A Good Day in the Life (of Chronic Pain)

Since a work injury in May, I've been dealing with chronic pain. I recently joined a forum for people with thoracic outlet syndrome, my tentative diagnosis #3B--an awful condition that takes some people down below fifty percent, sends many into surgeries. I'm holding off on accepting that this is just life now, with all its new limitations, and not surprisingly was upset and a little pissed to see that some people were happy if they got to fifty or seventy-five percent functionality.This is an excerpt from my compromise on the matter. The numbers I mention refer to the commonly used "rate your pain" charts, with 0 or 1 being a happy face that looks like someone fed you soma from Brave New World, and 10 being the point at which you are in such agony you actually think you might want to die.

My boyfriend and I stopped at my storage unit yesterday, and I was feeling pretty good--the rain had stopped and I felt 5 or 6ish instead of shoot-me-now 8. The place is a hurried nest of disorganized boxes, all thrown in in the course of one night by three guys. Chris was exhausted from driving me all over the place, working, and working on his thesis, and I told him I could get my box of favorite sweaters and my boots and stuff myself. (He had to get the locks, of course--my stupid hand was not cooperating.)

Before May, I was that freak-of-nature chain-smoking never-eat-right 100-lb. woman who none of the athletes can keep up with in the national parks. I'll climb anything. So there I was in cardboard box playland, and I took a tentative step up onto a bin, used my good arm to pull myself up to the next level. I started stacking the boxes in some semblance of order, for future easy-access climbing. Chris was sitting in the car with a headache, listening to NPR. (Only my baby would listen to NPR with a headache.) He called out the window to me to ask if I needed help, carefully using my given name and NOT my pet name, but I didn't. By the time he'd gotten out of the car, I was crouched eight feet up in boxland, and using my good arm to move the stuff and my bad, left, formerly dominant arm as my backup. I felt clean, healthy sweat on my skin, not like the sickly-worn sweat that comes with physical therapy, and I grinned. He stared up at me, with his "I do not panic or worry" face, and I said, "Didn't I tell you I used to be a monkey?"

"I guess you did."

He only knew me for a few winter months before the injury; the second time he called me I told him to come on over, but I was in the garage sanding and spray-painting coffee tables. "How, um, manly, of you," he said, soundng maybe a little intimidated, and definitely surprised that the girl who had official daily grooming times, stacks of Vogues, and a bedroom made of pink and purple fake flowers and organza, was at home in the garage.

I slept twelve hours last night, only waking up once; I still haven't unpacked my winter clothes and started sorting them for the laundry and the dry cleaners; and today I'm propped on stacks of pillows, back at the computer. I really don't think I broke any of my restrictions; they're all for my left side, and I just decided to pretend I wasn't left-handed. I'm paying my consequence more in weakness than pain, though there's a bit of the latter, too: I don't know when the last time I actually used those muscles for anything was. The housework is piling up, I need to find at least a part-time job, and my favorite brook trout coffee mug is in danger when I pick it up.

So you choose your battles, I guess. And to see Chris look at me as the 100% ME, the girl who was raised not to buy what you can build, in a family where Dad thinks you're a disgrace if you can't change your own tire then go home and read some Steinbeck at the dinner table with Mom's approval--to know that Chris saw me whole, the way he would have seen me at Starved Rock this summer had I been up to the trek, that's worth one neutron day. Maybe last night when we fell asleep in our clothes, heads together, and stayed that way 'til morning, it was because on some level, I expressed ME to him. No resentment, real or imagined, slept between us last night.

And maybe I won't grit my teeth quite so hard when I ask him to go fill up my gas tank for me today.