The Sanctity of Pain

The Sanctity of Pain

There is and has been for some time, a debate about the value of pain. I think we all understand that physiologically, pain serves as a useful mechanism for the body in that it signals damage to varying degrees and acts as a warning flag that something serious needs to be attended to. Pain as a bodily wake-up call is something we all appreciate. That is not where the debate generally arises. It is the spiritual side of pain that is contentious. Some consider pain to be an important part of attaining a degree of meaning to our existence. It is thought to purify the soul in a way that nothing else can. We remember the scenes from The Da Vinci Code where the Opus Dei acolyte played by blue-eyed Paul Bethany and named Silas, as in the man of the forrest, spends his evenings in self-flagellation and with a barbed metal cilice strapped around his thigh, specifically to inflict pain and focus his thoughts on the tasks at hand, which are presumably all about the work of God. The clear message is that nothing, absolutely nothing, is more spiritual than well-directed and extreme pain. That concept carries over into the more Draconian versions of the strictest religions like Catholicism. Man was meant to suffer as Christ did on the cross and that it is through that suffering that he reaches an ultimate state of piety.

In my recent thrashing through memorabilia and old documents I ran across a baptismal certificate that bears witness to the fact that 68 years ago, I was, indeed, purified and “regenerated” in an act of ritual cleansing. I gained admission into the Kingdom of God by being immersed in water. I do not know if that was done symbolically with a drop of water to my forehead or by actually dunking me in a baptismal font, but apparently I was certified as cleansed and ready to become a member of the faith. This was done to me in Venezuela, where my parents lived at the time. I had been allowed to go unrepentant for my infant sins for a month or so until I could return from Florida, where I was born in Fort Lauderdale. I was baptized under the name of Ricardo Alberto Prosdocimi. I think the Ricardo was just a preferred name of the times that my mother liked. Alberto was my paternal grandfather’s first name (his wife’s name being Inez, the middle name given to my oldest sister, Kathy) and my last name was the family name of my father, originating from the Slavic-influenced area of far northeastern Italy around Bassano del Grappa. It is an uncommon name, even in that area, with only 652 people found with that surname in modern Italy. I suppose some might suggest that it is a relatively painful name to carry in modern-day America, but 17 people still do that. I say still because I can think of three of us (my sisters and me) that were spared that pain by virtue of my father changing his surname to Marin in 1962 and thereby relieving us of that burden. I haven’t yet figured out if avoiding that pain still entitles me to say that I am validly baptized in the Roman Catholic Church. Since I unofficially renounced such affiliation at age fourteen when I attended Notre Dame International Prep for Boys (in order not to be required to take religious instruction) in none other than Rome, near the very seat of papal power, I must certainly be on some list there that suggests I am an infidel and probably due some pain.

That brings up the subject of pain avoidance. If pain is a warning shot to man, then man has made the steadfast avoidance of pain a major priority in life. My recent flirtations with the story of the Sackler family and their empire of pain alleviation through OxyContin gave me an awareness of all the medicinal history of aspirin, acetaminophen, ibuprofen, morphine, heroin, Oxycodone, Vicodin, Demerol, Librium, Valium, Percocet, Precodan and all the pharmacological variations thereof. While I am certain that man spent many millennia finding natural and herbalistic remedies for pain, the refinement of the art over the last two centuries has brought us to a place where we can manage that shit, but not without severe consequences. The Universe is willing to allow us a certain amount of relief on a temporary basis, but it does not absolve us of all subservience to the god of pain. I love the example of the man with a toothache, something that is intentionally extreme, probably due to the proximity to our central nervous system. Man has been allowed to eliminate the pain by pulling the offending tooth (assuming it is done early enough to prevent systemic contamination) or by preventively filling the tooth. If one fills the tooth, this drilling is quite painful and man has been allowed to use Novocaine (invented in 1905 by the same German gang of scientists that brought us all the other pain interrupters mentioned above) to alleviate that pain. But Novocaine must be injected and that itself is painful, so we are allowed to use Lidocaine as a local anesthetic to rub onto the gums. We keep trying to avoid pain and pain keeps sneaking in, perhaps in lesser quantities, but still wanting desperately to remind us of something.

Yesterday I spent the better part of the day trying to relieve my brother-in-law’s pain. He has had a rough go of it over the past few years, with one affliction after another. As soon as he defeats one ailment, another seems to creep up on him and afflict him even worse than the former one. Some have been serious and what we would call life-threatening like Cancer, and others have been simply inconvenient like that toe infection that almost caused them to simply remove his toe rather than struggle to defeat the infection amidst all the other complicating medications that are in his system. For some time now, he has been suffering from extreme pain that was difficult for him and his physicians to isolate and identify as to its source. What he knew was that he was largely unable to sleep and thereby recoup his strength and vigor on a daily basis. Sleep is so fundamental to animal existence that its deprivation may be the one thing that competes with pure pain for attention. In fact, pain and sleep seem to want to battle it out for dominance when things aren’t going well in our bodies. So, Jeff was being kept awake by extreme pain that was proving hard to address. He is no stranger to extreme pain medication. He even went so far as to get several epidurals to try to block the pain, so that he could sleep better and thereby have some chance of withstanding the pain.

Finally, a spinal surgeon said he needed a surgical procedure to alleviate a lifetime of abuse he had somehow inflicted on his spine and that had caused the accumulation of large amounts of scar tissue that was causing pain to radiate throughout his lower body. This procedure was to be ambulatory and outpatient, but there was the inevitable complication. Supposedly, 14% of these surgeries end up nicking and damaging the dural coating of the spine in a way that must be healed before the person can move. Jeff, naturally, had the misfortune to fall into that 14% and therefore got the pleasure of an extended hospital stay for a day. Once he was able to prove that he could muscle his way around in a walker he was to be released. Hospital timing is a very relative thing and priority is rarely given to the attendants who are sent to retrieve patients. They are not the ones either in pain or charged with relieving pain. So, I put my car seat back and snoozed off and on for several hours while the hospital staff got around to attending to Jeff’s release. The experience was not without pain, but it was derivative pain for me in that it was mostly the pain of watching Jeff get into the Tesla front seat and then adjust himself and the seat to the point where he could stand the pain to his lower extremities. The world is not such a beautiful place, even in La Jolla, with the ocean just over the hill, when seen through the eyes of red, searing pain. I could see all of that in Jeff’s eyes as he tried to act as normally as possible for the ride to his home. My comfortable, music-filled hours of waiting were a joy by comparison to one minute sitting in that seat for him.

I dropped him at home with his shoebox-sized package of pain medications that he said included the dreaded, but necessary, OxyContin. Jeff is in the grip of, and experiencing, the sanctity of pain, firsthand. Somewhere along the way, we must all wonder if there is a God or a purpose to God’s ways if this instrument of pain is taken to such an extreme. Jeff is beyond awareness and warning. He has passed through his existential crisis and now just deserves some relief. Hopefully he finds it soon.