out which clothes I could get into and out of, and needing to carry a day-sack, and boring things like that. I continued to watch the clock and snack on Nurofen.
However…I didn’t come to talk about the pain itself…that’s just context. I may have lost you already, we’re always told to leave out the boring contextual bit until later. Ah well. Back to the point..
…which, as I have given the context, has to start with the question as to why, then, do I feel the need to talk about the gifts of pain. It’s not feeling like much of a good thing so far. But there are upsides.
Those who read me regularly will know that I have occasional lapses into the deep dark well of depression. I was sliding into one of those just prior to this injury. I was thrown a lifeline by a dear friend who called B.S. on some of my thinking and gently steered me in another direction, which helped, but to be honest, in retrospect, I’m not sure it helped as much as pure physical pain has
done. Having to focus on my body, what it is doing, what it is stopping me from doing, the actual management of the sensation when I’m trying to find a position in which I can sleep. How to get into clothes which I’d never have recognised depended on my shoulder-mobility. All the things I do without thinking: getting the plates off the high shelf, tying my hair up, shouldering (!) my everyday backpack.
All of these things pull me out of my funk. I can’t faff about my mental state when my body is crying out for help. A slap around the face from my own body brings me up short. It’s a stop inventing possible problems and deal with this one! moment. I would rather not have to, but I have to accept that it works.
There is the first gift: focussing on the body takes us out of the head.
That is something my Tai Chi teacher has been trying to instil for a few years now: getting into your body takes you out of your head. I think I finally get it.
~
I only know roughly what the injury was, but it was clear what it was not. No broken bones. Nothing cancerous. Not an infection. I can pinpoint the moment of injury. I know what I did, even if I don’t know the precise nature of the damage that movement did internally. It was purely physical, and of a kind that cannot – so far as I know – be fixed by surgery. So, I had to be kind and gentle and give my body time to do what I know it can do. My body is an amazing self-fixing machine. My immune system is strong. I have mental support systems in place. I know which foodstuffs and supplements are helpful. I know which crystal resonances will support me in this. I have my own self-generated meditation practices. The medical people tell me that cold will work better than heat, so I gravitate to ice-packs and compression rather than warm blankets. But yes, the occasional hot bath purely for the comfort factor. Arnica, internally and externally. And rest…most of all…don’t work through the pain, listen to it. Pain is a messenger.
I’m still listening. And paying attention.
I’m almost out the other side of this as I (re)write this piece. I have spent some of the time out of action looking for the upsides, the gifts in not being able to do what I really wanted to be doing.
I wanted to be doing Zumba, to be dancing, to be swimming. Every single one of those was (a) going to be excruciating (I know from the final Friday’s experience of trying to work through it) and (b) likely to make the condition worse (ditto). I cancelled all plans – and left it open as to when I would be back in class, back on the floor, back in the pool.
Then I shifted to what I could still do. I could still write, I could still walk.
I was due up at the coast – so I booked an extra night at one of my favourite hotels. I wouldn’t get to enjoy the pool, but it would simplify logistics and carry-loads and open up a little more walking time. Whenever we are prevented from doing one thing, it opens up an opportunity to do something else.
I try to focus on the lessons, because lessons are also gifts. My yelp-moment was a reminder that I cannot rush my recovery (Oh yes! What is that advice I have been givingsomeone else of late?!) It is a lesson in patience. Not very good at patience. It is a lesson in being flexible, allowing plans to be disrupted and making…not the best of a bad job, that’s too negative a take on it…making the best of a different scenario.
So then…what did I do, that I might not otherwise have done?
For one thing, I spent a lot of time in gratitude. I thought about friends and acquaintances who are dealing with end-of-life, or degenerative conditions, or chronic illnesses. I thought about the very limited degree to which my own thing was actually impacting on what I could do – got grateful
that it was my left shoulder not my right, that it was a shoulder and not a knee or an ankle, so I can still walk about and do what I need to do. That it did not impact on my livelihood. I thought about my age, and my health generally, and deeply acknowledged how lucky I am. When my mind wasn’t occupied with talking to the part of my body that needed to de-stress, subside, and re-knit, it was
actively engaged in messaging every other cell within me and saying thank you for every thing you do. When did you last thank your toes? Or the bridge of your nose? (Just saying!)
I stayed that extra night at one of my favourite hotels – in a room I had not been in before - but then I took a measure of the weather and cancelled the trip along the coast to go write outside. I stayed in bed for a day. Well, not quite "in bed" but I did spend most of the day in that quirky hotel room with a row of defunct clocks on one wall and a luggage rack with ancient suitcases high on another. And the bed was the only place to sit, so I sat there, or sprawled. I looked at the trees through the window and wrote a poem. I noticed snowdrops and aconite and went out specifically to photograph these signs of Spring encroaching. I walked up through the wood and looked at a stormy sea as the rain moved back in.
I couldn’t figure out how to find my usual channels on the TV so I dropped into hours of “true crime” stories, UK stories, which all seemed to suggest that most murders happen within relationships which is doubly horrible, but made me feel a bit safer. And when that got to be too much, I went to the other extreme and watched the Barbie movie. It was a delight. I think.
I stood for a very long time under a very hot shower.
I ate shortbread. When I declined “housekeeping” the lovely lady pressed more biscuits on me. What do I know? Maybe torn ligaments or stretched tendons or whatever the thing was would benefit from more sugar. My mood certainly did.
I kept taking the tablets and noticed precisely when they took effect – and then I decided to start stretching the interval between them. The last dose was at 2.20am the morning that I was leaving to come home. I pushed the next one back at half-hourly intervals, that got stretched further by train times, and bus diversions, and the joy of refreezing the ice pack and feeling that numbing cold again.
The following week was spent entirely at home. It was like being back in lockdown. I went out to the shops and came home again. I didn’t see anyone, other than shopkeepers and strangers, and the few of the neighbourhood people who smile and speak in passing. I had very few phone calls. The bluebirds and robins and blackbirds and magpies came to visit. The weather was unkind, but kind enough to reveal the full moon. It was a reminder of the hardship of those years, but also the aspects of them that I actually loved…the things I have let go that I might reclaim…the long hours of reading…writing…being still and quiet. I read a lot in that following week.
Re-reading His Dark Materials took me back to my first reading of it, and deep into the story itself. At the same time, I delved into the pamphlets and literary journals in my bedroom heap of unread
stuff. Much headway was made. I submerged myself in short stories and poetry, and hoped I was absorbing why the good stuff worked, and simply shedded any inclination to worry about how much I was skimming. The TBR tower became a small pile.
Time on my hands. I dove back into the Uncle Jim box. I filtered things out – and wrote about them in the ongoing draft of my Memoir of Things – I picked up treasured and important objects and responded – I wrote about what they are, I wrote poems, I started to transcribe a notebook - I delved into a website that helped me identify unknown people, I wrote and wrote and wrote. I started to unbraid the stories – to give each their own breathing space. I created a space on the backburner of my brain to figure out what to do with these things later. The gift for now has been the space to start diving down into them.
Somewhere in amongst it all, I did feel miserable and so booked myself a few days away. I had said that I was going to travel less often this year – and maybe one of the gifts is the chance to reconsider that decision. Make it less of a rule, either in the doing or no doing. The lesson of being flexible.
The final gift was that of simply not being busy. This meant that I noticed the snowdrop by someone’s garden gate, and later the one in my own garden. I was conscious of the daylight hours extending by an hour. The fluctuating temperatures. Cold and then not so much. My first ‘sitting on the back step’ moment of the year...
...Imbolc. The first day of Spring. Cross-quarter day. Half-way between the Solstice and the Equinox for those who measure their year by the sun. Snow moon at the full, for those who follow the reflective feminine calendar. It is quarter to five, by the clock, in the East of England. A February day. It is still daylight and I am sitting outside.
A greying towards evening twilight kind of daylight, but still, I am sitting outside.
This morning I wrote in my journal how I have lost this habit of sitting on the back stoop with my notebook. I cannot remember when I last did this. The habit fell away when I stopped coming out at minute with candles and booze, when I decided early nights and sleep would be better for me. It fell away as a habit when my eyesight failed to the point of needing spectacles to write, and the removal of them to see my surroundings clearly, and a different pair to identify the birds at the bottom of the garden. It wasn’t a habit that needed to be broken. It needed to be adapted, but instead I had let it fall away.
So here I am. At Imbolc. Late afternoon. On the back stoop as Spring creeps in.
I found my first snowdrop of the year in the street by the Fiveways. I crouched down to photograph it with my phone. It was close by someone’s fence, someone’s gate, and I am crouching in the street, a pack full of shopping on my back and the phone in my hand. No-one stopped. No-one commented.
A few days later I found a swathe of them, scattered with winter aconite, under the trees in a hotel garden.
Today I found the first one in my own garden. I bought bulbs but never got around to planting them. I will put them in later this year…they may take…they may not. In the meantime this lowly individual has made her way into my back plot. She shines brilliant against the wet bark covered ground and is half-strangled by a bramble runner that I will cut in the next few days. Not today. I have worked today, and my shoulder is not yet healed, and I have put my tools away. Instead I kicked the runner aside and crouch again to capture the moment, this time on my camera, hoping to catch the glisten of the raindrops she holds.
The seat was wet when I came out. I covered the damp with a cushion. The table was wet and I dried it with a towel more usually used for dishes…it would wash clean again. Now it is starting to rain again, so I will go indoors soon, but I wanted to sit out for a moment. I wanted to notice the warming weather, the lengthening daylight hours, that the robins and the bluetits and the blackbirds
are finding their accommodation, staking out their territory – singing from the top of the holly tree beyond the fence, bouncing from the nest box to the wisteria to the seed feeders, scrabbling in the turned earth for crawling things.
I want to notice again the work I have done in the garden and all that is still waiting for my attention. The japanese screens are rotting away and I don’t know how to replace them. I’ve cut back the fuchsia, not as far down as it needs to go, but as much as I could manage in one hit. I’m sure it will survive. The ivy and I continue our perennial battle, that I want to neither win nor lose.
Imbolc. The beginning of Spring. The beginning of regrowth, of ploughing and planting. There are seed potatoes chitting on the kitchen window sill – a word I hadn’t heard until a week ago. They’ll be ready to go into the earth when I come back from a weekend away. I’ve cleared the deadwood / deadleaf away from the strawberry bed and the herbs. I talk to the fruit trees to encourage them that the harsh pruning we did in the Autumn was well-meant. I hope they will recover. The rambling rose most certainly will, there are green leaves at her base already and a single pink bud on a remaining tall stem.
Being on the injury list has taken me away from exercise classes and meeting up with friends, but it has also brought me back to my garden, to the connection between my writing and being outside. The next few days are forecast to be dark and wet and I don’t know when I will next sit out here. I don’t know how quickly my recuperation will allow me both to go back to those classes and to spend more time doing what the garden is asking me to do. But I am glad that I came out today.
It would be a lie to say that I am glad of the injury - but I am noticing the upsides. There is always a gift, if we do but seek it out.
