Most days it’s unbearable.
I wasn’t going to write about it. It’s self-indulgent to say the
least, especially in print. At some point in each of our lives we
are felled by accident, or disease, and we do our best to soldier
on. Maybe if I write about it, I thought, it will help others
understand what they’re going through.
Most days it’s unbearable.
I wasn’t going to write about it. It’s self-indulgent to say the least, especially in print. At some point in each of our lives we are felled by accident, or disease, and we do our best to soldier on. Maybe if I write about it, I thought, it will help others understand what they’re going through.
That’s an excuse. The honest reason is that I can’t focus on anything else. The pain is blinding.
The cause? Accident. Knee. It was my own damn fault. One surgery is behind me, another awaits. Meanwhile, my leg has become infected, leading to one ER visit.
On a scale of life’s calamities, it does not rank high. But there is something about knees. Everyone who’s had this sort of thing (torn patellar tendon, snapped ACL) has told me the same thing. Worst pain they ever felt.
In my worst moments I’ve felt like Ivan Ilyich waiting to die. It has grown like a blind spot, blocking out sight itself. My every waking moment is consumed by it, and many of my non-waking moments as well. Can’t write a damn thing.
The most striking thing about constant pain is how exhausting it is. There is the extra effort just to get around, of course, to bathe, eat, use the toilet. But the pain itself causes the body to engage in a hidden struggle that saps what little energy you have left.
You’d think pills would help. I’ve tried vicodin, percocet, and fistsful of over-the-counter remedies. They work, for awhile. But pain, like a virus, seems to adapt.
About 10 days after the first surgery I met a tourist and his wife. Nice folks. He looked at the gigantic brace on my left leg – somewhere a bridge is missing – and nodded knowingly. I just hope what happened to me doesn’t happen to you, he said. What was that? I asked.
He developed an infection. Ended up spending weeks in the hospital. Put his recovery back months.
Two days later, I noticed the area around my kneecap getting red. I had a vision of some kind of flesh-eating bacterium consuming my knee.
I went to my orthopedist right away and was put on keflex, an antibiotic, and told to come back in a week.
My leg turned purple. I went back three days later and he doubled me up, adding the granddaddy of antibiotics, cipro, on top of the keflex.
The next day my doctor came by my apartment unannounced to see how I was doing. I was stunned. When was the last time a doctor visited you at home? I was relieved, yet even more concerned. Perhaps this was serious.
After three days on all the meds, the leg was even more purple. Then my left arm went numb and I felt faint. Maybe those flesh-eating bacterium were migrating. An ambulance took me to the ER, but they couldn’t find anything wrong.
The one constant is the pain.
It’s better when my knee is elevated, but the minute I try, brace and all, to get up, and the blood plummets south, I want to scream. And I have. I’ve caught myself crying like a baby in public. It’s embarrassing.
I’ve spent some time back at work, where I do my best to pretend my judgment isn’t impaired by the drugs and the pain. That’s when I’m really exhausted.
I’m told much of medicine and pharmacology is consumed by the problem of pain management. I appreciate so much better knowing why that is so.
When your world revolves around pain, everything else takes a back seat. You develop a kind of tunnel vision, the focus of which is usually something utterly mundane: a chair across the room you’re hobbling towards, or a good pee in the middle of the night, so you won’t have to get up again before dawn and stifle a scream as you stagger across the hall on your cane.
You just want the pain to end.
You try not to think the worst, but the word amputation has sprung to mind more than once. I know (I hope) I’m exaggerating, but such thoughts make you swear you will never take certain things for granted again. Meanwhile, you do your best to stay focused on your real life, the things you need to do, the deadlines you need to meet.
But at every turn, there is the pain.
